The potential use of hydrogen comes with challenges and involves research efforts from our group in partnership with various stakeholders in order to become a solution in our journey to a low carbon industry.
A wide variety of fuels are able to produce hydrogen, including renewables, nuclear, natural gas, coal and oil. When produced from renewable sources, hydrogen can help tackle various critical energy challenges. Renewable hydrogen will be a landmark industrial revolution for our existing processes and infrastructure. As hydrogen is stored at higher pressures and has a lower energy density than natural gas, burning hydrogen requires us to review our safety protocols and combustion parameters.
Today, renewable hydrogen is not yet available in the kind of volumes we need for large scale industrial applications. However, we are already preparing for the transition. Lhoist is already involved in multiple research efforts to expand our knowledge and expertise regarding hydrogen.
We are currently working together with the UK government, the Mineral Products Association and several other industrial partners to determine proper operating procedures for burning hydrogen in existing kilns. This includes software modelling of the production process followed by actual trials to determine the accuracy of our models. Lhoist has volunteered one of its parallel-flow regenerative kilns for software modelling of this type of kiln.