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MOSCOW (MRC) -- Essar Oil (Mumbai,
India) and clean energy specialist Progressive Energy (Stonehouse, UK) say they
have agreed to partner on the development of two low-carbon hydrogen production
plants at Essar’s Stanlow refinery in Cheshire, UK, that will supply
Progressive’s planned HyNet low-carbon regional distribution network, accoring
to Chemweek.
The companies have signed
a memorandum of understanding to jointly invest GBP750 million (USD1.02 billion)
to build two hydrogen production hubs, they say. The first hub will initially
produce 3 terawatt-hours (TWh) of low-carbon hydrogen each year from 2025,
converting natural gas and fuel gases from the refinery. This will be followed
by a facility twice as large, enabling a total capacity of over 9 TWh of
hydrogen/year. Carbon dioxide (CO2) from the process will be captured and
injected using existing pipelines into subsurface geological reservoirs offshore
in Liverpool Bay on the UK’s west coast.
The Stanlow refinery produces
16% of UK road transport fuels and processes 10 million metric tonnes/year of
crude oil and other feedstocks.
The new plants will provide Essar with
low-carbon hydrogen to decarbonize its own energy demand, in addition to
creating a regional hydrogen economy, Essar says. The hydrogen supplied into
Progressive’s HyNet North West system will be used for both industrial and
domestic purposes, it says.
The plants will utilize Johnson Matthey’s Low
Carbon Hydrogen (LCH) technology, with engineering in partnership SNC-Lavalin
well advanced, Essar says. An initial GBP7.5 million in funding for early
engineering work on the hydrogen project was provided by the UK government in
February last year.
The hydrogen development will set the Stanlow
refinery “on a journey to be the UK’s first net-zero emission refinery,” says
Stein Ivar Bye, CEO of Essar’s UK energy business. The project has the potential
to remove over 2 million metric tonnes/year of CO2 emissions current being
produced, he says.
Essar acquired Stanlow refinery from Shell in
2011.
As MRC reported earlier, in late September
2019, Essar resumed operations at its cracker in Stanlow,
UK with the capacity of 45,000 mt/year of ethylene and 165,000 mt/year of
propylene. It was shut on 11 September, 2019, due to the power outage at the
site.
Ethylene and propylene are feedstocks for producing polyethylene
(PE) and polypropylene (PP).
According to MRC's DataScope report,
PE imports to Russia decreased in January-November 2020 by 17% year on year and
reached 569,900 tonnes. High density polyethylene (HDPE) accounted for the
greatest reduction in imports. At the same time, PP imports into Russia
increased by 21% year on year to about 202,000 tonnes in the first eleven months
of 2020. Propylene homopolymer (homopolymer PP) accounted for the main increase
in imports. |
