French gas company Air Liquide inaugurated a $250 million liquid hydrogen facility in North Las Vegas, Nevada, which it stated will serve California and neighboring states.
The facility is designed to create around 30 metric tons (mt) per day of liquid hydrogen from landfill methane. It began operations and customer deliveries in April and pilot runs a year prior.
The production of Air Liquide’s largest liquid hydrogen plant is sufficient to maintain more than 40,000 hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs) on California’s roads.
The launch of the plant occurred one month after California Governor Gavin Newsom proposed increasing the state’s requirement for the sale of zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs), including those fueled by hydrogen fuel cells.
California is the largest market for electric vehicles in the United States, having exceeded the one million sales mark in February. According to the California Fuel Cell Partnership, the state has at least 54 retail hydrogen stations and 121 stations in various phases of development.
“By providing a reliable supply of hydrogen to California’s mobility market and the region’s industrial customers, we are making a significant investment in the transition towards a more sustainable future, one with hydrogen at its core,” Michael Graff, CEO of American Air Liquide Holdings, said in a statement following the launch.
Air Liquide, which has been developing technology throughout the hydrogen supply chain for decades, commenced development on the Las Vegas project in 2020.
The facility will use technology to produce and liquefy hydrogen in accordance with California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) that Air Liquide has developed and patented at its Delaware site, one of the company’s five research and development hubs.
These technologies include membrane technology for upgrading biogas or landfill gas to sequester methane as a fuel for hydrogen production. According to Graaf, the campus was also involved in the development of technology that allowed the University of Delaware to run its first hydrogen fuel cell bus approximately 15 years ago.
The LCFS in California is intended to promote the use and production of cleaner, low-carbon transportation fuels, such as hydrogen. It aims to cut greenhouse gas emissions and diminish the transportation sector’s reliance on petroleum.
Air Liquide already runs a hydrogen production facility on the Gulf Coast at La Porte, Texas, which produces 34.8 mt/day of the gas and is connected to Air Liquide’s hydrogen pipeline network, which includes 4.5 billion cubic feet of underground storage.
The Biden administration has designated hydrogen as the low-carbon fuel for the nation’s transportation industry, which the US Environmental Protection Agency has identified for several years as the major source of greenhouse gas emissions.
According to the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) Worldwide Hydrogen Review 2021, less than 0.01 percent of the energy consumed in the global transportation sector is hydrogen.
In its Global Electric Vehicle Outlook 2022, published on 23 May, the IEA stated that South Korea maintained the lead in 2021 in terms of hydrogen FCEV deployment, with more than 19,000 vehicles (almost double the stock at the end of 2020). According to the IEA, the United States has the second-largest stock of FCEVs, expanding from approximately 9,200 units at the end of 2020 to 12,400 units at the end of 2021.
According to Alex Klaessig, senior director of S&P Global Commodity Insights, Air Liquide is not the only producer of liquid hydrogen for a burgeoning industrial sector.
“This is part of a larger trend towards liquefaction since you’re able to deliver larger quantities cheaper in the liquid format,” Klaessig told Net-Zero Business Daily by S&P Commodity Insights.
Klaessig stated, in reference to recent announcements by Air Products and Plug Power, that “this is a hot market.”
Late in April, New York-based Plug Power and the Olin Corporation signed a joint venture to expedite the production of green liquid hydrogen to fulfill U.S. transportation needs. In 2023, the two businesses hope to put an up to 15 mt/day green hydrogen facility online in St. Gabriel, Louisiana.
Plug Power specializes in the development of hydrogen fuel cells for various mobile applications, as well as the production and distribution of hydrogen derived from renewable energy and carbon capture-equipped natural gas.
Air Products, based in Pennsylvania, began operations at a liquid hydrogen production facility in La Porte, Texas, with a capacity of 30 metric tons per day, by tapping into its 700-mile-long Gulf Coast Pipeline, which runs from the Houston Ship Channel in Texas to New Orleans. The pipeline can deliver about 1,9 billion cubic feet of hydrogen per day to clients from 25 producing sites.
These facilities include the Air Products facility in Port Arthur, Texas, which not only delivers hydrogen to the network but also captures and uses around 1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually for improved oil recovery operations since 2013.
