Air Products plans $4.5 billion investment in blue hydrogen facility

From pv magazine USA

Air Products said it plans to build a $4.5 billion blue hydrogen at a complex in Louisiana.

The company will build, own, and operate the project, which is planned to produce over 750 million standard cubic feet per day of blue hydrogen in Ascension Parish, Louisiana, south of Baton Rouge.

Blue hydrogen is produced using hydrocarbons as a feedstock, with the carbon dioxide (CO2) in the production process captured for permanent sequestration. The project is expected to create 170 permanent jobs and represents Air Products’ largest-ever investment in the U.S. The project is expected to be operational in 2026.

Part of the blue hydrogen will be compressed and supplied to customers by Air Products’ U.S. Gulf Coast hydrogen pipeline network. The pipeline stretches more than 700 miles from Galveston Bay in Texas to New Orleans. Today, this pipeline network can supply customers with more than 1.6 billion cubic feet of hydrogen per day from approximately 25 production facilities, including blue hydrogen from Air Products’ Port Arthur, Texas facility. The Port Arthur facility has captured approximately one million tons of CO2 annually since 2013, with the CO2 transported via pipeline and used for enhanced oil recovery operations.

The balance of the blue hydrogen from the new Ascension Parish facility will be used to make blue ammonia for export and converted back to blue hydrogen for transportation and other markets.

Around 95% of the CO2 generated at the facility will be captured, compressed, and transported by pipeline to multiple inland sequestration sites located along a pipeline corridor extending up to 35 miles to the east of the new production facility. Over five million metric tons per year (MTPY) of CO2 will be sequestered in geologic pore space secured from the State of Louisiana approximately one mile beneath the surface. Air Products said it has already received approval from the State Mineral and Energy Board, which is part of the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources, for the permanent sequestration of the CO2.

The news follows Air Products’ announcement in June of a multi-billion-dollar net-zero hydrogen energy complex in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

In April, Koch Engineered Solutions said that two of its companies, Optimized Process Designs and Koch Project Solutions, would partner with Fidelis Infrastructure to develop the Grön Fuels renewable energy complex in Louisiana.

The $9.2 billion multi-year program would produce green hydrogen, renewable diesel, sustainable aviation fuels, and bio-plastic feedstocks. The project also would include biogenic carbon capture and sequestration.

The Koch-backed project is expected to produce the equivalent of 1,000 MW of green hydrogen produced by electrolysis, with a pathway to net negative CO2 carbon footprint through the use of biogenic carbon capture and sequestration.

An investment decision is expected to be made later in 2021.