Hi 'svcsharegeneral', thanks for the question. Hydrogen is...

Hi 'svcsharegeneral', thanks for the question. Hydrogen is exploding. It has bipartisan support and, yes, we're engaged.

We announced on 31 July (link) our participation in Australia’s leading hydrogen industry development program, the Future Energy Exports Cooperative Research Centre (FEnEx CRC).

There are four research programs:

1. Efficient LNG Value Chains
2. Hydrogen Export and Value Chains
3. Digital Technologies and Interoperability
4. Market and Sector Development

We'll be participating under program 2, Hydrogen Export and Value Chains, which will focus on addressing the following research challenges:

1. Processing and delivery methods for cost-effective large-scale hydrogen export
2. Target export markets, including key applications and requirements
3. Supply chain architecture, design and operations
4. Export-class systems and technologies for hydrogen production, storage and delivery

There are two ways we'll seek to support the thermochemical hydrogen production route, specifically for lignite resources:

• COHgen, which stands for ‘Catalytic Organic Hydrogen generation’, is a novel, low temperature, low emissions hydrogen production technology under development that may provide a lower-cost alternative route to produce hydrogen from brown coal
• Coldry, the gateway enabler for lignite-to-hydrogen production, providing the frontend drying solution to COHgen and supporting project developers electing to use conventional hydrogen production technologies (gasification & steam reforming), coupled with CCS

The FEnEx program will assist ECT to validate the scale-up of COHgen in collaboration with industry leaders (energy producers) and end-users (energy consumers) and to identify the range of performance indicators and benchmarks for the production of hydrogen from brown coal.

The successful completion of the current Coldry upgrade project, in addition to meeting our cashflow positive objectives, would act as a small scale commercial demonstration, ticking the technology validation box, which will be essential for the large players in the emerging hydrogen industry (i.e. Japanese-led consortia with respect to Victoria) when considering the adoption of Coldry. Moreover, the char application of our Coldry upgrade project provides a partial analog for existing coal to hydrogen production processes, which will likely employ a combination of gasification, steam-methane reforming, separation and carbon capture and storage.