Shaping the Future with a Hydrogen Value Chain Simulation Platform

Today’s top international oil companies (IOCs) are responding to the climate crisis and setting goals to be net zero emissions companies by 2050, or sooner. They are essentially on a journey to transition from being international oil companies to becoming international energy companies (IECs). These companies will be implementing near term, medium term, and long term initiatives as they progress along their energy transformation journey. These steps will include:

• Reducing methane emissions
• Reducing carbon dioxide emissions
• Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage (CCUS)
• Accelerating decarbonization

A key enabler all companies are embracing as part of their strategy to drive to their net-zero goals is digital transformation which involves identifying and implementing methods to bring digital tools and work processes closer together in order to drive more informed business decisions. Digital Transformation is a critical lever that companies can use to deliver both short term sustainability gains including lower CH₄ and CO₂ emissions and to elevate the quality of capital project execution on new capital investments, on both CCUS and low or zero carbon energy projects.

Process Simulation is accepted as a required tool for the process design of traditional oil and gas and chemical plant facilities, from conceptual engineering on through to operations. However, with the energy transformation underway, the landscape of the process industries will change dramatically over the next three decades and as such, a process simulator must be able to simulate existing processes, new types of processes as well as support new and improved process engineering practices.

The paper discusses the challenges of the current simulation tools from a process modeling perspective when it comes to the need for:

• New equipment models for Green hydrogen generation including renewable power sources from solar and wind and for electrolyzers
• Accurate thermodynamics for modeling hydrogen liquefaction processes.
• Improved process equipment models for Gray and Blue hydrogen generation such as reactor models for hydrogen production from natural gas, absorption of carbon dioxide using Amines, and adsorption to create pure hydrogen.
• Capabilities to simulate liquid organic hydrogen carrier (LOHC) processes that increase the energy density of hydrogen.

The paper also discusses the challenges of today’s tools from a platform perspective when it comes to updating the tools for the needs of the hydrogen value chain.

• Legacy process simulators are overloaded with niche features and functions only usable by experts which makes it difficult for vendors to adapt them fast enough for rapidly changing industry trends.
• Process simulators are typically poorly integrated into engineering workflows beyond the process world, and if so, with a single directional information flow. This leads to poor FEED quality and subsequent capital project cost and schedule overruns.

To address these challenges, new process simulators need the following functionality to be true enablers of Digital Transformation for the new lower carbon economy:

• An open modeling framework to be able to quickly add new process models as they are rapidly developed to address the hydrogen economy, such as new electrolysis technology.
• The ability to take Hydrogen value chain models used for process design, and reuse them for dynamic simulation, control strategy design and for operator training simulators thereby shortening project schedules and lowering the total cost of simulation
• Putting those same models on-line for real time performance monitoring and online optimization for incremental profitability in a cost effective manner
• Incorporate the benefits of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for process engineering as they become better understood.

Industry stakeholders see the Digital Twin as the most important building block for the Digital Transformation of the process industries. While legacy simulators are well-suited to accurately simulate conventional processes, their decades-old architectures mean they are cannot be easily adapted for hydrogen and are not ideal to serve the entire plant lifecycle and support true Digital Transformation in the nascent hydrogen or low-carbon economy. The authors will use the AVEVA SimCentral Simulation Platform as an example of how the identified obstacles can be overcome with a next generation process simulator.