Compressor builder helps develop Honeywell green-hydrogen platform

Even if it couldn’t turn steel into peanut brittle, hydrogen would still be very tricky—especially when pushed into spaces that are smaller than it would prefer. However, because it will likely be a cornerstone of sustainable energy production in the future, it’s vital to establish and maintain good relations with this often prickly molecule.

To help users produce, store, distribute and consume hydrogen in ever-greater quantities via ever-more-extensive infrastructures, Honeywell demonstrated its Protonium software platform for green hydrogen production at Honeywell User Group 2025 this week in San Antonio.

“We’re covering the entire green hydrogen value chain, which includes design and optimization in a plant’s early stages,” said Swapnil Adkar, offering management director at Honeywell Process Solutions, who leads its global OEM market development program. “Protonium takes operating constraints, economic data, equipment inputs and other information, and performs permutation calculations for those early-stage designs, which can minimize subsequent levelized cost of hydrogen (LCOH) production expenses.”

Adkar reported that Protonium consists of three main functional areas:

Concept Design Optimizer (CDO) software;
Unified Control and Optimizer (UCO) that brings in operating-layer data to perform tasks such as carbon intensity monitoring and plant-model digital twins, advanced power profiles and demand management, and EPU health monitoring; and
Hydrogen Electrolyzer Control System (HECS) that uses performance data from operating and optimization stations.

“Protonium can even look ahead 24 hours, which is especially helpful for maintaining consistent operations, which extends the lives of electrolyzers that produce hydrogen,” explained Adkar. “UCO also uses machine learning (ML) and digital twins to gauge carbon intensity, helps users find the right combination of equipment and functions for their individual process requirements, and integrates input in a look-ahead fashion. The key is managing power intermittency, which is one of the important challenges we’re solving with intelligence coming from renewable energy sources such as solar and wind. Our software can decide what activity to do at what point to make sure we select the energy mix that results in the lowest costs based on current market forecasts.”

More specifically, UCO’s capabilities include:

Effective power intermittency management, which ensures plant safety and reliability, demand fulfillment and capacity utilization, and production rate control.
Scheduling, controlling and optimizing production with plantwide integration, look-ahead scheduling to minimize shutdowns, and optimization for lower LCOH and electrolyzer health.
Intelligence that enables complex decisions to be made quickly, such as those involving energy mixes, curtailment functions, carbon-intensity management, inventory management and electrolyzer life optimization.
Dynamic production planning, such as adjusting to ambient weather forecasts, demand profile changes, and carbon intensity.

To perform these tasks, UCO’s primary functional modules include:

Control and energy management (CEM) for optimizing green hydrogen-related assets, built-in power allocation philosophy, capacity utilization and demand fulfillment, plant data aggregation, advanced optimization integration, and operator interface for energy management.
Advanced optimization (AO) for hydrogen production control and economic optimization, embedded digital twins containing physics-informed machine learning models, demand fulfillment and production rate control, operations scheduling, plant power forecasting, it management, operations dashboard and analytics, and emissions monitoring.
HECS’ HMI toolkit for electrolyzer monitoring.

Impressed with compression

To gain some real-world input on Protonium’s development, Honeywell recently recruited compressor and turbomachinery manufacturer Ebara Elliot Energy. Some of the design challenges they’re tackling include:

Limited available experience in designing green hydrogen plants by developing an optimal design for location/power profiles;
Integrating available energy mix to further optimize plant design;
Addressing the use of manual tasks and Excel tools, which cause longer design and proposal times, and limit design visualizations; and
Validating business cases for green hydrogen facilities.

“The biggest hurdle for green hydrogen production is the fluctuations of its renewable energy sources,” said Zach Mayer, market development lead for sustainable fuels and chemicals at Honeywell. “There's also lots of continuing uncertainty about regulatory changes, so it's more important than ever to understand the needs of green hydrogen applications and the decisions surrounding them. There are a lot of products out there, but users need devices and software designed especially for green hydrogen production, and hydrogen to ethanol or methanol, so they can minimize the capital expenditure (CapEx) onthese projects.

“That's why we're developing Protonium’s CDO,” Mayer continued. “Users want to know if they should add battery capacity, plan on hydrogen storage, or determine what combination of wind and/or solar they'll need. They can put these questions into CDO, and it will perform what-if scenarios, and spit out recommendations and an optimized design base that reduces both LCOH and CapEx.”

Ernesto Guevara, senior business development and sustainability manager at Ebara Elliot Energy, reported that compression can be up to 20% of LCOH, so contractors and end users are realizing they have to redesign plants to accommodate green-hydrogen operations and equipment, which means they’re also learning to discuss these projects earlier to give them the best chances to succeed.

“They’re asking how many production lines they’ll need and which storage method is most appropriate based on the individual tasks and priorities,” said Guevara. “Hydrogen is such a light molecular weight gas that it needs extremely high speeds and more power for compression, and multiple compressors to achieve high-pressure ratios. Of course, there are safety issues because hydrogen is flammable between 4% and 75% in air, which requires a careful sealing system. Material considerations include embrittlement of materials that come in contact with hydrogen, as well as coating loss and dis-bonding.”

Guevara added that other green hydrogen challenges include the fact that it needs consistent electricity for production, compression and transport. This quickly comes into conflicts with the intermittent nature of renewable energy sources like solar and wind, which means storage becomes a crucial issue as well.

“This is why we’re participating in Protonium’s development,” said Guervara.