Liquid & pipeline transport, and multi-coloured production

Recently, liquid hydrogen has seemed to be regarded as very much the poor relation compared to other ways to move hydrogen around (such as within ammonia molecules).

Australia’s Woodside though, has just signed a “conditional offtake term sheet with Singapore-based asset manager Keppel… for supplying liquid hydrogen to power Keppel’s data centres in Singapore”. Hydrogen would be produced from Woodside’s proposed Australian facilities, such as its ‘H2Perth’ project.

With the usual alarm bells ringing around the term ‘conditional’ in that sentence, the next targeted step is said to be a move to a “binding offtake agreement for liquid hydrogen supply, starting as early as 2030”.

One reason why earlier transport of liquid hydrogen from anywhere to anywhere will be difficult is the current absence of ships purpose-built to do so, at any large scale.

That hasn’t put off China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) from completing what it claims is “the world’s longest liquid hydrogen shipping”.

This was a demonstration project with liquid hydrogen being moved “more than 10,000 nautical miles” to Shenzhen Yantian Port; after starting in September from Rotterdam, in the Netherlands. The journey went “via the Atlantic Ocean to the Cape of Good Hope and then to the Strait of Malacca”, thus “completing the first long-distance trans-oceanic transportation of liquid hydrogen in a tonnage class or above”.

This was a project in co-operation with Air Liquide, and the lack of specific liquid hydrogen carrier ships was circumvented by putting the product into “cold-preserving tank containers” which were in turn loaded onto a standard “ocean-going freighter”.

Over in Japan, Tree Energy Solutions (TES) has received a boost to its plans to put hydrogen into a different molecule, one much easier to move about within existing infrastructure: methane (natural gas, NG).