Black Hills Energy investigating feasibility of hydrogen generation from coal

Coal may not have fully outlived its uses – or at least, that’s what a feasibility study underway from Black Hills Energy seeks to find out as it works to determine the possibilities of generating hydrogen from the fossil fuel.

The program began with a grant awarded by the Wyoming Energy Authority (WEA) and drew together partners from Black Hills, Babcock & Wilcox (B&W), and members of the Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Department at Ohio State University. They chose the Wyodak Mine in Campbell County, Wyo., as a testing site, and efforts will also stray into design and estimation for a semi-commercial scale plant to be developed during the analysis.

“Over 30 years of research has led us to this opportunity to unite clean energy technology with Wyoming’s important and abundant energy resources,” said Mark Stege, Black Hills Energy’s vice president of Wyoming operations. “We are honored by this grant and the prospect of leveraging innovative hydrogen technology to deliver efficient energy to customers.”

Efforts at Wyodak will make use of B&W’s BrightLoop chemical looping technology. Brightloop oxidizes and reduces oxygen-carrier particles, allowing fuel to react with oxygen-carrier particles in a reducer reactor to form combustion byproducts. Reduced particles then move to hydrogen reactors to react with steam, partially oxidizing them and generating hydrogen before the oxygen-carrier particles are shunted off to an air reactor for regeneration with air and returned to their original state.

This would mean a potentially steady production of hydrogen and a largely pure stream of CO2 without any need for carbon capture equipment to extract it.

“Our mission at WEA is to embrace an all of the above energy strategy towards reducing emissions,” WEA Program Director Anja Richmond said. “In doing so, we encourage innovation that supports the continued relevancy of every power generation source, including coal. The collaboration and advancement of exploring critical new ways to use Wyoming coal present great potential for our state.”

If the plant proposed during analysis and its accompanying estimate prove feasible and cost-effective, a second phase of this project would involve the construction of such a facility at Black Hills Energy’s Neil Simpson Complex, based on the BrightLoop technology.