Hyundai Motor Group has unveiled two innovative hydrogen production solutions that will utilize organic waste and non-recyclable plastics to create this desirable fuel through more eco-friendly means.
The project is called the HTWO Grid solution, as Interesting Engineering reported, and the company aims to leverage its greener production method to produce around 30,000 tons of hydrogen each year between its two locations. This output would make it the world's largest in the field.
The waste-to-hydrogen plant uses organic materials such as food and sewage sludge to produce hydrogen fuel by using microorganisms to break it down through anaerobic digestion, the report explained. This creates biogas, which can be refined into hydrogen.
A W2H location is already in operation in Chungju City, South Korea, producing over 1,000 pounds of hydrogen per day using 60 tons of food waste. The goal is to create small W2H processing facilities in various regions to reduce shipping and storage costs — and to power vehicles with this more eco-friendly fuel.
The other location is a plastics-to-hydrogen operation, which utilizes non-recyclable items, such as contaminated plastic, composite materials like toys, and vinyl. This helps to reduce the amount of the material in landfills and generates fuel in the process.
The plastic waste goes through a series of processing stages, including removing impurities, melting it into a liquid state, and creating a gas that's eventually refined into high-purity hydrogen.
Dealing with plastic waste has been a global headache, with the material breaking down into microplastics and infecting every biome, including our own bodies. We've collectively generated around 11 billion tons of the stuff to date, while only around 9% gets recycled and 72% ends up in landfills, according to the MIT Technology Review.
The nearly 100 million tons of hydrogen that was used across the globe in 2022 was created with dirty fuels, which generated roughly 12 tons of planet-heating carbon per ton of hydrogen, according to a report by the U.S. National Science Foundation.
"Demand for hydrogen will likely skyrocket over the next few decades, so we can't keep making it the same way we have up until now if we're serious about reaching net-zero emissions by 2050," materials scientist James Tour said, per NSF.
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Researchers at Rice University in Texas developed a similar process to convert waste plastics to hydrogen fuel, although they managed to create two viable products through their method.
"In this work, we converted waste plastics — including mixed waste plastics that don't have to be sorted by type or washed — into high-yield hydrogen gas and high-value graphene," Kevin Wyss, lead author of a study published in Advanced Materials, told NSF. "If the produced graphene is sold at only 5% of current market value — a 95% off sale! — clean hydrogen could be produced for free."
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