Ineos Grangemouth plans to build a 150,000t/yr blue hydrogen plant to decarbonise its operations. The firm has committed £500mn ($685mn) to developing the plans, which would see the construction of a steam methane reformer with emissions captured and fed into the Acorn carbon capture and storage (CCS) project.

Ineos Grangemouth will also spend £500mn fitting out its facilities so they can run on hydrogen, estimating that at least 70-80pc of operations can be adapted.

Grangemouth is home to Scotland’s only crude oil refinery, a number of petrochemical production plants and the Forties pipeline system, which delivers 40pc of the UK’s North Sea oil and gas production.

2mn t/yr – Site emissions after blue hydrogen plant is operational

The firm has already invested £500mn in a combined heat and power plant that will help reduce the emissions associated with the site. Ineos has a goal to reduce emissions by 10pc by 2025 compared with a 2019 baseline, and a further goal to have net-zero emissions by 2045.

“When Ineos bought the site in 2005 it was emitting around 5mn t/yr CO₂.We have already reduced that to 3mn t/yr today,” says Andrew Gardner, chairman of Ineos.“Our next step, to use hydrogen combined with carbon capture via the Acorn project, will reduce this to below 2mn t/yr.”

Ineos plans to capture and store at least 1mn t/yr CO₂ by 2030 through the project.

Under current UK government plans four zero-carbon clusters will receive funding to carry out CCS.

“Acorn will definitely be one of them,” said Gardner. “If Acorn is in phase one we can then get in and negotiate with government on how the financing is going to work,” he tells Hydrogen Economist.

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Author: Tom Young