Scaleable, microstructured plant for steam reforming of methane

We report results obtained in a demonstration plant for hydrogen production at 5Nm^3 h^−1 in a microchannel system constructed using techniques proven in Heatric printed-circuit heat exchangers (PCHE). The manufacturing technique allows great complexity in the design to be achieved with little incremental cost and our plant takes advantage of this to carry out the combustion and reforming reactions in highly integrated multiple adiabatic beds (MAB). The PCHE manufacturing technique is scaleable and the results from this small-scale plant demonstrate not only a practical miniplant for distributed manufacture of hydrogen but also provide the design basis for much larger plant (for example for transport fuelling and industrial applications) based on replication of the plate structures. The system operated at 2 bar to produce hydrogen for a notional PEM fuel cell, with essentially complete conversion of natural gas in the reformer to equilibrium yields of CO, CO2 and H2 (∼80%). The plant showed excellent turn-down characteristics to 30% of design capacity.