The world's largest green hydrogen project is

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Questions are being raised about how green the Sinopec project will really be, as only 300 MW of solar power has been built to power it.

Chinese state-owned oil giant Sinopec has announced that the world's largest green hydrogen project , the 260 MW Kuqa plant in Xinjiang, northwest China, will begin commercial operations on June 30.

This project will surpass the current world leader, a 150 MW project in northern China owned by Ningxia Baofeng Energy. However, Kuqa's reign as the largest green hydrogen system in operation will not last long.

Sinopec is already building another project that is about a third larger in Ordos, Inner Mongolia, China, although it is not known when it will be completed. Additionally, the company has also announced a ¥20 billion ($2.8 billion) green hydrogen project in Inner Mongolia, which will pump 100,000 tons of H 2 per year through a new 400 km gas pipeline to Beijing.


Green hydrogen produced in Kuqa City will be sent by pipeline to a nearby oil refinery operated by subsidiary Sinopec Tahe Refining and Chemical Company, where it will replace gray hydrogen produced from unmitigated natural gas. H 2 is used in oil refineries to remove sulfur from crude oil and produce petrochemicals.

A storage tank capable of storing 210,000 m 3 of hydrogen will be used in Kuqa to ensure a constant flow of H 2 along the pipeline, which can transport 28,000 m 3 /h, while the project's 13 electrolyzers have been supplied by three local manufacturers: Longi, Peric and Cockerill Jingli Hydrogen, which is now 100% owned by John Cockerill of Belgium.

But questions are being raised about how green the hydrogen produced at Kuqa will actually be.

The original proposal for the project, submitted in 2021, stated that it would be powered by a 1 GW solar plant, and last June the plant was said to have been scaled back to 361 MW, according to research firm BloombergNEF.

In a private report, BNEF stated that a 361 MW plant would only provide 58% of the electricity needed to meet the electrolysers' 1,060 GWh annual power requirements, with the remainder having to be sourced from the local grid, which relies on coal. .

BNEF said at the time that Sinopec planned to negotiate with the local grid operator to obtain the remaining 42%, but that the commitments so far had been " vaguely described by Sinopec as coming from nearby wind farms or other clean energy sources " . If energy from fossil fuels is used to produce hydrogen in Kuqa, it cannot be considered “green” or “renewable”.

A general rule of thumb is that green hydrogen projects require approximately 2 MW of renewable energy for every 1 MW of electrolyzers to account for the variability of wind and solar production.

Sinopec plans to produce more than two million tons of green hydrogen a year by 2025, its executives have said, with gigawatt projects in the works.

Ordos project Sinopec has not revealed the capacity of the Buy Email Database Ordos project's electrolyzers, only stating that it will produce around 30,000 tons of hydrogen per year.

The Kuqa project will produce approximately 20,000 tonnes a year, suggesting that Ordos will have a capacity of around 390 MW, although according to Chinese media, the latter project will apparently be powered by 450 MW of wind power and 270 MW of power. solar.



However, as the wind tends to blow stronger at night than during the day, these hybrid projects are expected to generate more electricity in a 24-hour period than those that rely solely on solar power, which could mean that would require a smaller capacity of electrolyzers.

The Ordos project will include 288,000 m 3 of hydrogen storage, as well as a gas pipeline to deliver the H 2 to its main customer, the Zhongtian Hechuang Ordos coal processing plant, which currently uses the most polluting form of hydrogen (produced from of unmitigated coal) to produce synthetic chemicals.