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Veteran oilman and chemical engineer Neil Camarta has come out of early retirement­ to commercialize a molten salt-based process for cleaner, cheaper hydrogen production.
TYLER IRVING
Neil Camarta just can’t seem to stay retired. After 35 years in the oil industry, including stints at Shell and Suncor, the chemical engineer from Edson, Alta. is now in what he calls the ‘crackpot business,’ taking risks on maverick new technologies. His current project is Western Hydrogen, a company that recently launched the world’s first pilot-scale molten salt reactor for turning carbonaceous feedstocks — including petroleum coke, asphalt, natural gas and even biomass — into high-pressure hydrogen, ready for use in oil sands upgrading or electricity generation. ACCN spoke to Camarta about what drives him to keep innovating.
Can you tell us about your alternative, molten salt-based process?
This was developed by the folks at the United States Department of Energy lab in Idaho, who are experts in reactor design. We fill our reactor with molten sodium salts: sodium hydroxide and sodium carbonate. Then, we heat it up to 1,000 C and pressurize it up to 2,000 pounds per square inch.
When we inject our hydrocarbon feedstock plus water into this reactor, a looping reaction takes place. First, sodium carbonate reacts with the hydrocarbon plus water to form elemental sodium ions, plus carbon dioxide and hydrogen. Then, the sodium ions react with water to form more hydrogen plus sodium hydroxide. Finally, the sodium hydroxide plus the carbon and more water re-forms the sodium carbonate. So it’s a big looping reaction, in which the molten sodium salts act as a catalyst — they’re not consumed.
The upshot is that if you put in any hydrocarbon — whether it’s a fossil fuel like petroleum coke, coal and natural gas, or renewable feedstocks like glycerol, algae or wood chips — the looping reactions convert it plus water into hydrogen and carbon dioxide (CO2).
Traditional gasification — burning hydrocarbons in a low-oxygen environment — can accomplish the same transformation. What’s the advantage of your system?
All the gasifiers I know use oxygen plants, because they don’t want to waste energy heating up the nitrogen in the air that comes along for the ride. In these systems, 18 to 30 per cent of the capital cost is tied up in the oxygen plant. We don’t need oxygen, so that gets one big piece of hardware off the table, and also saves a lot on utility costs.
The second thing is that we produce our hydrogen at high pressure. Hydrogen takes a lot of energy to compress, but you typically need to have it at around 1,000 pounds of pressure to be useful. So again, we save on costs by not needing a compressor. The elegance of our system is that everything happens in one reactor, so it’s much more energy-efficient than a conventional gasifier. If you go back and talk about steam-methane reformers, those use air in the burners used to heat the catalyst, which requires blowers, etc. And you still need to compress the hydrogen up to 1,000 pounds. In general, our system has fewer pots and pans.
Your system doesn’t produce­ pure hydrogen­, but rather a mixture of H2 and CO2. How do you separate these streams?
We have a quench stream which cools off the reactor gases, and that carries away some CO2. As for the rest, there are a couple of options. One is to use pressure swing adsorption, which involves microporous minerals that selectively adsorb CO2. Another is to use a cryogenic process to liquefy the CO2 and separate it from the H2. We looked at both these options, and either way it comes out to be a lot cheaper when the gases start at high pressure. We’re also looking at ionic transport membranes that separate hydrogen from other gases, and they run really well at high temperatures too. If it works, it would be a real breakthrough, and would help us get rid of a lot more pots and pans. But that’s still an open question; and we’ll find out in the next year.
Molten salt gasification has been known for decades­; what did you do differently­?
The chall­enge was the reactor design. You need the right metallurgy to contain the molten sodium salts at high pressure and high temperature. The other key element is that we just have one reactor, which means you don’t have to pump molten salts around, which would be hard to do. Really it’s the expertise developed by the people in Idaho — the metallurgy and the mechanical design — that make the difference.

The pilot plant build by Western Hydrogen in Fort Saskatchewan, Alta. contains the world's first large-scale molten salt reactor for the production of hydrogen, a key ingredient in oil sands upgrading. The feedstock can be any carbonaceous material, from asphalt and petroleum coke to waste glycerol or other biomass. Photo credit: Katherine Camarta
Tell us about the pilot plant you’ve just built.
We built it for two reasons. Firstly, we wanted to prove the technology, to get all the proper data and to try different feedstocks. We’re running it on asphalt because it’s cheap, you can put it in a tank and pump it, and it’s a good proxy for a heavy, carbonaceous feedstock. If you can run on asphalt, you can probably run on anything.
Secondly, it acts as a showcase. Oil sands people are “show me” people, and the best way to get rid of a crackpot is to ask them to build a pilot plant; a lot of them never do. We’ve put ourselves right between refinery row and upgrader alley — in Fort Saskatchewan, just east of Edmonton. There are a lot of pots and pans out there, including the upgrader I built for Shell, so it’ll be pretty hard to avoid us.
It’s going to take us a year or two to try out different feedstocks and get the kind of practical information that engineers need to design a demonstration plant. I see moving toward that kind of scale-up within five years.

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CANADIAN CHEMICAL NEWS