Australia headquartered green hydrogen shipping solutions company Global Energy Ventures (GEV) has proposed to generate up to 100,000 tons of green hydrogen annually, with the help of 2.8 GW of solar energy on Tiwi Islands in the country's Northern Territory.
The idea is to establish a pipe-to-pipe hydrogen supply chain to ship green hydrogen produced to the emerging hydrogen markets across the Asia Pacific, including Singapore, Indonesia, South Korea and Japan.
Green hydrogen produced is planned to be transported with the company's own 430 ton compressed hydrogen pilot scale ships. It would later expand into 2,000 ton ships. Management said it the Tiwi Hydrogen Project will run in parallel to the company's ship engineering and class approval program.
"Our compressed shipping solution is highly modular and can therefore scale to match the advancement of electrolyzer technologies and market demand for pure green hydrogen gas, and deliver a competitive cost of hydrogen as the project scales," said GEV's Managing Director and CEO Martin Carolan.
It expects to achieve financial close for initial phase of the project in 2023, as GEV targets its 1st hydrogen export to commence in 2026.
To begin with, the project is planned to have an initial 500 MW solar energy capacity under the development phase, eventually growing to 2.8 GW following regional hydrogen market growth and benefitting from cost reduction and efficiency improvements in solar PV, electrolyzers and shipping. The solar PV project is proposed to be installed on 1,800-hectare commercial plantation land.
GEV has zeroed in on this location as it is close to existing port infrastructure and industrial precinct at Port Melville.
"The strategic rationale for GEV to develop a landmark upstream renewable energy and green hydrogen production project is to demonstrate the simplicity and efficiency of using compression for a pipe-to-pipe green hydrogen supply chain and to provide greater certainty in the commercialization of our shipping solution," explained Carolan.
The company will start with a feasibility study, to also establish bankable solar generation data for the proposed location.
Details of how the plan is designed to work are available on GEV's website.
Northern Territory where the Tiwi Green Hydrogen Project is to be stationed, is also planned to be home to another massive solar project with between 17 GW to 20 GW capacity, generating enough clean energy to supply to Singapore via subsea cables (see More Partners For Sun Cable's AAPowerLink).