Energy technology company Mitsubishi Power is set to announce two more green ammonia power projects in northern Europe as efforts to decarbonise the region’s gas-fired generation capacity gather pace.

The new projects come after the Japanese-owned company signed a memorandum of understanding with UK energy firm Centrica in November 2023 to explore the development of Europe's first ammonia-fired power plant at the site of a combined-cycle gas turbine (CCGT) in Cork, Ireland.

Mitsubishi expects to announce the second and third projects within the next few months, Javier Cavada, the president and CEO for EMEA at Mitsubishi Power, told Hydrogen Economist in an interview.

“We are already developing those projects within Europe, in places where ammonia is already part of the economy, where there is a trading mechanism for ammonia and it is used in chemicals production,” he said.

Conversion of a CCGT to run on 100% ammonia does not involve an extensive retrofit, with modifications largely confined to the burning and the exhaust systems, Cavada added.

The commercial case for ammonia firing has to be proven on a project-by-project basis.

“We are not talking about a new technology that is way more expensive that needs to be proven or scaled. The differential factor is the cost of the ammonia,” he said.

Conversion to ammonia only really works commercially in place where there is already an “ammonia ecosystem” with the necessary infrastructure in place. Building a new ammonia value chain to serve a project would be too expensive, Cavada explained.

Ammonia trades globally in an established commodity market, giving it an advantage over hydrogen, global trade in which is at an early stage of development, he added.

Better than CCS

Decarbonisation of gas-fired generators by converting to green ammonia or by blending hydrogen into the fuel mix is a better long-term solution than the deployment of CCS, the technology for which Mitsubishi also supplies, Cavada said.

“We are not talking about a new technology that is way more expensive that needs to be proven or scaled” Cavada, Mitsubishi

“CCS is a solution for very hard-to-abate industries. Your carbon-capture plant is a new plant next to your existing emitter,” he said. “Transforming a gas-fired power plant is just a conversion of fuel, so it has a much lower impact in terms of capex.”

Placing captured CO₂ into storage and not using it as a feedstock elsewhere is not a long-term solution, according to Cavada. “You can do that for the coming ten years, but you also need to create a value for that CO₂—if you are only storing it in landfill that is a silly application.” He added: “In the long run, keeping the same emissions and adding carbon capture does not look like the smartest way to have green electricity.”

Blending

Mitsubishi is the world’s largest supplier of gas-fired power generation technology, but it is also investing heavily in the deployment of hydrogen and its derivatives in the power sector. In Japan, it is testing blending up to 100% hydrogen in gas-fired power plants of 700MW, 100MW and 40MW. Hydrogen use is commercially proven only in the smaller of these plants so far, partly because of constraints on global supplies of low-carbon hydrogen.

Increased blending in gas-fired power generation will be critical in decarbonising the sector, Cavada said. Blending up to 30% in a large CCGT of 700–800MW in the UK can cut emissions equivalent to removing 50,000 diesel cars. Raise that to 100% hydrogen and the emissions reduction is equivalent to removing 500,000 cars. “[The impact of] blending is not linear—you get this exponential growth in the amount of emissions you are removing,” he said.

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Author: Stuart Penson