Design of Disaster Resilient, Reliable and Resourceful Hydrogen Generation Unit

Abstract

The demand for Hydrogen has grown over the past few years and has tremendous potential to play in a clean and affordable energy source. Hence this provides an opportunity for adopting alternative competing technologies for producing Hydrogen. But the major challenges hindering the production of chemicals is the upsurge in the number of disasters and supply chain issues of feedstocks. This thesis aims to investigate a Disaster Resilient Approach to produce Hydrogen. A hierarchical framework has been proposed and is implemented for the case study of Steam Methane Reforming process. A base case design was developed with Natural gas as the major feedstock. Based on Mean Time between Failure (MTBF) and Mean Time to Restore (MTTRes) estimates, Monte Carlo simulations were done to incorporate uncertainty to find the system Availability. Based on the critical step, design modification was done to increase the system Availability which improves the Profitability of the process as well. Subsequently using historical wind speeds and Floods depth in Texas Gulf coast analysis was done and resilience measures were proposed to combat the same. The probabilistic impact of disasters was deployed in profitability analysis and it was seen the ROIs of Disaster Resilient Hydrogen unit improved. We explored different feedstocks as an alternative to reduce the reliance on supply chains of Natural gas. Based on Gibbs Free minimization model, two low-cost feedstocks were employed to improve the Resourcefulness of the Unit. It was also seen that addition of CO2 Absorber can result in the process being more sustainable by capturing the greenhouse gas CO2 and also result in carbon tax credits.