Paul Rodden • Season: 2025 • Episode: 388
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Welcome to The Hydrogen Podcast!
Welcome to The Hydrogen Podcast! 🎙️ Join host Paul Rodden as he dives deep into Honeywell’s groundbreaking contributions to the hydrogen economy with special guest Bryan Glover, Chief Technology Officer and Growth Officer at Honeywell Energy and Sustainability Solutions. With over 35 years of expertise, Bryan shares how Honeywell is pushing the boundaries of hydrogen innovation to drive the energy transition.
Key Topics Discussed:
🔹 Honeywell’s Hydrogen Vision: Technologies shaping the future of clean energy
🔹 Industries Driving Hydrogen Demand: Refining, petrochemicals, ammonia, and more
🔹 Key Innovations: Carbon capture, catalyst-coated membranes, and liquid organic hydrogen carriers (LOHCs)
🔹 Infrastructure Challenges & Solutions: From transport to storage, leveraging existing assets
🔹 Strategic Partnerships: Collaborations with ExxonMobil, Johnson Matthey, and Electric Hydrogen
Featured Highlights:
1️⃣ Honeywell’s Role in Energy Transition: Decades of expertise in refining and petrochemicals applied to hydrogen
2️⃣ Major Milestones: Technologies like PSA for hydrogen purification and groundbreaking LOHC solutions
3️⃣ Blue Hydrogen Advances: Carbon capture innovations reducing costs and emissions
4️⃣ Global Hydrogen Strategy: Partnering with industry leaders to accelerate clean hydrogen adoption
5️⃣ Future Outlook: How Honeywell is addressing cost and efficiency to scale green hydrogen
Thank you for listening and I hope you enjoy the podcast. Please feel free to email me at info@thehydrogenpodcast.com with any questions. Also, if you wouldn’t mind subscribing to my podcast using your preferred platform… I would greatly appreciate it.
Respectfully,
Paul Rodden
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Transcript:
Paul Rodden 0:00
Hello and welcome to the hydrogen podcast, where we explore the latest advancements, challenges and opportunities in the world of hydrogen. I’m your host, Paul Rodden, and today I’m excited to be joined by Brian Glover, the Chief Technology Officer and growth officer at Honeywell Energy and Sustainability Solutions. Honeywell is a global leader in developing cutting edge technologies for the energy sector, with a century of expertise in refining, petrochemicals and now hydrogen solutions, Brian has over 35 years of experience at the company, and he has now helped lead honeywell’s work in spearheading initiatives that are shaping the future of hydrogen, from advancing production technologies to solving infrastructure challenges, they are at the forefront of the energy transition. Brian, thank you so much for joining us today.
Bryan Glover 0:46
Hey. Well, Paul, really happy to be here and happy to be able to talk to you today.
Paul Rodden 0:49
Fantastic. So to start off, can you share Honeywell’s vision for its role in the rapidly evolving hydrogen economy?
Bryan Glover 0:56
Yeah. You know, in terms of Honeywell, we’ve got a broad strategic focus at Honeywell on three large, mega trends that we see as sort of critical to shaping the future. And given honeywell’s position as a large industrial company, those include the future of aviation, the future of automation and energy transition. And it’s interesting that hydrogen in a number of ways, and we’ll probably dive into that a little bit deeper as we get going. It’s focused on the future of energy transition, but it actually intersects with those other two mega trends as well, in one way or another. So it’s really touching all of them, and it’s become really an important strategic thrust at Honeywell, and we’re actively engaged in developing technologies that can support the adoption of both the production of hydrogen and also sustainable uses of hydrogen once it’s once it’s produced. And you know, I think we, like many in the industry today, see hydrogen, and especially clean hydrogen, is being critical to film in a future economies, whether it’s in chemicals or energy, it’s going to bridge across all of those and so we’ve really been working on a range of technologies that can support the growth of multiple sources of clean hydrogen, and we’re excited, actually, to see that future taking off already. Right? One example that we’ve been really excited about is our participation in the Exxon Mobil’s clean hydrogen project at their Baytown facility that’s going to produce a large amount of low carbon hydrogen right here in the US. And that we’ve provided carbon capture and hydrogen purification technology for that. And that carbon capture technology, once that unit’s up and running, is going to capture about 7 million tons of CO two annually from that unit, which is the equivalent to the emission of about a million and a half cars. So it’s a large, significant project, and it’s one of those things that we’re very excited to be partners and providing technology, and excited to see that that project move forward.
Paul Rodden 2:55
What industries or sectors do you see as the biggest drivers of hydrogen demand? And how is Honeywell positioning itself to serve them?
Bryan Glover 3:04
You know, it’s really interesting. There’s a lot of, I’d say there’s a lot of talking, a lot of buzz about hydrogen. And I think there’s two, there’s two broad visions for for hydrogen in the future, right? One is, one is a critical chemical for industrial purposes, which is the primary use of hydrogen today. And the other is as a as a store and transmission shores for energy. And so I think the two, the two avenues that you see are producing clean hydrogen for things like refining and petrochemicals. For hydrogen consumption is important in order to transfer molecules to to make the things we want, for production of ammonia, for production of clean methanol, and then the other is as an energy source, particularly for hard to abate industries where high temperature thermal energy is required or something like that. You know, we certainly see a future where the demand for clean hydrogen grows first in that chemistry space and the industrial chemical places where it’s whether it’s fuel production or chemicals, and then as the cost and availability of hydrogen increases, I think we’ll see more penetration into hydrogen as an energy carrier, but in terms of where we see it, you know, today we see it In refining and petrochemicals, whether it’s for producing cleaner transportation fuels or initially today, for renewable diesel and sustainable aviation fuel, where hydrogen input is required, we see strong demand for clean hydrogen to go into those applications today, ammonia production, we’re seeing projects that are using clean hydrogen for ammonia production, for natural gas, In this case, as a chemical but in some cases, also as a fuel. And I think we’re seeing the start of clean hydrogen used in in methanol and and a little bit, you know, spotty here or there, in heating applications or in production of steel places like that. But I think that’s going to take a little bit longer for those to become as big as it can be for chemical uses.
Paul Rodden 5:03
I agree. How does Honeywell assess current market demand for hydrogen, and how do you anticipate it evolving over the next decade?
Bryan Glover 5:10
At the moment, you know, what we see right now is, you know, within today’s hydrogen production, I don’t know, it was somewhere around 70, 80 million tons. We’re seeing some slow and steady interest in moving towards green hydrogen sources for those existing chemical opportunities, but then the longer term outlook, and I think this is probably what we’d all like to have a better handle on. But we do see tremendous demand for hydrogen going forward. And you know, here we tend to look to industry sources to really understand where it’s going to go. And you know, some of the key thing, key places we might look hydrogen, counselor, World Bank, I think, you know, Peg hydrogen growth to be somewhere between five and seven times over the next 30 years. So I think there’s strong, strong view that there’s going to be hydrogen demand growth significant. A lot of that’s going to depend on cost and availability. A lot of it’s going to depend on acceptability of sources. Whether you know whether blue hydrogen or green hydrogen is acceptable as a source of clean energy, but that’s what that’s what we see. I think the big challenge now is really in terms of cost, if we look at renewable hydrogens or green hydrogen, I think most sources today would peg that cost at maybe four to six or $7 a kilogram, depending on cost of energy that’s used. And that’s quite a bit higher than the cost of grade today, which is a little bit of a gating factor right now we see blue hydrogen availability coming in below that, I think, much closer to gray in places where blue is acceptable. And I think the availability and the cost are the things that are going to set the ultimately set the rate of growth for hydrogen. You know, we’ll probably get to that five to seven times, one way or another. But I think the question of what the curve looks like over the next 510, 15 years, is it a is it a quick uptake, or is it a slow uptake, rising towards the end? I think that remains to be seen. But I think we, you know, from the perspective of Honeywell, we at Honeywell are, you know, here, trying to do our best to make that hydrogen available to people through technology at the lowest cost, that it can be produced at the fastest pace that we can get technology out, so that it’s, you know, so that it’s less dependent on availability of technology and more dependent on, really, just what the economic demand for hydrogen is.
Paul Rodden 7:36
Could you highlight some key milestones Honeywell has achieved in hydrogen development so far?
Bryan Glover 7:42
I’m kind of going to go way back, and I won’t take too long, but Honeywell has been involved in production of hydrogen for a long time, and probably our key participation goes back to the mid 1960s actually, 1966 when we introduced the first pressure swing absorption unit for hydrogen purification. So people had been making hydrogen through reforming or partial oxidation of one sort or another for a long time, but being able to clean it up to high purity through pressure, swing absorption was a significant innovation driven by op at the time, and today, that technology has grown to the point that it’s used very broadly. We’ve delivered over 1000 PSA units worldwide to support that. You know, that may have been sort of one of our early forays into hydrogen production, but we continue to focus today on innovation, and the things that we’re focusing today are in the one in the area of blue hydrogen providing carbon capture solutions that can support blue hydrogen production from new and existing hydrogen plants, whether it’s existing steam methane reforming unit or whether it’s a new auto thermal reforming unit, we’ve got technologies that can pair with those units in order to give you maximum economics and maximum performance in terms of producing the hydrogen, capturing it, and then maximizing the yield out of those so one of the, you know, one of the key things is by including carbon capture technology with purification technology, we believe we’re able to produce a higher yield of hydrogen out of a reforming system than a less integrated system. So we’re working there. We’ve done a lot of work in Catalyst, COVID membranes, and we’ve got, we’re not thinking of intellectualizer company, but we are a membrane company, and we’ve been, we’ve been providing membranes in the natural gas area for decades, and so we’re a leading provider of membranes, actually, for CO two separation from natural gas. So we’ve, we’ve been helping people recover CO two, in some cases, for sequestration or re injection, for a long time. And so we’ve been putting that membrane know how to work in the area of catalyst coated membrane. So we’re a catalyst company, we’re a membrane company. It seemed like it was a natural connection to bring those together. So we’ve produced catalyst coated membranes that we’ve demonstrated internally and with and with some interested third parties, they can produce about 30% more hydrogen or surface area than membranes that are in the market today, which which ultimately can drive to a smaller, more compact, lower cost electrolyzer. We think about of about the same 29 to 30% reduction in capex due to process intensification for systems that use those membranes. So we’re excited about that. We’re, you know, we’re moving to commercialization with those. We’re moving to commercialization with simpler, lower cost technologies that can do the cleanup and the final polishing and purification of electrolyzer hydrogen. And then we’re also we’ve also done work, and we’ve launched a technology that’s available for transport of hydrogen, a liquid, organic hydrogen carrier technology. So they’re very active space for us, and there’s a lot going on today, and if anything, accelerating our efforts there to really try to bring comprehensive solutions to people.
Paul Rodden 10:58
Efficiency and cost are critical in this industry. How do these innovations improve operational efficiencies or reduce production costs?
Bryan Glover 11:07
That’s the challenge, you know. Because I think we’re always looking for, you know, how can I make the new thing for less than the old thing? And I think when, when we start to talk energy transition, at least as we get started, you know, we’re really talking about, how can I minimize the cost impact of of the new thing so So one example is sort of what I just mentioned around catalyst coated membranes for electrolysis, and that’s really focusing on the efficiency of the membrane and trying to get the maximum current density across the membrane and be able to make the electrolyzers as small as possible. The other areas where we’re focusing on cost is trying to, in general, bring end to end solutions to the extent that we can, if I look at, you know, in the case of like blue hydrogen, trying to make sure that that the solutions that we provide with carbon capture and then with purification, that we maximize yield when we do that, and that we’ve got systems that are designed to be well integrated into the hydrogen production units themselves. So we’re not a hydrogen technology company ourselves. There’s a number out there, and we’ve been, we’ve been working with several of them, and in all cases, what we’ve really tried to do is to make sure it’s not just two technologies that happen to be sitting next to one another in a plant that are connected by a pipe, but two technologies that are thoughtfully put together in order to minimize the both the cost of construction, but the cost of operation in terms of, you know, the energy and cost inputs as well as the yield that comes out of it. The last thing that I would add to that is really trying to design for maximum reuse of existing assets. And so, for instance, in blue hydrogen, you know, there’s a opportunity to decarbonize existing steam methane reforming units, right, which can, in some cases, provide a more cost effective solution for producing blue hydrogen than maybe an all new build. In terms of our work with liquid organic hydrogen carrier, which is a way to take the hydrogen and bind it with an organic molecule to be able to put it in, you know, sort of standard shipping. One of the great things about that technology approaches, there’s potential to do significant reuse of existing facilities for the combination of the hydrogen with the hydrocarbon and the recovery of the hydrogen with the hydrocarbon, and then it can also take advantage of existing shipping assets that are available for hydrocarbons. So really, two pronged approach, right? Trying to try to do our best to come up with the most cost effective solutions, but where there’s an option to reuse existing assets and clean them up, that’s another great opportunity as well.
Paul Rodden 13:48
What initiatives has Honeywell undertaken to scale green hydrogen production, and what challenges are you addressing in that space?
Bryan Glover 13:56
So touched on these a little bit already, with the catalyst coated membranes. That’s a that’s a big part of it. I mentioned earlier, just a little bit about purification. So you know, even the even green hydrogen requires drying, it may require a little bit of additional cleanup. So working to bring to the market fit for purpose solutions cost effective, that scale with with green hydrogen, a lot of green hydrogen projects that we may see going forward will be small in scale. At first, a lot of hydrogen cleanup and purification systems have gotten to the point today where they’re really designed for large industrial scale. So to be able to offer solutions that fit well with point source production of hydrogen that’s much smaller than many industrial applications, I think is important. Transportation is another big thing, whether it’s supporting transportation of hydrogen and pipelines, or supporting transportation of hydrogen through shipping, as I mentioned already, bringing technology that can if green hydrogen is not going to be a point source production, then bringing technologies that can help support the transportation of green hydrogen from low cost producing regions to consuming regions, I think is, is very important. And there’s another adjacencies as well that that we’ve been working on. One is energy storage, where, you know, a key part of renewable hydrogen, green hydrogen is having that renewable source of energy. And you know, it’s not a, it’s not a practical situation to say, Well, I’m gonna, I’m gonna design an electrolyzer that runs well the sun shines. So being able to provide energy storage solutions that can, that can take renewable energy and turn it into a steady source we’ve got, we provide both, both lithium based package solutions through our industrial automation business and through our energy and sustainability solutions business, we’re working to introduce long duration flow battery technology as well, both of which can be paired with renewable hydrogen in order to make a more stable system. And then control systems as well. The you know, one of the things with renewable hydrogen is you end up with, you know, even medium sized plant running a small fleet of electrolyzers. And within Honeywell, our process solutions business, which is one of the premier control system providers in the world today, has control system offerings that can integrate all the elements of a green hydrogen plant together to be to provide a very controllable system, and potentially to provide sort of fleet management over a number of Point Source, renewable hydrogen assets as well. So there’s a lot that we’re working on, and I think there’s a lot that can be done to really bring this to an industrial scale. Carbon Capture is a crucial component of low carbon hydrogen.
Paul Rodden 16:39
Could you share some insights on honeywell’s latest advancements in carbon capture technologies?
Bryan Glover 16:44
At Honeywell, we’ve been working on carbon capture for decades and decades and decades, and, you know, in with our background, primarily in the energy industry, whether it’s refining a petrochemicals or natural gas. You know, we’ve historically thought of it as acid gas removal. You know if you will take taking CO two and or other acid gasses out of either refinery streams or out of natural gas streams. And so we’ve had within the company of a significant basket of technologies that were originally designed for carbon capture, maybe in somewhat different applications, but that we’ve been able to readily apply to today’s landscape of of carbon capture, whether it’s for, whether it’s for pre or post combustion situations in refining, petrochemicals, gas processing, power, cement or steel or other industries out there, we’ve we have technologies that are not only suitable, but we think are, you know, world class in terms of addressing those solutions. So we’ve got project Fractionation, which we’ve seen pairs, oftentimes very well with, you know, hydrogen production for blue hydrogen. That’s the basis of the project with ExxonMobil and Baytown. But some advanced liquid scrubbing systems as well. We’ve got something called our ASCC, our advanced solvent carbon capture system, which can be used in pre combustion, but also broadly in post combustion scenarios, for scrubbing different kinds of vent and flue gas for CO two and we think is the low cost solution in the industry today, absorbance, and some of that comes out in hydrogen purification, But there are applications where adsorbents might be the right play, and we’re a significant absorbent company, and then also in membranes, natural gas, historically, membranes for for high CO two gasses have been the way to take that CO two out. Membranes can have a play in some places as well. And so we’ve been, you know, moving to adapt and improve that technology, or those technologies where they can fit for, as I say, both pre and post combustion applications. And, you know, I felt that generally, they’re, they’re best in class solutions, and really can cover a very, very broad spectrum. You know, as I say, there’s, there’s the the project with Exxon Mobil. There’s another project that was announced a while ago, somewhat similar. It’s with Wabash Valley resources in the US, where, you know, they’re looking at gasifying materials, including including biomass in order to make hydrogen. And same thing there. This incorporates CO two fractionation system, originally designed to take CO two out of natural gas, but CO two fractionation system along with some molecular cleanup through absorbance in order to produce clean hydrogen out the back end. But essentially, whatever the scenario is, we can probably find a solution, but are continuing to pump a lot into development, because it’s really about making the technology available and making it fit the application at a cost that that makes sense in order to be able to drive decarbonization as the hydrogen industry grows, infrastructure is often cited as a major hurdle.
Paul Rodden 19:51
What do you see as the primary challenges, and how is Honeywell addressing them?
Bryan Glover 19:55
Yeah, I’d agree completely that infrastructure is a big is big hurdle here with a COVID couple of notable exceptions, us, Gulf Coast and maybe some places in northwestern Europe, hydrogen is historically consumed where it’s produced or in in close proximity, right? There are, you know, there are examples in the US, Gulf coast, where, you know, hydrogen is transported over reasonable distances, but that’s not the norm. And so, you know, a key part of driving a hydrogen economy is, you know, in many cases, is going to be the, you know, developing capabilities for transport and storage of hydrogen which which may or may not be there today. It’s also going to be trying to develop these clean hydrogen sources for the minimal cost, and so anything that can maximize either localization. So think about renewable hydrogen, green hydrogen. It’s great for a localization play, because if you’ve got access to clean electricity, you can produce some, you know, small amounts on site, as long as we can make sure that the cost at small scale doesn’t dramatically exceed the cost at large scale for renewable hydrogen. Then as long as electricity supply allows being able to produce locally is sort of one way to take advantage of minimal impact on infrastructure. But then where we’re going to build Infrastructure and Transport hydrogen having technologies available that can maximize the reuse of existing hydro infrastructure is critically important. So liquid, organic hydrogen carrier for us, that’s a big play, because we take the hydrogen, we we combine it with poly we make metal cyclohexane. Can ship that on relatively standard shipping that can handle hydrocarbon liquids. You strip the hydrogen off the other end, get toluene back. The toluene has got to be returned, but the infrastructure to support that largely exists because there’s refining assets that exist in the world today, in hydrogen consuming regions, or future hydrogen consuming regions that are surplus and maybe have been shut down and can be adapted for a relatively low cost. The ability to put the hydrogen into the hydrocarbon at the producing end. There may be assets there that can be adapted, or, if not, that’s a relatively low cost asset that can be built. And so really looking at technologies like that, the ability to add carbon capture to existing hydrogen assets, working with companies that are getting into the CO two transport and sequestration business in order to help customers find opportunities to locate blue hydrogen production sites near places that there’s existing pipeline access, perhaps surplus natural gas pipeline capacity, or something that can allow that CO two then to get back to sequestration sites. I think that’s all part of the picture. And those are all areas where we, either through our technology or developing partner relationships, are trying to trying to bring together technology and an industry ecosystem where we can help customers who want to develop hydrogen assets to develop their projects in a more seamless and a simpler way, so that these things can move forward at the at the pace that people desire.
Paul Rodden 23:08
Yeah, and you just touched on something. I’d like to take a little bit deeper. If we can your work with liquid, organic hydrogen carriers or lo HCS, really, is fascinating. Can you explain how this technology facilitates long distance hydrogen transport?
Bryan Glover 23:24
I think probably a lot of us have seen or read a lot about the challenges of of hydrogen transport. You know, you can, there’s, there’s multiple ways that you can approach this. You can, you can liquefy the hydrogen, you can put it on a boat. But that, you know, because of the, you know, the extreme cryogenic nature of that, lot of complexity, a lot of costs, a lot of boil off along the way. There are other ways to transport hydrogen ammonia is, is one of them. It has some advantages. It also has some challenges. The liquid, organic hydrogen carrier is the system that we think for long distance transport of of hydrogen makes, makes the most sense. One from just a basic cost and simplicity of doing it on an ongoing basis, but two from a from a capital intensity and capital cost, because it does allow for significant, as I mentioned, a couple times, significant reuse of existing assets. And so for us, this was really good fit, because as Honeywell, we’re a company that, for decades, has been a leader in the technologies that are required to do this. So the two technologies that you require are essentially hydrocarbon saturation technology to be able to put the hydrogen into the carrier. In this case, our carrier is toluene slash methyl cyclohexane. So at the at the hydrogen insertion end, it’s a taking toluene and saturating it at low cost and high selectivity to methylcyclohexane. You want all of your hydrogen and all of your toluene to convert to methylcyclonexs Saying and not have cracking or any byproducts or anything else that that hydrocarbon saturation field is an area that Honeywell has a lot of experience, has been playing in for a long, long time. Related technologies that are used at industrial scale are, for instance, benzene saturation to produce cyclohexane that ultimately goes into the nylon chain and others, or just general saturation of aromatic compounds in refining applications. So a lot of a lot of experience with that, and a lot of repurposable assets. On the other end is the dehydrogenation, so removing the hydrogen for the methyl cycle from the methyl cyclohexane, and again, producing a pure hydrogen stream, and I’ve been a pure toluene stream, and that really is essentially just a narrower form of catalytic reforming, or what we op would call in Honeywell platforming. And so as the as the company that developed that technology, originally back in the late 40s, and as the leading provider of that technology, as well as other industrial dehydrogenation technology for propylene and butylenes. Again, it was a natural fit, and in developed regions, areas like Japan account, there’s a number of idle catalytic reforming units that are already configured in a way that they can take toluene and dehydrogenated, I mean methylcyclohexane And dehydrogenated in soluwe. So there’s ready availability of units that could be revamped and repurposed in order to do that. And that’s really the two ends of it. Again, a little bit like the carbon capture. It’s a natural fit for technologies that we’ve worked on for decades and have a deep understanding of and then can optimize for this application. So it’s very exciting to us that the solution is fairly straightforward, involves a lot of asset reuse, which, by its nature, is sustainable, because the equipment is already there and could get up and running relatively quickly, and the assets are where they need to be, right? It’s the it’s the consuming countries that, you know, places like Japan, maybe places like Korea, that actually today have some excess capacity these old assets. It seems like rare in the world that the an idol asset is actually where you want it, but this is a great case where potentially idle assets are already where, where they need to be and where, where customers will want them to be.
Paul Rodden 23:24
Let’s talk about risk for just a little bit operational risks are always a concern. How does Honeywell approach mitigating risk in hydrogen related operations?
Bryan Glover 27:25
So, so for us, it’s, don’t want to understate it. I don’t want to trivialize it, right? Because always dealing with hydrogen, it is, it is something you have to be careful with. But I think the good thing for us is hydrogen, and either producing or consuming. I’ll say processing hydrogen has been core to much of the technology base that Honeywell has developed over the years, as well as some of our own operating plants as well. So you know, much of the world of refining and petrochemical technology today has to do with either removing hydrogen from molecules, things like catalytic reforming. For gasoline is really about turning aliphatic materials into aromatic materials. So extracting hydrogen and that becomes a principal source for hydrogen use in refineries, things like propane, dehydrogenation, again, you’re taking propane, removing the hydrogen, and producing high yields of propylene. Or hydro processing technologies, things like hydro treating or hydro cracking, in particular, where you’re really trying to transform molecules by putting hydrogen in them to either saturate them or go ahead and break bonds and break them down into smaller components. So So for us, in terms of developing technologies and hydrogen management, between process technologies that we’ve been providing to the world for a long time, hydrogen purification equipment like PSA or membrane systems, we’ve been doing that for a long time. So we feel that we’ve got a, you know, a lot of deep understanding on how hydrogen needs to be handled in order to handle it safely, and we’re incorporating that, plus all the new learnings we have, into the systems that we design. But beyond that, given that Honeywell is more than a technology company that we’re a controls company, we’re a sensors company, we have, we have sensor technology that’s available that can detect hydrogen leaks and allow you to be able to quickly action on those within a process plant. And we have advanced control technology that’s able to control the the entire process plant in order to make sure that we’re managing hydrogen and and if we do have a problem, we’re able to shut down in the in the safest way that we can and be able to manage the hydrogen and get to a safe place. So I would say, for a company like Honeywell that’s been dealing with hydrogen industrially for a long time, we feel comfortable with it, and we we feel like we know how to make these systems safe. And I think that’s actually a really big advantage with technologies that we’re developing and we’re promoting you because it does come from that deep background, rather than, you know, it’s, it’s not as if we’re somebody that said, hey, you know, this hydrogen space looks interesting. Let’s invest a little money and and try to figure out how to, how to produce some new hydrogen production technology without having decades of experience in terms of, you know, safe and CO compliant management of hydrogen Canadian systems.
Paul Rodden 30:20
Earlier, you mentioned some partnerships that you have. You also recently partnered with Johnson Matthey to advance lower carbon hydrogen solutions. Can you tell us more about the goals of that collaboration?
Bryan Glover 30:20
Our work with Johnson Matthey is, you know, I mentioned earlier in terms of blue hydrogen, really the value of trying to bring an integrated solution. So so our carbon capture technology, along with our hydrogen purification technology and Johnson’s, Matthey Johnson Mattheys, low carbon hydrogen, what they call LCH, their technology, we’ve been working together to be able to offer customers who want an integrated solution. Not everyone does, but for people that want an integrated solution, integrated solution, a well integrated solution from the front end, through auto thermal reforming, through the carbon capture and the hydrogen purification, a system that’s designed to work together so the the ATR has been optimized in order to work with hydrogen recovery system which, which isn’t necessarily trivial, because you know, like in this case, you know, you’ve got a you’ve got a very hot side and a very cold side, for instance. So you’ve got another thermal reformer running at really high temperatures, and then you’ve got a cryogenic system on the back end in order to remove the CO two. And so there is a significant challenge in integrating those technologies in a way that minimizes energy consumption and recovers all the heat that you possibly can and yet allows you to get to cryogenic temperatures on the back end. So getting to getting to integration and getting to the lowest cost of operation, which also results in a low carbon footprint, is really important there in our ability to work together to drive towards these integrated solutions that you know, from a customer perspective, are also integrated in that they’re designed to work together. It’s not that customer has to buy Part A from from one supplier and Part B from another supplier, and then hope that they actually work together. There’s an ability for us to work collaboratively with Johnson Matthey to provide not just the design, but then service for that, for the end to end situation. And what we see today is increasingly, people that want to produce hydrogen, they want to produce hydrogen in the old world that we’ve lived in Honeywell, which is the refining and petrochemical world. Refiners put together a complex refinery, and then they go about day to day optimizing that operation for the feed, their configuration, the products that they need to run. And so generally, in the refining space, what you know, what oil refiner is trying to do is use their configuration, their special capabilities and their knowledge to get the best outcome every day right for people that are making hydrogen, right, they’re going to have a stable feed. It’s it’s probably natural gas. In the case of blue hydrogen, they want the natural gas to come in, they want the hydrogen to come out. They want it to run steady, and they want it to produce as effectively as it can every day, day in and day out. And that’s a very different paradigm. And so being able to bring an end to end solution is is really important to that, because that’s what the customer values. They’re not trying to optimize to different kinds of hydrogen every day or different feed stocks. They want to be able to, you know, optimize and make that thing run better and more reliably every day. But that means it needs to be well integrated to begin with, and then they can go from there.
Paul Rodden 33:37
And along with Johnson Matthey, also partnered with ExxonMobil, and they’ve deployed your CO2 fractionation and hydrogen purification system for its carbon capture efforts. What role does this technology play in advancing their projects?
Bryan Glover 33:52
Yeah, so in their project, it’s an auto thermal reforming based hydrogen project, and it needed a carbon capture component. So you know, as they evaluated options, they like what they saw with our option. And in that case, the the license, or for the hygiene technology, was top So, and our ability to work with top so again, to to bring to Exxon Mobil a solution that they felt was optimal for their needs was was critical. And there’s multiple ways that you could put carbon capture on the back end of an ATR. It could be through a solvent system. Could be with CO two Fractionation, probably some other systems out there. But when, when they looked at it and looked at the integration, they saw that the CO two fractionation was the more effective system in order to go with that, and that CO two Fractionation, you know, we we work to make sure it pairs well with the ATR, but then we also make sure, on the back end, that in terms of the hydrogen purification, that it’s not just a standard run of the mill hydrogen purification PSA system. It’s PSA system that’s special. Integrated to work with the particular way that CO two fractionation system works, and take advantage of some of the or create some synergies between those two technologies. So it’s a little bit more than the CO two recovery system itself. It’s the CO two recovery system in combination with the PSA system on the back that really brings the unique capability here and the unique integration. So, you know, I think we all know that when you have multiple processes in a row or in combination with one another, the more you can integrate them, and the more you can focus on how they work together, the more value you’re going to get out of it. And here, you know, there’s trade offs on the front end, on how CO two would work with the ATR. There’s trade offs on the back end. You know, potentially, there is some balancing that you need to do between getting the best integration with the front end and the best integration with the back end. So again, it gets back to that idea of, I want to integrate the system and I want to optimize it end to end in order for best performance, rather than to do local optimizations and say, Okay, well, I’ve got the best possible integration of hydrogen purification with CO two Fractionation, but that led me to doing something that maybe is not optimal in the way I integrated it with hydrogen production. So being able to see that end to end, we see big value there.
Paul Rodden 36:16
And Honeywell also acquired Air Products, LNG technology. How does this acquisition enhance your capabilities in the hydrogen sector?
Bryan Glover 36:24
This was an opportunity for us, you know, I think, to really focus on, again, bringing deep solutions to to the industry, and focus on that, that mega trend of energy transition. So we’ve been a player in refining, we’ve been a player in petrochemicals, and we’ve been a player in natural gas for a long, long time, but in natural gas, which would be a typical feed stock for hydrogen production, our participation in natural gas historically has been in the cleanup of the natural gas, in the production of natural gas, separation of natural gas liquids, cryogenic separation of natural gas liquids, and Then in the cleanup of those liquids, and in the processing of those liquids. So Honeywell was in this where, as gas came out of the ground, we offer technologies to remove salt or remove CO to remove mercury, remove other contaminates and make it clean and ready to go into to go into LNG. In fact, up was already providing pre treatment for about 40% of the world’s LNG capacity in order to get it ready. And then through our worn off and up Russell businesses, we were providing technology for separation recovery of natural gas liquids, and then separation and purification of the natural gas liquids once they’re taken out of natural gas and with technologies like our propane dehydrogenation and butane dehydrogenation and some others, really were providing large outlets for monetization of those natural gas liquids. So we’re playing broadly in that chain, but we weren’t playing directly in the liquefied natural gas space. So so that acquisition and bringing in LNG technology really allows us to complete that portfolio. And again, as I was mentioning, you know, in terms of integrated solutions, right, really bring what we anticipate to be hassle free, well, integrated solutions that are best in class for, you know, raw gas, all the way through LNG, and all the way through pipeline gas, and all the way through natural gas liquids, and monetization of the natural gas liquids, so that really fills out that network and allows us to be a full provider. Some of that LNG may find its way into hydrogen production, initially Gray, but then maybe blue in some parts of the world, but then it also allows, I’ll say, sort of greater participation and greater support of the build out of natural gas infrastructure as we go forward. And, you know, we really see, like, I think most of the world is natural gas as being an important transition fuel, especially, there’s a lot that people want to do in decarbonization. You know, whether it’s hydrogen or things like sustainable aviation fuel diesel, but there’s an awful lot to be done, really, in the short term, just to support global energy systems, to get to the lowest possible carbon intensity fuels, where we’re still using fuels. So Right? You know, part of LNG to move coal out of power production and other places. I think there’s a lot of runway for that. And the reduction in carbon intensity just by switching to natural gas can be, can be significant. So we see a lot of value in that. You know, some of the focus on hydrogen, but a lot of it just supporting energy transition in general, and help the world drive to where to where we all want to go.
Paul Rodden 39:40
And lastly, your partnership with electric hydrogen focuses on electrolyzer technology. What are the objectives with this collaboration, and how does it fit into honeywell’s broader hydrogen strategy?
Bryan Glover 39:50
Yeah, so our broader hydrogen strategy, as I mentioned in the beginning, our goal really is, Honeywell is to help bring capabilities and technologies of the market that support, say, the world’s desire to move more towards hydrogen driven economy. And so we’ve been focusing heavily on internal investment to support that, but we’ve also been doing some external investment to support that. So in June of 2022 our high growth ventures platform made an investment in electric hydrogen. We’ve done an assessment, and we thought it was very promising, very promising technology. So we were, so we were part of a series B financing round, and contributed to the financing that went at the time. So we’re supporting the development of them, you know, looking for any opportunities to collaborate with them. But really, this is part of our efforts to support the development of the hydrogen infrastructure for the world, and looking to help support technologies that we think can have a strong impact.
Paul Rodden 40:53
Brian, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us today and sharing these incredible insights into honeywell’s initiatives and contributions to the hydrogen industry. Your team’s work in advancing technologies and addressing challenges. It’s truly inspiring.
Bryan Glover 41:07
Well, you know, Thank you, Paul. I appreciate the chance to talk with you today. Enjoyed the talk, and it’s been great to sit down and do this. So thank you for inviting me.
Paul Rodden 41:15
Absolutely and for our listeners. If you’d like to learn more about Honeywell and their role in shaping the future of energy, visit their website@www.honeywell.com. Until next time. I’m Paul Rodden. This is the hydrogen podcast. Thanks for tuning in.
