Hyundai Steel’s Dangjin steel plant produces 99.999% high purity hydrogen that can be used in hydrogen electric vehicles by using the by-product gas (COG) generated in the coke manufacturing process.

What if the world’s most abundant, non-polluting hydrogen is used as a major energy source? In such a hydrogen society, hydrogen productivity will become more important than anything else.

Hyundai Steel extracts hydrogen from by-product gas to produce hydrogen electric vehicle fuel and opens a new future with clean energy. The meaningful challenge of Hyundai Steel, which has built a hydrogen plant at the Dangjin steel mill, has already proved its full potential thanks to the success of Hyundai NEXO.

The ultimate eco-friendly car without emissions

When you interpret the Chinese characters of hydrogen, it means ‘the background of water’ or ‘the root of water’. This is because hydrogen (H) is named after the phenomenon that water (H2O) produces when it reacts with oxygen (O) and burns.

The reason why hydrogen is considered the ultimate future energy source is also found in the name. If you decompose water on the earth, you can get enough hydrogen, and even if you produce electricity by reacting with oxygen, you do not discharge pollutants, so it plays a good role as green energy.

Currently, hydrogen is used in a very limited area, such as rockets, jet fuel, automobiles and fuel cells for power generation. The most popular hydrogen electric vehicle, like an electric car, has a great effect in replacing existing internal combustion engine and improving environment such as fine dust reduction and greenhouse gas reduction.

Once the fuel is free of carbon and other impurities, hydrogen and oxygen meet and produce water, so there is no harmful exhaust gas. Therefore, hydrogen electric vehicles are sometimes referred to as the ultimate eco-friendly cars that can replace internal combustion engines without any harmful exhaust gas.

The birth of a hydrogen factory in Dangjin steel mill

The Hyundai Steel Dangjin Steel Plant’s hydrogen plant was born in order to lay the foundations for future hydrogen electric vehicles as the need for hydrogen resources in the steelworks increased. It was designed to produce 99.999% pure hydrogen and commenced commercial production in earnest in February 2016. Currently, the hydrogen plant produces about 8,200 kilograms of hydrogen per day, 3 million kilograms.Considering that the Nexus One refueling needs is 6.33kg, it has a capacity to charge about 1,300 vehicles a day and 473,000 units a year.

Dangjin Works supplies energy to the appropriate flow, heat, pressure and temperature for safe and high purity hydrogen production.

The hydrogen extraction process is as follows: Of the components (hydrogen 58%, methane 23%, carbon monoxide 8%, nitrogen 7%, trace amounts of tar and sulfur) contained in the byproduct gas (COG) generated in the Cokes manufacturing process, tar and sulfur Removes methane, carbon monoxide and nitrogen by TSA (Temperature Swing Adsorption) and PSA (Pressure Swing Adsorption) method. After that, it will produce 99.999% high purity hydrogen which can be used in hydrogen electric car through residual impurity removal process.

In addition to these extraction processes, all facilities of all plants are separated into explosion-proof areas and the possibility of ignition is blocked in advance to minimize the possibility of hydrogen explosion. Here, we installed a system that stops automatically when the oxygen concentration increases above a certain level in the coke manufacturing process, thus establishing a safer environment. Not only that. In order to maintain high purity hydrogen quality that can be used for hydrogen electric vehicles, we operate a real-time hydrogen purity analysis system, which automatically cuts off hydrogen supply when the purity is below 99.999%.

Hydrogen electric vehicles are the best solution for dealing with increasingly serious global warming and environmental threats. The reason why hydrogen energy is attracting attention is because of its strong point of being ‘environmentally friendly’. Particularly, to meet the 2 Degree Scenario Vision of the International Energy Agency (IEA), which aims to keep the global mean surface temperature of the Earth not to rise more than 2 ℃ in comparison to the pre-industrial level. Hydrogen can play a very important role in increasing the flexibility of future energy, including power, in this situation.

Hyundai Steel’s gas management team manager Lee Seung-min said, “If you build a hydrogen filling infrastructure that is extremely scarce and you get the benefit of government support at the time of purchase, the hydrogen electric car will not be an option in the near future. It will be the world’s largest automobile market. ”

The government is already working on a road map with the goal of supplying 10,000 hydrogen electric vehicles and 100 hydrogen filling stations by 2020. Dangjin Works produces high purity hydrogen that can be used for hydrogen electric vehicles by itself. In the meantime, Hyundai Steel has continued to devote efforts to reduce greenhouse gases and realize a hydrogen society by supplying waste gas from the blast furnace as a fuel to the by-product gas power plant. In 2015, Hyundai Stell achieved the VCS (Verified Carbon Standard) certification, which is internationally recognized as a result of minimizing carbon dioxide emissions.

Source: Hyundai