2

A question that becomes particularly relevant for "the hydrogen economy" or in the event that IGCC coal baseload electric generation seeks off-peak markets for hydrogen.

I can't seem to locate a breakdown of the costs of Haber Bosch plants adequate to tell me about just the Haber Bosch reaction stage of the plant*.

In particular, I'm interested in the energy consumed to and the capital cost per capacity.

*I did find an IGCC conceptual design paper that proposes a Haber Bosch stage consuming 375MW producing 8731kg/hr implying NH3 would cost 43,000kWh/tonne but that seems quite exorbitant. By contrast, there is another proposal that says 6MW is adequate to produce 1000tonne/day implying a cost of 144kWh/tonne. An additional dataum is capital cost of 3000€/kgh ammonia capacity I located from a slide presentation pdf but it isn't clear whether this includes the air separation unit capital.

James Bowery
  • 121
  • 3
  • A significant r\part of the cost is making H, do you mean to ignore that cost ? – blacksmith37 Apr 17 '21 at 16:26
  • @blacksmith37 If you exchange the source of H2 from natural gas to something else, this question becomes relevant. – mart Apr 17 '21 at 19:47
  • I added a motivating sentence at the beginning. – James Bowery Apr 18 '21 at 03:48
  • @mart so you are saying that without your suggested change, the question is not relevant? – Solar Mike Apr 18 '21 at 05:32
  • Engineering implicitly is about relevance, so it would be redundant to say that the question "becomes relevant", hence the qualifier "particularly". – James Bowery Apr 19 '21 at 03:27
  • Now that I think of it, my problem with this question is not relevance but that we don't know your prior research. electric powered HB plants where developed at least as a concept as containerized units, a few years back I'd also seen research papers on these - so the energy part is probably answerable with an an hour or so on google scholar and sci hub (did you try that, @JamesBowery ?). Capital cost, I'm not so sure. – mart Apr 19 '21 at 06:23
  • 1
    Well I spent several hours doing web searches without being able to find any papers that broke out just H2+N2 => NH3 stage from the electrolyitic and other energy inputs of unrelated stages (such as air separation units, etc.). I could go back over those results and show you what I mean if you like. – James Bowery Apr 19 '21 at 23:13

0 Answers0