Texas is one of the world’s biggest oil producers due to fracking. But what will happen to its giant industry when reserves run out or demand for fossil fuels declines due to emissions commitments? The answer is an ambitious project called Hydrogen City.
Welcome to Hydrogen City. This is the world’s largest project to produce, store, and transport green hydrogen as ammonia, at least on paper.
The initiative’s centerpiece is the Piedras Pintas Salt Dome, a geological formation in South Texas that, because of its impermeability, stability, and constant temperature, is ideal for storing vast amounts of hydrogen.
The Texan oil of the future. The goal of Hydrogen City is to take advantage of Texas’ abundant solar and wind energy to produce green hydrogen from water electrolysis, store it in its gaseous state in a salt cavern, and transport it on demand through a 75-mile pipeline to an ammonia plant in Corpus Christi.
The project is estimated to produce 280,000 metric tons of hydrogen annually and one million metric tons of green ammonia for export to international markets like Asia.
The entity behind the project. Hydrogen City is an initiative of Green Hydrogen International (GHI), a Houston-based company founded in 2019 by geologist Brian Maxwell.
Over the past four years, Inpex Corporation, Japan’s largest oil and gas company, and ABB, the Swedish-Swiss giant that makes industrial equipment and components for power generation, have joined the project.
When will construction begin? Construction will begin in 2026. What’s ambitious are the plans to start commercial production three years later, in 2029, with a 2.2 GW electrolyzer powered by 3.75 GW of solar and wind power.
If there’s one thing that could spur public and private interest in accelerating the project, it’s Piedras Pintas’ enormous storage capacity. The salt dome could store up to 6 TWh of energy over the long term, a true revolution for the many industries that depend on ammonia.
The big hurdle is sustainable hydrolysis. While it's possible to produce green ammonia from green hydrogen without using fossil fuels, the cost of energy cost for water electrolysis puts these types of projects into question, as wind turbines and solar panels can't always power them.
Hydrogen City will purchase electricity from the Texas Electric Reliability Corporation of Texas (ERCOT) during off-peak hours to smooth out fluctuations in solar and wind generation. This will reduce costs while lowering the need for non-renewable energy sources. Whether this will reduce the cost of producing hydrogen, and therefore ammonia, remains to be seen.
This article was written by Matías S. Zavia and originally published in Spanish on Xataka.
Imagen | Dennis Dimick (CC), rawpixel.com (C0)
View 0 comments