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A Washington company says it has developed a way to capture carbon from natural gas and use it to make asphalt to build roads. Modern Hydrogen uses a process called methane pyrolysis that produces clean hydrogen out of methane and captures the carbon from that gas before it reaches the atmosphere. Methane, which is four parts hydrogen and one part carbon, is the largest component of natural gas. The captured carbon is a solid carbon byproduct called “carbon black” that can be used as binder in hot-mix asphalt, cold patch and asphalt sealers, the company says. The carbon-captured asphalt has already been used for sealing an asphalt parking lot in Portland, Oregon, and for paving a driveway with hot-mix asphalt in Seattle (see the video at the end of this story). The product has also been used in private parking lots and driveways in California, New Mexico, Florida and in Alberta, Canada, the company says. Road Recyclers, an Austin, Texas-based designer of asphalt binders for the road recycling industry, has signed on to be “the first to incorporate carbon stripped from natural gas in public roads,” according to Modern Hydrogen. Road Recyclers has been testing Modern Hydrogen products and says it is now ready to begin field trials with partner municipal and state transportation agencies.

“Modern Hydrogen is thrilled to see a broad collection of hub approaches, regions, and companies, including ourselves, be selected by the Department of Energy to continue building out the hydrogen hubs,” said Mack Hopen, commercialization manager at Modern Hydrogen. “The Hubs are a crucial first stage of development for the hydrogen economy, and this investment by the Energy Department will help make that happen,” he added. “As these plans become reality, we are excited to be able to put our mission into practice — making energy cleaner and cheaper. But, the Hub model is not the end-all-be-all solution. The majority of prospective hydrogen users are located outside these geographic areas, and our distributed pyrolysis approach will ensure that they can still get affordable, clean hydrogen without being located at or near one of these Hubs.” The company uses methane pyrolysis to decarbonize natural gas, which is abundant and cheap in the United States. That process splits the hydrogen and the carbon. In other words, natural gas is 80% hydrogen, and the focus is on removing the one pesky carbon atom. The technology heats natural gas to 1,000 degrees Celsius without oxygen. That allows Modern Hydrogen to crack the natural gas and decarbonize it, thus isolating the carbon atom — not burning it and sending it to the atmosphere. That avoids 10 gigatons of CO2 yearly. Public and private enterprises have invested millions of dollars in this technology, which former Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz applauds. It’s called turquoise hydrogen because it mixes blue and green. Blue hydrogen occurs when the carbon is captured and buried, and green hydrogen refers to using wind or solar power to split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. The primary focus is on producing clean hydrogen for the hard-to-decarbonize industries or things that cannot quickly electrify. That applies to planes, trains, ships, and long-haul trucks. Electric generators can also run on a blend of hydrogen and natural gas.

The administration is funding several different hydrogen production technologies, an approach backed by Tony Pan, co-founder of the methane pyrolysis start-up Modern Hydrogen. “So far, the government deserves a big kudos for how they’re supporting clean hydrogen. Instead of picking winners and losers directly, most of the incentives are technology agnostic,” Pan says. Some hubs will use water electrolysis powered by renewable or nuclear energy, some will upgrade biomass or waste into hydrogen, and some will pair fossil fuel-derived hydrogen production with carbon capture.

Tony Pan came to the United States from Taiwan in 2004 to study physics at Stanford University before getting his Ph.D. in the same subject area from Harvard University. Now, the 37-year-old is the chief executive of Washington State-based Modern Hydrogen, making energy cleaner and cheaper with a formula endorsed by a former U.S. energy secretary and Microsoft Founder Bill Gates. We’ll get into that in a moment. But utilities have invested in and bought the technology — a potentially humongous market in the pilot phase. The chief executive says it will go commercial in 2025 and gradually scale up. “Right now, it is like Tesla in 2008,” CEO Pan told me in a virtual interview. “Utilities are the target audience, which serve millions of customers — residential and business. They have pressure to reduce carbon emissions. Otherwise, they could do nothing. They want to switch to hydrogen because it burns cleanly. It is about decarbonization — quickly and at scale.”

A Bothell-based company, Modern Hydrogen, is on the leading edge of finding a cost-effective way to turn natural gas emissions into clean-burning hydrogen. Modern Hydrogen said they have engineered a way to take carbon out of natural gas in order to create decarbonized gas, which releases significantly less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere when burned. Company co-founder Tony Pan explained removing the carbon from the fuel itself is a lot easier than trying to capture the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The captured carbon is also a lot more useful than the carbon dioxide, which is mainly just injected into the ground to be sequestered away.

In this episode of Hardware to Save a Planet, Max Mankin, CTO and Co-founder of Modern [Hydrogen], and Mothusi Pahl, Vice President of Business Development at Modern [Hydrogen], join Dylan Garrett to discuss an innovative technology that decarbonizes natural gas use by converting gas to clean hydrogen at the point of use without CO2 emissions. Modern [Hydrogen] is a cleantech company focused on heat and hydrogen. Its first solution decarbonizes gas use by converting customers’ gas to clean hydrogen onsite without CO2 emissions. Its second solution provides efficiency by transforming heat into power, saving money, reducing carbon footprint, and providing resiliency in blackouts.

In this captivating episode of the Dealmakers’ Podcast, we embark on an extraordinary voyage with Tony Pan, a visionary entrepreneur determined to combat climate change through groundbreaking technology. From his early days growing up as the son of a Taiwan Navy officer to founding Modern Hydrogen, Tony’s journey has been nothing short of inspiring.

Modern Hydrogen strips carbon from natural gas, preventing those molecules from becoming carbon dioxide. Called “pre-combustion carbon capture,” this technology can be paired with existing gas networks to decarbonize them at stages upstream during gas transmissions, at utility gate stations, or directly at an operator’s point of use. The full article is published in Gas Technology Magazine 2023

Natural gas and air are producing hydrogen in a NW Natural pilot.

Modern Hydrogen demonstrated the application of a technique that makes road construction and maintenance more cost-effective with a reduced impact on the environment. On the outskirts of the Portland metro area, the road to a cleaner future is being paved… literally. Modern Hydrogen is a leading player in the quest to “sequester avoided CO2 emissions effectively and sustainably in the built environment.” Recently, it demonstrated this application at a customer site for the first time, infusing captured carbon with “hot mix asphalt” [in Seattle] and a pigment sealer in Sherwood, Oregon.

Along with sectors like steel and chemicals, utilities could be a major source of demand given the scale of their distribution networks. But they answer to regulators and rate-payers sensitive to any hike in monthly bills, so hydrogen costs must gradually fall in order for utilities to blend greater volumes, said Ben Wilson, chief strategy and external affairs officer and interim president at National Grid Ventures, a unit of the London-based electric and natural gas utility that operates in New York and Massachusetts. National Grid is exploring hydrogen investments and is partnering with a Seattle-based startup, Modern Hydrogen, that is working on distributed hydrogen production technology that serves to “disrupt us,” Wilson said.

Tour participants got a close look at a sample of the carbon that will soon be captured at the dairy digester. A Bothell, Wash.-based company called Modern Hydrogen will extract granulated carbon from methane to produce pure hydrogen. “So this technology lets them take that methane that’s getting delivered to them and convert it to hydrogen so that they can burn the hydrogen and then collect the carbon instead of spewing it in the air,” Robinson said. The only emissions from burning hydrogen is water vapor. It’s about the cleanest fuel out there. And methane is just about the dirtiest, before it’s burned. It’s more than 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. The technology comes from Modern Hydrogen, previously known as Modern Electron. The Bothell, Wash.-based company is focused on reducing emissions from biogas, like what Qualco Energy produces from cow manure, within the existing gas infrastructure.