Daryl Brown analyses the US hydrogen production and consumption markets – specifically looking at the last 25 years.
There have been a lot of changes in the last 25 years. In 1990, a share of Apple cost only a dollar, the internet was used mostly by the federal government and a few universities, and your phone stayed at home. Dramatic changes have also come to the US hydrogen industry. While the demand for hydrogen has increased significantly, the provision of hydrogen by merchant gas companies has increased from practically nothing in 1990 to the single largest source of “on-purpose” production in the US today. On-purpose is the sum of captive (produced and consumed by the end-user) and merchant (produced by another company and sold to the end-user). Excluded here is hydrogen recovered from byproduct process streams, which is a significant source in an oil refinery.
Worldwide, captive hydrogen production occurs mostly at ammonia and methanol production plants, and at crude oil refineries. The same is true in the US, but the largest amount of captive hydrogen in the US is produced for oil refining, while for the world it is for ammonia production. Captive and merchant hydrogen production in the US since 1990 is shown in Figure 1. Total production grew quickly in the 1990s, leveled off for about eight years, and then continued growing over the last decade.
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