MOSCOW (MRC) -- Oil and gas company Royal Dutch Shell and Dutch gas company Gasunie plan to build a massive green hydrogen plant in the northern Netherlands in the next decade, the companies said, to cut emissions, reported Reuters.
Fuelled by a large new wind farm off the coast of Groningen province, the plant would ultimately be able to produce 800,000 tonnes of hydrogen by 2040, the companies said, cutting the Netherlands’ CO2 emissions by about 7 megaton per year.
The companies expect to start a feasibility study this year, while they seek other industrial and energy partners to join.
"In order to realise this project, we will need several new partners," said Shell Netherlands director Marjan van Loon.
"Together we will have to pioneer and innovate to bring together all the available knowledge and skills."
The plant would use a water electrolysis unit to convert sustainable electricity into hydrogen, which can then be stored for reconversion into power or for direct industrial use.
Its capacity would be roughly equal to the hydrogen produced by natural gas now used by industrial factories in the Netherlands, helping the Dutch to reach their target of reducing CO2 emissions to 49% of their 1990 level by 2030.
The small but densely populated Netherlands still has the fifth highest level of CO2 emissions per capita in the European Union, while deriving just 7% of its energy from renewable sources.
Shell and Gasunie’s plans, however, are still in an early stage and depend, among other things, on government permits, the assignment of new wind farm locations in the North Sea and the availability of Dutch and European subsidies for green energy.
The project envisages a wind farm that would grow from a capacity of 3 gigawatt (GW) to 4 GW in 2030 to possibly 10 GW by 2040, sufficient to meet the current electricity consumption of about 12.5 million Dutch households.
The first wind turbines could be ready in 2027, Shell and Gasunie said, and would be used to start the production of green hydrogen in a large plant in the town of Eemshaven and possibly also in facilities at sea.
The hydrogen would then be carried by Gasunie’s existing pipelines to industrial customers in the Netherlands and northwest Europe.
As MRC wrote previously, in late February 2020, Royal Dutch Shell Plc shut the large crude distillation unit (CDU) at its 211,270 barrel-per-day (bpd) Convent, Louisiana, refinery for an overhaul. Shell shut the 130,000 bpd VPS-1 CDU for an overhaul expected to take 30 days to complete.
Besides, a catalytic reformer was shut last Sunday night at Royal Dutch Shell Plc’s 211,270-barrel-per-day (bpd) refinery in Convent, Louisiana, after a brief fire.
Ethylene and propylene are feedstocks for producing polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP).
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Russia's estimated PE consumption totalled 2,093,260 tonnes in 2019, up by 6% year on year. Shipments of all PE grades increased. PE shipments rose from both domestic producers and foreign suppliers. The estimated PP consumption in the Russian market was 1,260,400 tonnes in January-December 2019, up by 4% year on year. Supply of almost all grades of propylene polymers increased, except for statistical copolymers of propylene (PP random copolymers).
Royal Dutch Shell plc is an Anglo-Dutch multinational oil and gas company headquartered in The Hague, Netherlands and with its registered office in London, United Kingdom. It is the biggest company in the world in terms of revenue and one of the six oil and gas "supermajors". Shell is vertically integrated and is active in every area of the oil and gas industry, including exploration and production, refining, distribution and marketing, petrochemicals, power generation and trading.
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