According to Paul Browning, president and CEO of Mitsubishi Power Americas, Mitsubishi is keenly focused on decarbonizing power generation.
To reach that goal, the company is undertaking a project in Delta, Utah, where the last coal-fired power plant that supplies power to the state of California will be retired in 2025.
“Our customer has decided to repower that power plant with an 840-megawatt combined-cycle power plant. Just to put that in context, 840 megawatts is enough power to meet the peak electricity demands of the city of Los Angeles,” Browning said during CERAWeek.
The utility-scale project will be powered with two gas turbines in a combined-cycle mode that are capable of using 30-percent hydrogen when it enters commercial operation in 2025.
“The other 70 percent will be natural gas,” Browning said, adding that Mitsubishi has also made a commitment to use 100-percent green hydrogen in the future.
Regarding where that hydrogen is going to come from, Browning pointed to another project “that happens to be right next to door to the Delta, Utah, power plant” — a large salt dome.
“We are going to be putting a huge cavern in that salt dome that’s about the size of the Empire State Building,” Browning said. “We’re going to be able to produce green hydrogen on-site using electrolysis from renewable power and electrolyzed water converted into hydrogen and oxygen. We’re going to capture the hydrogen and store it underground in this huge salt dome.”
Calling the project a “groundbreaking project not just for North America but really for the world,” Browning noted the salt dome will be the largest energy storage project in the world “by quite a lot,” and has a commercial operation date of 2025.
Hydrogen-based investment
Seifi Ghasemi, chairman, president and CEO of Air Products and Chemicals Inc., said he attributes the contemporary push for companies to proactively respond to the climate crisis to the activism of youth who are more likely to accept energy cost increases than previous generations.
“There is a fundamental drive by the younger generation who expect to live another 80 years,” Ghasemi said. “They are saying, ‘I want to do something about the climate.’ They don’t want to deal with hurricanes and problems like we saw [earlier this year[ in Texas.”
In that respect, Ghasemi compared the energy market to the supermarket.
“When I go to the supermarket, I am willing to pick up a cup of yogurt which says, ‘organic yogurt.’ I know full well that I am going to pay a higher price for it, but I’m doing it because it’s organic, and it is good for me and good for the environment,” he observed. “We think that people are going to push and be willing to pay a higher price for green products, and we believe that hydrogen is obviously the energy of the future.”
Air Products and Chemicals Inc. is investing approximately $10 billion dollars into hydrogen-based energy “because we believe the consumers are going to use the product if it is made available at a commercial scale,” Ghasemi said.
“That is why we are not doing these ‘toy’ projects, because 10 tons here or 20 tons there are nothing, because they don’t move the needle,” he explained. “That is why we are undertaking a massive project in NEOM, a technology hub city in Saudi Arabia, to prove to the world that you can make this stock, you can make it economically, and it is available.”
Ghasemi is confident that consumers are willing to pay a higher price for that level of environmental engagement.
“We are not competing with gasoline when we are talking about green hydrogen for a car,” he concluded. “We are talking about something new and something novel.”
