The world’s largest waste-to-hydrogen plant

Hyundai Engineering introduced plants that convert organic waste into hydrogen and plastic waste into hydrogen at the H2 Mobility Energy Environmental Technology (MEET) conference taking place in Seoul on September 25 – 27. The two plants will produce more than 30,000 tons of hydrogen per year, making them the world’s largest facilities in this field.

Organic waste such as food waste, sewage sludge and livestock manure produce large amounts of methane, contributing to global warming. Technology to convert waste into hydrogen not only helps process this amount of methane, preventing global warming, but also creates new industrial value when producing hydrogen – an environmentally friendly energy source.

First, organic waste will be decomposed by microorganisms thanks to the anaerobic digestion process. This process turns waste into biogas. The biogas is then upgraded to biomethane, removing CO2 and impurities. The final step is to convert biological methane into hydrogen.

In addition to organic waste, Hyundai’s new facility will also convert plastic waste into hydrogen. The first is the “pretreatment” stage, which removes impurities such as metals, sand, and paper to create waste plastic materials. Then, with a “melting” process developed by Hyundai Engineering, the waste plastic is heated and stirred to melt into a paste state. This process continues to remove small impurities.

During the gasification process, waste plastic is melted into liquid form and fed into the gasifier with oxygen and steam to produce CO and hydrogen syngas using Shell technology. Finally, in the syngas refining step, additional hydrogen is produced through CO conversion, removing impurities in the syngas and separating CO2. As a result, the plant successfully produced hydrogen with high purity from plastic waste.

With 130,000 tons of plastic waste, the plant can produce about 24,000 tons of hydrogen per year in an environmentally friendly way. This amount of hydrogen has many applications such as fuel for the marine industry and for electric vehicles.