INEOS extends €2bn investment plan to UK

Jake Stones

20-Oct-2021

LONDON (ICIS)–British chemicals company INOVYN, a subsidiary of INEOS, announced its plans to invest in green hydrogen production at its Runcorn site near Manchester on Wednesday. The investment follows INEOS’ wider €2bn spending plan released earlier in the week.

INEOS announced on 18 October that it intends to establish green hydrogen production projects in Norway, Belgium and Germany as part of its €2bn commitment. Wednesday’s announcement marks the first of the chemicals company’s spending in the UK as part of this wider investment plan in European hydrogen.

Hydrogen production at Runcorn amounts to 7,000 tonnes/year, roughly 233GWh of hydrogen at lower heating value.

The aim of the investment at the Runcorn site is to support on-site facilities for the purification and compression of existing low-carbon electrolytic hydrogen for distribution to fuelling stations across the UK.

The announcement also stated that the ramp-up in hydrogen production could be used to support power generation.

The current 7,000 tonnes of hydrogen is enough to fuel 2,000 trucks per day.

INOVYN also said that aims to increase hydrogen production in the UK to further support the decarbonisation of transport.

HYDROGEN STORAGE

INOVYN is also leading a hydrogen storage project in the Mersey area, aimed at supporting the HyNet cluster, a 3.7GW blue hydrogen production project recently selected for track 1 funding of the UK government’s cluster sequencing programme.

The hydrogen storage facilities consist of 19 newly-built salt caverns that can store a total of 1.3TWh of hydrogen.

The storage site’s potential capacity is higher than Storengy’s Stublach site and SSE Thermal’s Aldbrough site combined.

WIDER INVESTMENT

On 18 October INEOS announced plans to spend €2bn across Europe to ramp up its green hydrogen production.

The investment announced initially earmarked German, Belgium and Norway for projects, but also stated that spending would be extended to the UK and France.

Two key electrolysis projects were included in the plan on Monday. Firstly, a 20MW electrolysis unit powered by zero-carbon electricity in Norway, and a 100MW electrolyser at the INEOS Koln site in Germany.

The hydrogen produced by the 100MW Koln project may also be used in the transportation sector.

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