H₂ production through natural gas reforming and carbon capture: A techno-economic and life cycle analysis comparison

As policy incentivizes low-carbon hydrogen production, there is growing interest in the deployment of natural gas hydrogen production with carbon capture and storage (CCS). Here, we conduct comprehensive techno-economic analysis (TEA) and life cycle analysis (LCA) on five hydrogen production cases, with a focus on characterizing emissions and cost implications of varying CCS schemes for hydrogen production with CCS. We find that CCS cases can achieve over 95% CO₂ capture at the plant, while reducing the well-to-gate (WTG) greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to 3.21–3.65 kg CO₂ eq/kg H₂, this is 63–68% lower than the emissions of industrial baseline case. The levelized cost of hydrogen (LCOH) of CCS pathways is estimated in the U.S. context to be 1.17–1.56 $/kg as compared to $1.04/kg of industrial baseline case. Given regional variations in fuel and electricity prices and their upstream emissions impacts, we also performed a regional analysis of the proposed pathways.