On 18-19 March 2025, the IFRF French Committee held a training course on industrial combustion at the Air Liquide Innovation Campus in Paris, one of our Preferred Research Partners.

The 16 motivated participants attended from all over Europe including Belgium, France, Germany, Portugal, Romania, and Turkey. They represented gas transport companies (GRDF, NaTran), burner and equipment manufacturers (Ecostar, Suntec, Honeywell, LaVision), energy services (Technip), the glass industry (Isover Saint Gobain), technical centres and universities (Cetiat, Ku Leuven, CTCV, Centre IN+, Fraunhofer-Institut Umsicht, Comoti).

Participants were able to attend lectures from combustion experts and demonstrations of laboratory-scale and semi-industrial burners for the gradual transition from natural gas to hydrogen, using air or oxygen.

Louis Ricci from Fives combustion business unit presented a broad overview of all the industrial sectors where combustion is required, together with the key drivers. This was quite a challenging task considering the diversity of applications where combustion is not easily replaceable. Luc Jarry for Air Liquide foresees that more than 20% of the future energy demand could be linked to renewable hydrogen, having in mind that only a small part of hydrogen is renewable today.

A demonstration of a small laboratory burner (20 kW as shown below) was then given by Davide Honoré from CORIA Labs, using advanced measurement techniques. This showed a clear demonstration of transitioning from natural gas to hydrogen, in particular the transition when the heating value is 50/50 given by the two mixed fuels. Safety and risk management in industrial combustion systems with hydrogen was presented by Lieutenant-Colonel Laurent Lecomte from ENSOSP and Jean-François Brilhac from LGRE. They demonstrated that the specificities of hydrogen must be considered but do not present any insurmountable difficulties, and that hydrogen is no more (or less) dangerous than any other conventional fuel.

On the second day, Syntia Metchueng for Fives Stein presented the challenges of decarbonising the glass industry, where electricity and hydrogen can be major players, but the impact on the process, for example the glass colour can be challenging. Hassan Mohanna and Sébastien Caillat from Fives Stein highlighted the efforts to design burners able to operate from 0 to 100% hydrogen with natural gas while keeping a constant heating profile in steel reheating furnaces, without jeopardising the process. The Twinghy project was then presented, with expected full-scale trials of hydrogen during production in 2026.

In summary, the bottleneck now is more the availability of renewable hydrogen than technical issues. 

Finally, the participants were able to see the demonstration in a semi-industrial furnace of oxy combustion of natural gas and hydrogen by Air Liquide’s Mohand Amirat and Jean-Baptiste Sénéchal, under the supervision of Anna Publi-Melsio, who organised the event alongside the IFRF French Committee team.