Worley explained that while many industries want to invest in green hydrogen, high production costs pose a barrier to driving market adoption and achieving scale over natural gas or blue hydrogen. Facilities also require an accessible and abundant supply of renewable energy. Green hydrogen is made via electrolysis, which is powered by renewable energy.

The company said the collaboration aims to address these challenges by scaling up technologies and reducing production costs to enable green hydrogen to become more widely used.

Under the terms of the partnership, Worley will provide engineering, procurement, and construction expertise across all stages of a project. ABB will provide offerings for electrical infrastructure, automation, operations digitalization and optimization, and energy management, while IBM will supply systems integration services, as well as data framework and management solutions.

“This collaboration aims to help turn net-zero solutions into reality,” said Chris Gill, Worley’s senior vice president of low-carbon hydrogen. “By fast-tracking and standardizing how we engineer-design-operate, this collaboration is expected to reduce the levelized cost of green hydrogen and help our customers to decarbonize their operations further.”

Zahid Habib, vice president, global energy & resources industry leader at IBM Consulting, added that while many industries have been able to adopt wind and solar to help decarbonize operations, energy-intensive industries such as petrochemicals require heat temperatures and combustion that cannot be achieved with these renewables. “Green hydrogen can help address these distinct needs in a more scalable sustainable way,” he said.

Worley is working on more than 80 hydrogen projects around the world. These include a green hydrogen facility for Shell at Tweede Maasvlakte in the Port of Rotterdam, the Netherlands. The facility, which Shell said will be one of the largest commercial green hydrogen plants in the world, is scheduled to start operating by 2023, producing between 50,000 and 60,000 kg/day.

Another large-scale green hydrogen and green ammonia project is being handled by Worley for the H2U Group in South Australia. Worley won the front-end engineering and design contract for the greenfield demonstrator stage of the Eyre Peninsula Gateway project, which will have total capacity of up to 10,000 t/y green hydrogen and 40,000 t/y green ammonia. At full scale, the project will produce more than 200,000 t/y green hydrogen and 800,000 t/y green ammonia.

Author: Elaine Burridge, Freelance Journalist