A new Italian technology to obtain hydrogen from waste, with a double result: favoring decarbonisation and disposing of waste materials, especially plastic, which otherwise no one knows what to do. This is the proposal of the Maire Tecnimont group, which through the subsidiary NextChem has developed a process to produce “circular” hydrogen and has identified 12 districts in Italy where to install plants of this type, to be built with an investment of 4.8 billion. . The starting raw material is plastic and dry waste currently not recyclable while the final products are hydrogen, ethanol, methanol and recyclable plastics. Pierroberto Folgiero, CEO of Maire Tecnimont Group says: “The beauty of this idea is that it is born at already low costs”, and as such it can easily establish itself on the market.
To clarify the significance of this novelty, it should be borne in mind that there are various ways of producing hydrogen, conventionally identified with a color. Hydrogen is defined gray when it is obtained from fossil fuels, with the formation of CO2; this is by no means a clean fuel. On the other hand, the gray hydrogen produced with a further expedient is defined blue, that is, with the capture of carbon dioxide at the source, which in any case has an additional cost due to capture and storage. Hydrogen is green if it is generated by electrolysis of water using electricity from renewable sources (if the sources used for electrolysis are not renewable, it falls back into gray hydrogen); finally, it is purple if it is obtained by electrolysis using electricity produced by a nuclear power plant.
Currently 96% of the hydrogen produced is gray, so it is not a solution to CO2 emissions. Blue hydrogen would be a solution, but while some environmentalists like it, others reject the idea of producing a lot of carbon dioxide anyway, albeit not in free form. Even less do ecologists like the purple hydrogen generated by the atom (which still has its supporters, especially in France). The new hydrogen with Maire Tecnimont technology is circular.
The various colors of hydrogen also have a geopolitical projection. Chief Executive Officer Pierroberto Folgiero explains: “Germany exits nuclear power and coal but receives Russian gas from the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and therefore focuses on blue hydrogen, obtained from a fossil source such as natural gas with CO2 sequestration. France does not rely heavily on either methane or coal but pushes politically at the European level to obtain purple hydrogen from the atom. Having not built, in the last 20 or 30 years, the waste treatment plants that have been built throughout the rest of Europe, Italy is now unable to dispose of many of its waste, and directs a large part of it abroad, high cost. This non-recyclable waste is for Italy what methane is for Germany and nuclear for France, a potential source of hydrogen already competitive with chemical recycling. We have mapped twelve districts where it is particularly useful and convenient to produce circular hydrogen “.
Folgiero concludes: “Green hydrogen is the crown prince of the green transition. Everyone says he will take the throne, but producing it requires a lot of renewable energy. Maire Tecnimont’s circular hydrogen is based on a new source of energy, waste ”.