Building a New Business Development Tool

Shell is targeting net-zero energy business, a goal to be reached by 2050 helping limit global temperature rise to 1.5 °C. Blue hydrogen can play a key role as a transition energy vector and base chemical until the decarbonization of industry is fully complete.
This project has built a New Business Development (NBD) tool, which can be used as a shortcut instrument for preliminary techno-economic assessment specifically for Shell blue hydrogen projects. The tool has been aimed at process engineers from the Shell blue hydrogen team to generate comprehensive mass and energy balance for several different blue hydrogen process line-ups via simple process flow simulations, which do not go deeper in detail than a process flow diagram (PFD). The tool is built up from interchangeable blocks, each representing a series of functional units. A selection of different blocks is made to form any of the available process lineups. First principles and several correlations are utilized to generate the mass and energy balance for each block. Each block is represented in the interface of the tool. The target value for each variable is the one obtained by the UniSim simulation software.