Green Hydrogen Dominoes Stacking Up
There are several dominoes that have to stack up to make green hydrogen work. One is cheap energy and the other is cheap electrolysers. Australia has abundant sunshine to provide the energy. Now, Fortescue Future Industries (FFI) is working on the next piece of the puzzle, electrolysers, making hydrogen using an electrolyser designed and built by the FFI team. They succeeded in this 10 days ago, producing industrial-grade hydrogen for the first time in their Western Australia facility.
“FFI has developed a number of new electrolyser technologies that will form part of their electrolyser patent family. The outcomes of these projects will inform FFI’s electrolyser technology selection going forward, as FFI works towards its target to produce 15 million tonnes of green hydrogen per year by 2030. FFI Chief Executive Officer Julie Shuttleworth said, ‘This is another outstanding achievement from our FFI in-house scientists and engineers — who are continuing to break new ground. The FFI team has designed and operated our own electrolyser system which will be the key to developing FFI’s green hydrogen production into the future.'”
“This electrolyser was internally designed, built and commissioned by a small, dedicated team of experts — an impressive achievement that is representative of the hard work that is happening across the whole of FFI,” FFI Chairman Dr Andrew Forrest AO said. “The team spent thousands of hours on this project, facing setbacks along the way, but they pushed forward and managed to produce hydrogen before their stretch target date — something they should be incredibly proud of.”
The electrolyser will be producing green hydrogen by the end of 2022 powered by solar panels installed on the roof of FFI’s Dawson Road facility near the Perth Airport, Western Australia. “The stack that produced the hydrogen is a pressurised alkaline system. The internally designed supporting hydrogen gas management system is fully operational and will be used to test all of FFI’s prototypes and designs.”
When you add this achievement to Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest’s global deals to extend the use of green hydrogen and his plan to build a gigawatt-scale electrolyser factory in Queensland, you can see the plan taking shape. CSIRO’s recent report projects significant falls in the costs of electrolysers over the next decade. We are seeing this unfold before our eyes. Will it only be a matter of time before green hydrogen moves from an expensive side project to the main stream of energy storage?
Source: Fortescue Future Industries
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