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It shouldn’t come as any great surprise that Middle Eastern oil and gas companies are keen on advancing the ‘blue’ flavour of hydrogen – separated from natural gas but with carbon capture and storage (CCS) added to abate the co-produced carbon dioxide emissions.

QatarEnergy, for example, has “broken ground on a 1.2 million tonne per year blue hydrogen-based ammonia project”.

The country is already “the largest grey hydrogen consumer in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)” and has “been looking to leverage its domestic fertiliser industry to develop blue ammonia”.

As well as the ammonia produced, the project will have a CO2 storage capacity of “1.5 million tonnes per year”. It expects “to start production in Q2 2026”.

Next door in Saudi Arabia, Topsoe and Aramco have “signed a Joint Development Agreement (JDA) to advance low-carbon hydrogen”.

The partnership will use Topsoe’s ‘eREACT’ technology, which generates the heat for steam methane reforming using renewable electricity, rather than the usual approach of burning some of the methane to do so. That means no pesky combustion flue gases to need to apply carbon capture to, which makes the latter easier and cheaper. Topsoe also reckons that their approach uses “4-5 times less electricity than a comparable electrolysis operation”.

This technology is to be introduced at Shaybah Natural Gas Liquids (NGL) recovery plant. It will be pretty small scale to start with: a “3MW unit is expected to produce six tonnes of low-carbon hydrogen daily”.

At the same time, Aramco will have its own clever stuff to demonstrate via the project: its “innovative palladium-alloy membrane technology” for carbon capture.

Cemex is taking a turquoise rather than blue approach to the hydrogen production to use in one of its UK cement kilns: it is “set to trial a process developed by Hiiroc that uses plasma to produce hydrogen”.

Hiiroc’s process “sees hydrocarbons pass through 50 kW plasma torches where an electric field splits them into hydrogen and carbon”. The carbon is then “quenched into solid carbon black and passes to a third chamber for separation”.

Using fewer electrons is a major draw here too: Cemex reckons on “80% less electricity” compared to electrolysis. Plus, the carbon capture bit is easier too: the process produces a nice solid product rather than trying to grab molecules of CO2 from a gas stream.