A 3 - Nachhaltige Wasserstoffproduktion in Österreich

01.02.2007 - 23.10.2008
Research funding project
Nowadays besides the economic effects also sustainability is of growing importance, when dealing with processes to provide renewable energy. While during production of electric power and heat more and more focus is given to small, decentral facilities using renewable recources, in the area of liquid biofuels, except during production of biodiesel, only a few attention is given to this aspects. For the use of hydrogen as a fuel for the automotive sector concentrated sientific work and compo-nent development can be observed concerning the topics refueling and storage as well as motor and fuel cell development. But hydrogen is still produced using the well know routes, mainly based on oil and natural gas. But especially hydrogen can be produced from different routes and raw materials. In Austria espe-cially biomass seems to be suitable for this purpose. Feedstock biomass includes wood, straw, en-ergy plants, but also biomass based residues from industrial processes. Suitable production routes for hydrogen are based on thermal and thermochemical (gasification, pyrolysis) as well as fermen-tative (microorganisms) tranformation of biomass. While there exists already demonstration plants For the process of biomass-gasification other processes like the production of biohydrogen by fer-mentation at the moment are at the begin of development. But especially for the fermentative pro-duction of hydrogen using microorganisms fisrst experiments are very promising. Other alternative processes to gernerate hydrogen from biomass is reforming it from biogas. In this route the produc-tion of biogas can be observed as a state of the art process, while the process step of reforming is part of actual projects. Other processes like production of hydrogen from electrolysis and by reforming from oil and natu-ral gas sre state of the art and used as reference systems. The proposed feasibility study will investigate production, upgrade, storage and usage of hydrogen in the automotive area ¿ especially hydrogen to be used in combustion engines anf fuel cells ¿ for different plant sizes. Instead of economic aspects, main focus will be given to assessment of technological effciency of the whole production chain, life cycle analysis, ecological aspects as well as local integration. De-spite this, the use of biomass as feedstock and the use of renewable energies for the production pro-cess will play a central role during the investigations. The study will finally give a technical snd ecological valuation of available and future technologies to produce hydrogen for use in combustion engines and fuel cell from biomass.

People

Project leader

Project personnel

Institute

Grant funds

  • FFG - Österr. Forschungsförderungs- gesellschaft mbH (National) Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG)

Research focus

  • Sustainable Production and Technologies: 50%
  • Modeling and Simulation: 50%

Keywords

GermanEnglish
BiotreibstoffeBiofuels
Wasserstoffproduktionhydrogen production
Nachhaltigkeitsustainability
Prozesssimulationprocess simulation
Life Cycle Analyse (LCA)life cycle analysis (LCA)

External partner

  • OMV AG
  • PROFACTOR Produktionsforschungs GmbH

Publications