Sydney Uni to scale up low-emission hydrogen-producing process

Hazer Group and the University of Sydney's Laboratory of Sustainable Technologies (LST) will collaborate to develop and scale up the Hazer Process, a low-emission hydrogen and graphite production process.
According to the company, the University's Laboratory of Sustainable Technologies has particular expertise in graphite and nano-materials technology, as well as chemical engineering scale up expertise and experience in the hydrogen economy.
The Hazer Process was developed by researchers at The University of Western Australia (UWA) over several years. The intellectual property rights were than assigned to the Hazer Group for further commercial development.
The process allows natural gas and other feedstocks to be effectively converted into hydrogen and high quality graphite, using iron ore as a process catalyst.
Once fully commercialised, the Hazer Process will yield significant savings for hydrogen producers, and provide clean hydrogen, with much lower production of carbon dioxide emissions compared to current steam reforming process from hydrocarbons.
Natural gas, methane, oil and other fossil fuel feedstocks are already used to produce hydrogen. The current process involves heating the gas in the presence of steam and a nickel catalyst, breaking up the methane molecules and forming carbon monoxide and hydrogen. The carbon monoxide gas is then passed with steam over iron oxide, undergoing a water-gas shift reaction to produce even more hydrogen.
While these current processes yield an 80 percent efficiency for the generation of hydrogen from natural gas, they produce carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses as major byproducts. Depending on the feedstock, one tonne of hydrogen produced will also yield nine to 12 tonnes of carbon dioxide.
The Hazer Process promises to reduce these carbon dioxide emissions: in addition to hydrogen, the Hazer Process also yield high purity, highly crystalline synthetic graphite -- the type usually used in batteries and other high-value graphite applications.
The agreement will give Hazer access to LST’s facilities which are ideally set up to undertake the development work Hazer requires. Under the agreement, the company will actively manage and direct all development activities. The company will provide the operating funds for the development work, while the University of Sydney will provide two full time researchers to work with the Company.
The company will retain ownership of all Intellectual Property developed through the collaboration, ensuring it retains control over the Hazer Process.
The collaboration will see the partner scaling up the Hazer Process, allowing it to produce kilograms of product per day. This is an increase of up to 100 times the operating level undertaken to date. In addition, the collaboration will see further characterisation and analysis of the graphite produced by the Hazer Process under different conditions to ensure it is best able to meet end user demands in key graphite markets.