Bioenergy Insights: Ceres and AtkinsRealis to design modularised green hydrogen production system

Bioenergy Insights: Ceres and AtkinsRealis to design modularised green hydrogen production system

Jon Harman, technology delivery director at Ceres, tells Bioenergy Insight about its collaboration with AtkinsRealis for a commercial multi-megawatt modularised hydrogen production system.

Ceres is a clean energy technology licencing business with a primary focus on the development and commercialisation of solid oxide cell technology for use in both fuel cell and electrolyser systems. Formed in 2001 as a spin-out from Imperial College London, the organisation now employs approximately 600 people, over two sites in Horsham, West Sussex and Redhill, Surrey.

Ceres licenses both the use and development of its technology to its strategic partners, in addition to the cell and stack manufacturing processes. It is currently collaborating with partners who are setting up high volume cell and stack factories in Europe and Asia, as well as developing their own ranges of products utilising Ceres technology.

Harman leads Ceres' Solid Oxide Electrolysis (SOEC) programme, which is currently developing a set of electrolyser products that will enable commercial scale through high volume global manufacturing.

"As we are a technology licencing business, it is important that we engage with stakeholders right across the supply chain: from hydrogen off-takers to Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs)," said Harman. "Therefore, a key part of my role is ensuring that we are having the right conversations with different stakeholders to deliver a true scalable and cost-effective product architecture for our SOEC technology.

"We listen to the practical challenges and pain points that companies have experienced in process plant design, construction and operation, and then aim to address these though our technology and product development programmes."

AtkinsRealis collaboration

Ceres recently announced it had joined forces with design, engineering and project management organisation AtkinsRealis, to deliver the front-end engineering design (FEED) for a commercial multi-megawatt modularised hydrogen production system. This system is based on Ceres' solid oxide technology.

Harman said the collaboration came about because AtkinsRealis has global expertise and capabilities in hydrogen across the full value chain - from production and storage, to distribution and utilisation. The organisation is also a strong advocate for the use of electrolyser technology for the decarbonisation of industrial sectors such as steel and ammonia production.

"As such, they see SOEC technology as a great fit for decarbonisation of these processes, due to the opportunity for process integrate to drive down the cost of hydrogen production. Working with AtkinsRealis, we are combining our strong skills sets and expertise to identify and maximise opportunities to use Ceres' technology in industrial applications to accelerate commercialisation at pace and scale," added Harman.

He then told Bioenergy Insight that the partnership is focusing on industrial applications that cannot be electrified directly with renewables, and require green molecules to decarbonise such as steel, ammonia and synthetic fuel production.
"The very high efficiency of SOEC technology is achieved through heat integration with such processes and therefore solutions where the SOEC electrolyser is closely coupled with the industrial process are ideal applications," said Harman.

25% more efficient

According to Ceres, SOEC provides a route to generate green hydrogen over 25% more efficiently than incumbent lower temperature technology. Bioenergy Insight asked how this is achieved.

"In short, this significantly increased efficiency is achieved through higher temperature operation and process heat integration. As SOEC technologies typically operate between 500 and 850C, they are fed with steam rather than liquid water. This significantly reduces the energy required to split the water molecule into hydrogen and oxygen," said Harman.

Through good thermal system design, the steam or heat supplied to the SOEC electrolyser can be of low-grade temperature around 150 to 170C, he added. At this temperature, industrial process heat or steam steams are of low valve, and it is therefore economically advantageous to utilise this heat to increase hydrogen production efficiency.

"One of the unique selling points of Ceres' SOEC technology is the lower operating temperature of 500 to 600C," continued Harman. "This enables the Ceres cell to be manufactured with a steel substrate rather than the fully ceramic supports of higher temperature SOEC technologies. This drives down material costs; enables high volume, high yield manufacturing and vastly improves robustness, whilst retaining the high efficiency characteristics."

Aside from that, the collaboration provides valuable insights into how the advantages - such as the lower CapEx cost, lower operating temperature and inherent robustness of Ceres technology can be leveraged into scalable, modular products.

"We are breaking new ground in developing SOEC-based plant architectures and operational concepts at scale and this has been feeding directly into our product development strategy and roadmap."

Mass produced

The technology has the potential to be mass produced using commonly found materials with a limited carbon footprint, and is already being scaled under license through partners in Germany, Korea and Taiwan.

"A large benefit of our breakthrough technology is that we can use commonly found materials to build our cells," said Harman. "Ceres uniquely uses an automotive-grade steel comprising 95% of our current generation's stack mass, where we currently use approximately 40% recycled steel.

"Ceria, the most abundant rare earth and a commonly found material, forms the active chemistry of our cells and precious metals account for less than 2% by weight of our stacks, considerably lower than conventional electrode supported solid oxide technology. Aside from performance benefits, there are huge environmental and sustainability benefits using steel and other abundant materials.

"By 2030 our partners will reach multi-gigawatts of global capacity and both ourselves and our partners consider the environmental implications of our stacks at their end of life. Ceres is seeking to investigate the feasibility of automating stack disassembly processes for the cost-effective recovery of precious metals and the subsequent mitigation of CO2e emissions, ultimately reducing our cradle-to-grave emissions of our cells and stacks," concluded Harman.

Article originally sourced from Bioenergy Insights: https://www.bioenergy-news.com/news/ceres-and-atkinsrealis-to-design-modularised-green-hydrogen-production-system-2/