Uniper to establish to climate friendly hydrogen hub in Germany

LONDON (ICIS)–International energy company Uniper on Wednesday unveiled plans to establish a German national hub for hydrogen in Wilhelmshaven which will have an import terminal for green ammonia.

The “Green Wilhelmshaven” terminal will feature an “ammonia cracker” for producing green hydrogen and will also be connected to the planned hydrogen network, Uniper disclosed.

A 410 MW electrolysis plant is also proposed, which in combination with the import terminal would be capable of supplying around 295,000 tonnes/year – or 10% of the demand expected for the whole of Germany in 2030.

The “climate friendly hydrogen” will primarily be used to supply local industry, but it will also be possible to feed it into the national hydrogen network, with the NH3 splitting plant for “the first scaled plant of its kind”, the Dusseldorf-headquartered enterprise added.

While no investment sum was announced, commissioning of the new terminal is planned for the second half of this decade, depending on national import demand and export opportunities.

Uniper COO, David Bryson, commented: “It is essential that Germany and Europe remain industrial powerhouses: if we want to achieve this and still hit our ambitious climate protection targets, we need hydrogen to power sectors such as steel production, the chemicals industry or in freight, shipping and air transport.

“In other words: We need ‘green molecules’ as well as ‘green electrons’. We need to get hydrogen out of the laboratory and start using it in large-scale applications and marketable industrial solutions — we should make it into a commodity and exploit its wide variety of uses.

“One way of achieving this is to import green ammonia and convert it into hydrogen, which is something we are looking at for Wilhelmshaven.

“Currently, Germany plans to generate 14 TWh of green hydrogen in 2030, but the demand for that year is forecast to be 90–100 TWh — the discrepancy between these two figures is abundantly clear.

“We will be heavily dependent on imports if we want to use hydrogen to help us achieve our climate goals.”