LONDON (ICIS)–The Norwegian government has
granted funding of €5.9m for the development of
ammonia as a hydrogen carrier for the energy
market as part of Norway’s Green Platform
programme.
The grant will be made available to Wartsila,
Hoegh LNG, the Institute for Energy Technology,
the University of South-East Norway,
Sustainable Energy, and BASF.
The grant will account for about 50% of the
total budget for the project.
The funding will be allocated to enhance the
availability of large-scale storage and
transport capabilities of clean energy, and
aims to develop a system to convert ammonia
back to hydrogen that will eventually be able
to be fit onto a Hoegh LNG vessel.
This vessel will then be able to relocate
accordingly, similar to a floating storage an
regasification unit (FSRU) for LNG, and will
allow for ammonia to be turned back into
hydrogen for distibution into local
infrastructure.
LNG FSRUs have been chartered recently by
Germany following the Russian military invasion
of Ukraine, and can offer a quicker route to
access imports as opposed to building a full
LNG terminal that may take several years to
begin commercial operations.
As a result, such a technology could open up
several more access routes onto the global
renewable ammonia supply chain, which is
expected to begin to ramp up in 2025 and 2026
with several memorandums of understanding
(MoUs) having been signed for the import of
ammonia into northwest Europe from those dates
onward.
Indeed, the European Union is seeking to import
10 million tonnes/year of renewable hydroen by
2030, with the vast majority set to be in the
form of ammonia with liquefied hydrogen a more
costly option and can suffer from large
vaporisation losses.
Ammonia has been touted as one of te main
mechanisms for moving hydrogen across vast
distances, and can be produced from combining
hydrogen with nitrogen, with several countries
seeking to capitalise on renewable hydrogen
production from global regions with elevated
renewable resource.
Several countries in northwest Europe (Belgium,
the Netherlands, Germany) are developing
ammonia import terminals to take advantage of
abundant renewable resources from the Middle
East, Africa, Australia, and Canada.
