Sungrow Hydrogen will supply around 96MW of alkaline electrolysers to a major Chinese e-methanol project in Inner Mongolia.
The electrolyser-making subsidiary of Sungrow said it would deliver 16 alkaline electrolyser units to state-owned China Coal Ordos Energy Chemical’s 100,000-tonne Liquid Sunshine demonstration project.
The $680m project, which is already under construction, plans to combine green hydrogen and CO2 captured from a coal-powered chemical plant’s operations to produce e-methanol.
Sungrow will also supply integrated gas-liquid separation and purification systems for the plant.
Once complete, developers expect to have installed 625MW of wind and solar capacity and reduce a total of 500,000 tonnes of CO2 per year. It is expected to be put into operation in October next year.
E-methanol production is becoming a key focus of Chinese electrolyser deployments. According to H2 Intelligence, of the 15 large-scale low-carbon hydrogen plants set for commissioning in 2025, three are focused on e-methanol production.
Harnessing China’s by-product hydrogen
The China Hydrogen Alliance (CHA) forecasts that demand for the molecule will reach 35 million tonnes per year (MTA) and comprise 5% of the country’s total energy by 2035.
These figures are set to rise to 60 MTA and 10% by 2050, the year in which global hydrogen demand might reach 100 MTA. The maxim of commodity traders that ‘China consumes half of everything’ appears to be true in the case of the country’s burgeoning hydrogen energy and fuel cell industry, as well. Where will China find such large amounts of hydrogen?
China has an extensive history in industrial gas processing for the chemicals industry. The country is ‘rich in coal, poor in oil, and with a little natural gas’. Coal gasification is a major source of energy and raw materials for China, especially in the remote north. Aside from coal gasification and coke oven gas (COG), China also produces ethylene from ethane cracking and propylene from propane dehydrogenation (PDH), both chemical feedstocks for plastics and other downstream products. China also produces about half of the world’s caustic soda in chlor-alkali plants. All these processes produce hydrogen as a by-product and are therefore of interest to the emerging fuel cell industry as a potential source of cheap fuel…
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