Industrial gases company Linde expects to announce another two 100MW green hydrogen electrolyser projects in Europe in the near future as its scales up its production portfolio in the region, according to David Burns, the company’s vice-president of clean hydrogen.

Linde is also bidding on projects totalling 250MW related to green ammonia production, he told the Energy Transition Europe 2021 conference, hosted by Reuters.

And it is looking to develop a further 100MW of capacity at its Leuna chemicals complex in eastern Germany, where a 24MW facility is already under construction, Burns says.

“All signs are green in terms of progress, and as we go from megawatt to gigawatts, we aim to be in the forefront of that,” Burns says. “It is kind of a virtuous cycle—the more megawatts you put in, the lower the cost gets, and the easier it is to add more capacity.”

Linde is working at scaling up capacity together with UK-based electrolyser maker ITM Power, in which it acquired a minority stake in 2019.

“Ammonia is maybe a stepping stone to liquid hydrogen” Burns, Linde

A planned expansion of the Refhyne electrolyser at Shell’s Rhineland Refinery near Cologne in Germany to 100MW, from an existing 10MW, is still awaiting final decisions on investment and subsidies, according to Burns.

ITM is supplying proton exchange membrane electrolysers to the project, the first phase of which came online in July this year.

Linde is also working to scale up technology to liquefy hydrogen. “We have designs for 50t/d and we are working on 400t/d, which is kind of the scale we need to really enable an export market to develop,” Burns says.

Liquid hydrogen will eventually become the main hydrogen carrier, with green ammonia confined to direct applications such as shipping fuel but not widely converted back into hydrogen via crackers because of the costs involved, Burns adds.

“Ammonia is maybe a stepping stone to liquid hydrogen that in the future is the hydrogen carrier,” he says.

ITM recently announced it has acquired a site for its second factory in Tinsley, Sheffield. The firm intends to build a factory on the site capable of producing 1.5GW/yr of electrolysers in addition to ITM’s 1GW/yr facility at nearby Bessemer Park, completed in January.

A third international facility, expected to have a capacity of 2.5GW/yr, will bring the firm’s total electrolyser manufacturing capacity to 5GW/yr by the end of 2024.

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Author: Stuart Penson