Techno-economic analysis of on-site blue hydrogen production based on vacuum pressure adsorption: Practical application to real-world hydrogen refueling stations

Although climate change can be efficiently curbed by shifting to low-carbon (blue) hydrogen as an energy carrier to achieve carbon neutrality, current hydrogen production mainly proceeds via the gray pathway, i.e., generates large amounts of CO₂ as a byproduct. To address the need for cleaner hydrogen production, we herein propose novel CO₂ capture processes based on the integration of vacuum pressure swing adsorption into a gray hydrogen production process and perform retrofitting to a blue hydrogen production process for on-site hydrogen refueling stations. Techno-economic analysis reveals that the implementation of the proposed capture processes allows one to significantly reduce CO₂ emission while preserving thermal efficiency, and the economic feasibility of this implementation in different scenarios is determined by computing the levelized cost of hydrogen. As a result, blue hydrogen is shown to hold great promise for the realization of sustainable energy usage and the net-zero transition.