H2-Industries has unveiled plans to build a USD 1.4bn waste-to-hydrogen plant in Oman, which would annually convert up to one million tonnes of municipal solid waste — the stuff collected from homes and businesses — into 67,000 tonnes of hydrogen.
The trash will be sourced from waste management operators and “mined from existing landfills”, the company says, in what would appear to be a world-first for H2 production — although no sourcing agreements have yet been signed with the country’s sole waste management provider, Be’ah.
The plant would be supported by a 300MW solar installation backed up by 70MW of energy storage to enable baseload operation.
While H2-Industries says that “the primary function of the plant is to produce green energy without environmentally harmful emissions”, the facility would, however, produce one million tonnes of CO2 per year.
The company says that carbon dioxide can be captured and combined with hydrogen to make e-fuels such as synthetic diesel or aviation fuel, but the facility would produce more CO2 than required for such purposes.
According to Shell, e-fuel requires a hydrogen-to-CO2 ratio of about 1:7 (by weight), but the plant would produce roughly 15 times more carbon dioxide than H2.
H2-Industries has not disclosed its waste-to-hydrogen technology, describing it as both a “thermo-chemical process… [that] is achieved without the use of external electricity or burning waste” and as an “integrated thermolysis plant” — thermolysis meaning chemical decomposition by heating.