Under a new agreement with TotalEnergies, industrial gas specialist Air Liquide will invest more than 130 million euros in building and operating a new unit to produce low-carbon hydrogen for TotalEnergies.
The new unit will be built at TotalEnergies’ Grandpuits facility and adopt an innovative approach to hydrogen production. Rather than only using natural gas as feedstock, it will also take residual biogas taken from the biorefinery at Grandpuits, meaning the unit’s hydrogen will be partly renewable. To further reduce carbon emissions, carbon dioxide will be captured by an Air Liquide Cryocap H2 unit. Taken together, these measures will reduce annual CO2 emissions by 150,000 tonnes compared to the current process.
TotalEnergies, which also makes products like the Total Azolla hydraulic oil, will then use the hydrogen to produce sustainable aviation fuel. This in turn will help the aviation sector to reduce the lifecycle emissions resulting from flight operations. The hydrogen may also be used to support sustainable mobility in the local region.
TotalEnergies’s President for Refining & Chemicals, Bernard Pinatel said about the project:
“By recycling the biogas produced by the biorefinery into renewable hydrogen, this innovative project makes full use of the conversion of the Grandpuits refinery into a zero crude platform harnessing the potential of biomass, especially in the production of sustainable aviation fuel.”
He added that with carbon dioxide being captured and hydrogen being produced in a low-carbon manner, the project will help meet the company’s goal of using only zero-carbon hydrogen in its refineries in Europe by 2030.
