The Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) has awarded A$15 million to Hadean Energy for a A$30 million project to build and operate a pilot hydrogen plant in Victoria, the agency announced on 5 November. The hydrogen will go to a nearby industrial facility and be used in steel manufacturing, as a real test of whether the technology can support lower-emission steelmaking.
The pilot is expected to produce up to 7 kg of hydrogen per hour and to cover around 85% of the hydrogen needed for an annealing process in a steel plant. Hadean estimates that its technology could make hydrogen with around 30% less electricity than conventional electrolysers. The technology was developed by the national science agency CSIRO over eight years, with earlier ARENA support.
The agency's chief executive said the cost of production is still the main barrier for green hydrogen in industries that are hard to electrify, and that the pilot should provide the evidence needed to judge its commercial potential. If it works, the same technology could later be used for low-emission synthetic fuels.
Where the heat goes in a hydrogen plant
Electrolysers are often talked about in terms of electricity, but on site a good part of the engineering is about heat: taking it out of the stacks and the gas streams, or, in high-temperature designs, bringing it in from a neighbouring process. Either way the plant ends up with several liquid circuits that have to be kept apart, each with its own water quality, and the cooling or heating loops are usually separated from the plant water by plate heat exchangers.
For a pilot running next to a working steel plant, the questions an operator will ask early are practical ones: which circuits share water with the existing site, which ones need demineralised water, and what can be opened and cleaned without stopping the annealing line.
Sources: Process Online, ESD News
