Hydron Energy receives grant to scale gas upgrading system

Hydron Energy Inc., a North Vancouver, British Columbia-based clean fuel company that is commercializing a gas upgrading solution, has received a $365,000 grant from the Natural Gas Innovation Fund (NGIF), an Ottawa, Ontario-based capital venture firm.

Hydron, founded in 2020, has developed what it says is a first-of-a-kind gas upgrader, the Intensified Regenerative Upgrading Platform Technology (INTRUPTor), that produces low-cost renewable fuels, such as renewable natural gas (RNG) from biogas, as well as clean hydrogen from syngas.

“The high cost of biogas upgrading is an obstacle on the renewable natural gas development path. The first generation INTRUPTor was developed for a mobile solution at Hydron’s facility in North Vancouver, B.C., Canada, to reduce the cost significantly,” Hydron President and CEO Soheil Khiavi says. “With the grant from NGIF, Hydron will be able to scale up this disruptive technology by orders of magnitude to service the conventional biogas upgrading market.”

Hydron Energy’s INTRUPTor system is a platform solution that converts biogas, landfill gas, syngas and natural gas into a pipeline quality RNG. The compact system will provide significant capital and operating cost savings over conventional gas upgrading technologies.

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The system uses two proprietary technologies: novel nano-porous sorbent in parallel passage contactor form, replacing conventional adsorbents in bead forms, and integrated rotary valves, replacing solenoid-actuated valves used in cyclic pressure swing adsorption, the NGIF says. This approach intensifies the process compared with incumbent systems, with the associated benefits of lower capital and operating costs. 

Hydron Energy is focused on providing an affordable and scalable solution to produce RNG from anaerobically digested biofuels. The grant from NGIF will provide funding for further product development and scale up for the system. Hydron Energy is scaling up core components of the INTRUPTor system by up to 10 times.

“I am confident that INTRUPTor offers a cost-effective solution to the issue of biogas upgrading. We are pleased to endorse Hydron Energy’s innovative technology, which has the potential to advance the progress of renewable natural gas,” says John Adams, president and CEO of NGIF Accelerator and managing partner of NGIF Cleantech Ventures. “NGIF Industry Grants and its focus on de-risking clean technologies through field trials and pilots are part of NGIF’s integrated model of industry validation, customer creation and market commercialization.”

The INTRUPTor operates in ambient conditions and does not require feed compressors, vacuum pumps, feed gas drying units or exhaust gas post-treatment systems to produce pipeline-quality RNG. As a result, Hydron says the system reduces capital and operating costs by up to 50 percent over conventional systems and delivers what the firm says is an industry-leading carbon intensity score. Hydron will enter the existing biogas market with multiple sizes of the INTRUPTor solution. The system will upgrade biogas for facilities as small as a 100 normal cubic meters per hour (Nm3/hr) and up to 3,800 Nm3/hr. The system will offer onsite gas upgrading to producers that previously wouldn’t have been able to upgrade to high quality gas for various reasons.