Page 9 - GLNG Week 14

GLNG AUSTRALASIA GLNG
Woodside steps up pursuit of hydrogen export goals
PROJECTS & COMPANIES
AUSTRALIAN oil and gas developer Woodside Petroleum has unveiled the next step in its ongo- ing development of a hydrogen export strategy.
The company said on April 6 that it had teamed up with Japan’s JERA, Marubeni and IHI to study large-scale hydrogen-as-ammonia exports for use by the East Asian country’s coal- fired power generators.
Hydrogen can be used in much the same way as gas, with Woodside saying that exports to Japanese power producers could help to reduce their carbon footprint. The Australian company said Japan’s government-backed New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organ- ization (NEDO) had given the consortium the green light to conduct a feasibility study covering the entire hydrogen-as-ammonia value chain. The study will look into the construction and operation of world-class ammonia facilities as well as optimising supply chain costs.
Woodside said it intended to investigate moving from blue to green hydrogen for export. Blue hydrogen is produced from gas using steam methane reforming, while green hydrogen is produced from renewable energy using electrol- ysis. In both production processes hydrogen is combined with nitrogen to form ammonia to enable it to be shipped as a liquid. Ammonia
does not produce any on-site carbon emissions when consumed in a power plant.
Woodside’s executive vice president of exploration, Shaun Gregory, told the Austral- ian Financial Review in October 2019 that blue hydrogen production costs were about a third of those of green hydrogen and that the cost gap needed to shrink.
JERA, a 50:50 joint venture between Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) and Chubu Electric Power, is the world’s single largest LNG importer and controls nearly half of Japan’s domestic ther- mal power generation capacity.
Woodside envisages large-scale hydrogen production taking off at a global level by 2030 and has argued that Australia needs to invest heavily now in order to be a sector leader. Greg- ory said last year that his company wanted to be at the forefront of a hydrogen export industry that might come to rival the liquified natural gas (LNG) scene.
Woodside signed a non-binding agreement with state-run Korea Gas (KOGAS) on the joint study of the technical and commercial feasi- bility of a green hydrogen pilot project. The agreement built upon a memorandum of under- standing (MoU) signed by the two companies in mid-2018.™
EUROPE
Total agrees to charter LNG-fuelled VLCCs
PIPELINES & TRANSPORT
FRANCE’S Total has signed an agreement to charter its first two LNG-powered super-tank- ers, known as very large crude carriers (VLCCs). The dual-fuel newbuild vessels have a capacity to carry around 300,000 tonnes (2.2mn barrels) of crude each, Total said in an April 7 statement. They will be chartered from Malaysian ship- owner AET, and are due to be delivered in 2022.
The French company noted that the vessels have been designed with LNG propulsion in order to reduce their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and with the “latest technologies” to lower their consumption further. The move follows the implementation of International Maritime Organisation (IMO) 2020 rules at the start of this year, limiting the sulphur content of marine fuel to 0.5%. The new rules have boosted interest in the use of LNG as a bunkering fuel as ship owners consider their options for limiting sulphur.
Total hopes to reduce the carbon footprint of its operations through the use of LNG for
bunkering. While there has been some debate about the impact of using LNG, the French company says it results in a reduction of 99% in sulphur dioxide emissions, 99% in fine particles emissions, up to 85% in nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions and about 20% in GHG emissions.
Total Marine Fuels Global Solutions, the busi- ness unit in charge of Total’s global bunkering activities, will supply LNG for the two VLCCs.
AET, MISC Group’s petroleum shipping subsidiary, currently operates two LNG dual- fuel Aframax vessels and two LNG dual-fuel dynamic positioning shuttle tankers within its global fleet. The deal with Total allows the com- pany to expand its fleet to include LNG dual-fuel VLCCs for the first time.
“As a group, we took early and bold deci- sions to invest in LNG dual-fuel vessels and I am pleased to see the industry responding so posi- tively to our strategy,” AET’s chairman, Yee Yang Chien, who is also the president and group CEO of MISC, commented.™
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