Woodside hydrogen plans

Australian article

Woodside Petroleum has high hopes for hydrogen joint venutre

After talking up the huge potential of producing hydrogen from West Australian natural gas, Woodside Petroleum chief executive Peter Coleman is pushing ahead to explore its options with potential joint venture partners.

Woodside plans to take advantage of the Pilbara’s abundant sunshine to use clean power to separate hydrogen from natural gas or methane. The leftover carbon would either be captured and stored or used to manufacture other products.

While the energy major is still tossing up partners for any export project, it is understood executives will head to Japan later this month with an Australian government delegation to hold exploratory talks with operators and officials on transporting hydrogen in a liquid form.

Although any firm project may still be a decade from being delivered, the fuel source is receiving plenty of investment interest from the private sector while the CSIRO predicts it may be cost-competitive with natural gas and batteries by 2025.

Woodside has previously outlined a plan whereby the North West Shelf plant would convert its power plant, responsible for 70 per cent of the emissions in LNG production, to cleaner energy at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, once a deal was struck to process backfill gas there.

The Perth-based company would then look at the prospect of using cleaner power to make hydrogen.

It forms part of the next growth leg for Mr Coleman as he looks to capitalise on a solid set of investment options.

Woodside signalled yesterday it planned to press ahead with an expansion of the Pluto LNG plant after hiring Bechtel — which built all three of Queensland’s LNG facilities — as the preferred contractor for a new processing train at the site....   rest about LNG