The methane pyrolysis start-up Graphitic Energy has commissioned a pilot plant in San Antonio, Texas, that can convert natural gas into 1 metric ton (t) of solid carbon and several hundred kilograms of low-carbon hydrogen per day. Graphitic is paying for the trial with $15 million it recently raised as an extension of its series A funding round.
The pilot is taking place at the Southwest Research Institute, a nonprofit with an emphasis on energy and chemicals, and will run through the end of 2025. The move puts Graphitic in the company of BASF and Huntsman, which are piloting methane pyrolysis in Germany and Texas, respectively. Monolith Materials has a head start with a plant in Nebraska that produces about 38 t of solid carbon per day in the form of the tire ingredient carbon black.
Graphitic’s carbon is in the form of graphite. CEO Zach Jones says the technology solves two problems at once by eliminating the CO2 emissions associated with conventional hydrogen production while also providing a US source of graphite—a raw material for electric vehicle batteries and other industrial and energy applications.
Graphitic’s version of methane pyrolysis, which generates what is known as turquoise hydrogen, uses an undisclosed solid catalyst to oxidize some of the hydrogen to provide heat for the reaction. The pilot is part of the company’s pivot away from a liquid catalyst since its founding in 2021. The change also prompted a name change from C-Zero.
“At the pilot scale, we can gather essential scale-up data for our circulating fluidized bed reactor,” says Patrick Hanks, Graphitic’s chief technical officer. “This includes key metrics such as particle entrainment rates for cyclone and standpipe design, as well as void fraction and effective mass transfer coefficients for reactor sizing.”
The facility is big for a pilot plant, which Hanks says is intentional. “The pilot plant enables us to produce large volumes of carbon for our offtake partners to conduct testing and market-seeding activities,” he says. And that’s essential, because, unlike in the company’s early days, the carbon is now a critical part of the business plan. Being able to sell both crystalline graphite and hydrogen can make projects profitable without government subsidies, Graphitic says.
The liquid catalyst system yielded carbon that was too impure and amorphous to have any significant economic value, says Cansu Doganay, an analyst who covers hydrogen and electrochemistry at the market research firm Lux Research. The new approach is an improvement that may allow Graphitic to scale up more easily, she says. At the same time, she adds, “blue” hydrogen made by pairing conventional methane reforming with carbon capture is still cheaper and easier to scale.
Lux senior director Anthony Schiavo adds that any methane pyrolysis technology has to contend with a scale mismatch between its two products: every metric ton of hydrogen comes with about 3 t of carbon.
“These two markets don't fit together very well. The market for graphite is in the tens of millions of tons, but demand for hydrogen is about 100 million t,” Schiavo says. “So very quickly, if you want to serve the demand for hydrogen, you end up with a lot of carbon. If you want to serve the demand for carbon, you don't end up with that much hydrogen.”