Abstract
Hydrogen is expected to play an important role in the transportation sector for fuel cell vehicles (FCVs). The infrastructure of hydrogen refueling stations from low cost sources like natural gas is necessary to the successful transition toward hydrogen-based society. Osaka Gas has successfully demonstrated the on-site hydrogen production system with low-pressure reformer at the first hydrogen refueling station based on steam methane reforming (SMR) in Japan under World Energy Network (WE-NET) Project. We also developed a new compact hydrogen production system with medium-pressure reformer for hydrogen infrastructure as well as industrial use. The basic unit generates 30Nm^3/h pure hydrogen (99.999%), and all components are packaged on one skid. Our development effort realized to reduce 50% installation area, 50% capital cost and 30% operating cost compared with our conventional system. The paper will describe our conventional on-site hydrogen production system based on SMR that was installed at the WE-NET hydrogen refueling station in Osaka, and subsequently focus on the detail of our new compact hydrogen production system for wide variety of applications.
