Latest / Deep End Era. Engineering with Sankalp
Grey Hydrogen's Engine: Steam Methane Reforming and Autothermal Reforming
At two in the morning, night-shift process engineer Marcus Delaney is restarting a refinery hydrogen plant after a turnaround, pyrometer in hand, reading the colour of two hundred and twenty glowing tubes. This episode goes inside the machine that still makes almost all of the world's hydrogen. We start with scale: the IEA's Global Hydrogen Review 2025 puts 2024 demand near 100 Mt, met mostly from 290 bcm of natural gas and 90 Mtce of coal, with low-emissions hydrogen under 1%. Then the chemistry — methane plus steam to carbon monoxide and hydrogen, strongly endothermic; the water-gas shift…
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