United Utilities, Levidian win BEIS funding for biogas-to-hydrogen pilot

A consortium including British climate tech business Levidian Nanosystems and water company United Utilities Group Plc (LON:UU) has won GBP 212,000 (USD 257,000/EUR 252,000) in state funding for a pilot biogas-to-hydrogen project.

The UK government’s Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) has awarded the funding under the Hydrogen BECCS (bioenergy with carbon capture and storage) Innovation Programme with a budget of GBP 5 million, which, in turn, is part of the GBP-1-billion Net Zero Innovation Portfolio (NZIP).

United Utilities is leading the project which will utilise biogas from wastewater treatment as a fully sustainable feedstock to produce hydrogen and graphene through the Levidian LOOP. The awarded funding will be used in the first phase of the project to undertake a feasibility study and assess the performance of various biogas samples in a small-scale LOOP system at the Levidian Technology Centre in Cambridge. The partners plan to carry out a detailed analysis to optimise the hydrogen output.

In Phase 2, a LOOP100 system, designed to reduce carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) by 100 tonnes per year, will be deployed on a United Utilities site and will undergo extensive field trials.

Levidian’s LOOP technology uses a patented low-temperature, low-pressure process to crack methane into its constituent atoms, hydrogen and carbon, without requiring catalysts or additives. The carbon is locked into high-quality graphene, while the hydrogen can be stored for use in its pure form or be used as a hydrogen-rich blend.

The company is currently working on scaling up its technology to deploy a LOOP1000+ device. It says that if renewable power is used during the LOOP process, the produced hydrogen will be carbon negative.

(GBP 1 = USD 1.212/EUR 1.188)

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