Applications
Re-envisioning the role of natural gas in a clean energy future opens the doors to opportunities for the environment and for investors.
De-carbonizing the natural gas supply
CO2 emissions from gas consumption in North America exceeds 1.9 billion tonnes per year. There is a growing demand to reduce this pollution. Decarbonizing gas is essential to decarbonizing the entire economy, making low carbon fuel seamlessly available for heating and industry.
Hydrogen from our DMD technology can be injected into the existing natural gas grid to achieve this without a requirement for major infrastructure upgrades.
Grid Scale Energy Storage
Zengas DMD technology also solves the greatest problem facing the wind and solar industry, which is how to avoid losses forced by curtailing power production when supply exceeds demand. The technology makes it possible to store unused energy for later use during peak demand periods. Unlike batteries which are best suited for short duration and are inefficient and costly to maintain, hydrogen produced by DMD can be stored long-term without power loss or injected into the existing gas pipeline system as required.
Clean Heat & Power for Industry
The key role of decarbonization in the commercial gas supply is to reduce the carbon footprint of the gas being consumed by customers. Zengas DMD technology assists industrial and commercial users with process-heat applications to reduce CO2 emissons by stripping the carbon from their gas supply before combustion.
CASE STUDY: GAS TURBINE
A 290 MW gas turbine used for power generation consumes 2,700 gigajoules (GJ) of natural gas per hour and produces 1,200,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions annually. By dissociating the methane beforehand to remove the carbon and use the hydrogen as the primary fuel, carbon emissions are eliminated, equivalent to removing 262,000 cars from the road.
An intermediate implementation would be to remove the carbon from only a portion of the gas supply and use hydrogen enhanced natural gas (HENG) rather than operating the gas turbine on 100% hydrogen. Using a HENG blend reduces the hydrogen flows, but still achieves the objective of reducing the carbon intensity of power generation. In general, for every tonne of carbon removed from the fuel before combustion, approximately 4 tonnes of CO2 emissions are prevented, such that operating the same gas turbine on an HENG blend of 20% hydrogen with natural gas would lower carbon emissions by 240,000 tonnes per year, or about 52,000 cars.
Synthesis of Carbon Neutral Fuels
Carbon neutral fuels are increasingly important to support the world’s transition to cleaner economies and clean fuels. The hydrogen produced by Zengas’s DMD can be combined with CO2 released by industry or captured from the atmosphere to produce synthetic fuels that are not only compatible with today’s heating equipment, infrastructure and engines but permanently remove carbon from the energy life-cycle
