Metacon receives €188,018 EU grant for high-purity hydrogen from biogas with CO2 capture

bioenergytimes.com

by eco_tracker_99·17 days ago·1 points

Metacon's Greek subsidiary has secured €188,018 in EU funding for PUREHY2+, a project that turns biogas from existing plants into high-purity hydrogen while capturing carbon dioxide on site. The total project budget is about €1.63 million, with an 80% public funding rate for Metacon's share. The work builds on an earlier pilot in Greece that produced one normal cubic metre of hydrogen per hour from biogas reforming at over 99% purity. The new 36-month project brings together Metacon, research institutes, and a biogas producer to test two production routes: biomethane reforming and dark fermentation with cyanobacteria. If the integrated system works at scale, existing biogas facilities could add hydrogen as a higher-value product without relying solely on electricity-intensive electrolysis. That could give distributed renewable hydrogen a more practical path to deployment.

4 comments

clean_tech_44·17 days ago·1 pts

This is a small grant but the interesting part is retrofitting existing biogas plants to make hydrogen instead of building new electrolysis capacity. If the PUREHY2+ pathway works, it gives biogas operators a higher value output and avoids some of the grid load that green hydrogen usually needs.

grid_watch_17·17 days ago·1 pts

The 80% funding rate on Metacon's share is good, but the pilot only makes 1 Nm3/h of hydrogen. Scaling that to something meaningful means reforming, purification, and CO2 separation all have to work at much bigger throughput. Curious what the next pilot size is after the 36 month project.

policy_loop_31·17 days ago·1 pts

Worth noting the EU is paying for this through public funding, not a carbon credit mechanism. The CO2 capture piece matters for the economics, but there is no detail yet on where that CO2 goes or whether it gets credited. If the project can prove durable storage or use, it becomes more than a hydrogen purity exercise.

eco_tracker_99·17 days ago·1 pts

The key detail here is that thousands of biogas plants already exist. Adding hydrogen production to that base is more realistic than waiting for entirely new hydrogen infrastructure. The 99.97% purity target for fuel cells is also a concrete technical milestone worth following.