FFI partners with Enel on green hydrogen development

Fortescue Future Industries (FFI), a Green energy developer, and Enel’s global renewables arm Enel Green Power (EGP) will partner to explore co-development of the green hydrogen value chain with an initial focus on Latin America and Australia.

The companies, also through this collaboration, aim to make green hydrogen cost-competitive with fossil fuel-based alternatives during this decade.

The partnership will support FFI and EGP in their goals to not only diversify future energy supply and increase energy security, but also to help the world in its fight to lower emissions and fight climate change, Hutchinson said. The collaboration intends to establish a framework for FFI and EGP to identify and assess possible green hydrogen/ammonia projects.

The partnership marks an important milestone for the two partners as they look to bring even more large-scale production sites of green hydrogen and green ammonia to Latin America, as well as to Australia.

Clean hydrogen is a burgeoning sector, with game-changing potential for the climate, but it’s an industry that itself is ripe for disruption. That is the view of Utility Global, a Houston-based technology firm that believes it has developed a solution that could both upend how clean hydrogen is produced and expand options for consuming it at a reasonable cost.

Utility’s eXERO technology offers a novel approach to producing hydrogen utilizing waste gases and heat from industrial streams to power an electrolytic reaction that separates oxygen from water molecules. The process behind the technology, which requires no external electrical input, hinges on a proprietary ceramic membrane that enables hydrogen to be split off from the steam feedstock. The process can be powered by a “flexible” array of gases — methane, renewable natural gas or untreated industrial off-gases — which flow through the system and are processed into an “enriched” stream of CO2 that can be captured and sequestered at a lower cost compared to conventional methods. (Other elements and compounds in a waste-gas stream, such as nitrogen and oxygen, pass through the system and are released into the atmosphere.)