Design and Analysis of Hydrogen Production and Liquefaction Process by Using Liquefied Natural Gas

Compare to the gaseous hydrogen, liquid hydrogen has various advantages: easy to transport, high energy density, and low risk of explosion. However, the hydrogen liquefaction process is highly energy intensive because it requires lots of energy for refrigeration. On the other hand, the cold energy of the liquefied natural gas (LNG) is wasted during the regasification. It means there are opportunities to improve the energy efficiency of the hydrogen liquefaction process by recovering wasted LNG cold energy. In addition, hydrogen production by natural gas reforming is one of the most economical ways, thus LNG can be used as a raw material for hydrogen production. In this study, a novel hydrogen production and liquefaction process is proposed by using LNG as a raw material as well as a cold source. To develop this process, the hydrogen liquefaction process using hydrocarbon mixed refrigerant and the helium-neon refrigerant is selected as a base case design. The proposed design is developed by applying LNG as a cold source for the hydrogen precooling. The performance of the proposed process is analyzed in terms of energy consumption and exergy efficiency, and it is compared with the base case design. As the result, the proposed design shows 17.9% of energy reduction and 11.2% of exergy efficiency improvement compare to the base case design.