Sembcorp Industries investsRs 36,000 cr TN’s green hydrogen project

The green hydrogen unit of Singapore’s Sembcorp Industries Ltd has started signing initial contracts for a Rs 36,238 crore investment to build a green hydrogen unit in Thoothukudi district in Tamil Nadu.

The company has awarded an engineering design study (first phase of the front-end engineering design) contract to Italy-based Maire’s engineering and construction solutions arm Tecnimont, together with its sustainable technology solutions arm Nextchem. According to a statement, the contract is for a ‘green ammonia plant to be located in India’ by Sembcorp Green Hydrogen India.

A memorandum of understanding for the unit was signed between the Tamil Nadu government and Sembcorp earlier this year, based on which around 1,511 jobs will be created in the Thoothukudi area. Following this, Sembcorp teamed up with Japanese players like Sojitz Corp and Kyushu Electric Power to export India-made green hydrogen to Japan.

The study will leverage Nextchem’s digital tool ArcHy (Architecture of Hydrogen systems) to overcome the challenge of the intermittency of renewable power usage, resulting in capex and opex efficiency of the plant lifecycle, said a statement by Maire.

In particular, the ArcHy digital tool will use renewable energy production profiles, collected over a one-year period in different weather scenarios, to determine the size of the plant’s components like the electrolyzers, storage systems, and green ammonia production facilities with the aim of minimising the levelised cost of ammonia.

The ministry should mandate that these companies issue an expression of interest (EOI) for the registration of FOM producers and the off-take from both centralised and decentralised biogas/bio-CNG plants, as per the Fertilizer Control Order (FCO) for solid and liquid FOM, he said.

These companies should be linked at the root level to facilitate the application process for corresponding FOM producers within a specific geographical area, he noted.

Given that FOM has 2 per cent NPK content and 70 per cent moisture content, the current production of 1 million metric tonnes of FOM can supply 6,000 tonnes of NPK (Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium) supplements.