Air Products rockets to green hydrogen

The company is spending big on production but also on technology to convert hydrogen to ammonia for cost-effective global shipping, writes Jack Kaskey

Hydrogen is already big business at Air Products, and the Pennsylvania-based company is betting $9.4bn that the market is about to become much bigger as the energy transition drives demand for low-carbon hydrogen.

"The role that hydrogen can play in the future of the energy transition is going to dwarf the current hydrogen market in the long term," vice-president of investor relations, corporate relations and sustainability Simon Moore says.

Air Products started making hydrogen in the 1960s to supply the US space programme with rocket fuel, but it was air pollution limits on refined oil products over the past two decades that drove rapid growth in the company's hydrogen business. As oil refiners across the US and EU added hydrotreaters to remove sulphur dioxide from fuel products, Air Products' hydrogen production ballooned to 9,000 t/day, the world's highest.

Now, another environmental threat is poised to launch a new growth phase for hydrogen, and Air Products is determined to lead the way, with investments in Saudi Arabia, Alberta and Louisiana that the company says will make it the world's biggest producer of green and blue hydrogen. While hundreds of low-carbon hydrogen projects have been announced, Moore points out that Air Products' investments are firm commitments, fully approved by its board.

"We are off and running, full speed ahead, to go make these projects, to make sure that when the world wants this low-carbon-footprint hydrogen, we're going to have it for the world in 2025 and 2026," Moore says.

That has boosted confidence among business leaders and governments in places such as Germany — where carbon-free green hydrogen shipped from Air Products' 650 t/d project in Saudi Arabia will be an available tool to help reduce carbon emissions, Moore says. The company is investing one-third of the project's $5bn cost and spending an additional $2bn for infrastructure to convert green hydrogen to ammonia for cost-effective shipping to destinations around the world where it will be turned back to hydrogen near the point of sale.

The Saudi project, in Neom, includes 4GW of wind and solar to power alkaline electrolysers produced by German industrial firm Thyssenkrupp, which plans to boost its 1 GW/yr of electrolyser production to 5 GW/yr by 2025.

"We can't afford to tie our $7bn investment to somebody who really isn't going to be able to scale up and make what we need," Moore says. "That's one of the biggest reasons why we got lined up with Thyssenkrupp. And of course, we recognise that the order they have from us helps them support their expansion plans."

Ditching SMR

For its $4.5bn Louisiana project and $1.2bn Alberta project, Air Products is ditching the steam methane reformers (SMRs) that it typically uses to make hydrogen from natural gas, because only about half the carbon from an SMR can be captured for sequestration, Moore says. Instead, the company will deploy partial oxidation technologies to capture and sequester 95pc of carbon emissions, with the use of hydrogen-fuelled electricity creating "net zero" hydrogen in Alberta.

Both plants will feed into existing Air Products hydrogen pipelines that supply oil refiners and petrochemical producers, many of whom have made public commitments to cut their carbon use. Hydrogen from the plants will also be converted to ammonia for efficient shipping to customers not located along the pipelines.

Air Products plans to produce more than 1,800 t/d of blue hydrogen at the Louisiana plant, nearly triple the planned output of green hydrogen in Saudi Arabia, but the costs of the plants are similar. "Whether that ratio would hold in other situations, I think would depend on the local situation," Moore says.