Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners (CIP), a Danish renewable energy business, said that it will lead a project in Spain to build a massive hydrogen plant, as part of the Spanish government’s aspirations to leverage EU money to become a major producer of the gas.

Vestas, a Danish wind turbine manufacturer, Naturgy, a Spanish energy firm, Enagas, and Fertiberia, a fertilizer manufacturer, will all be involved in the project in Aragon, northeastern Spain, which is anticipated to start late next year.

The plant’s financial specifics have not been revealed, but it will have a capacity of 40,000 tonnes of hydrogen per year or around 30% of Spain’s current hydrogen consumption.

In a statement, Soren Toftgard, a partner at CIP, stated, “Spain and, specifically, Aragon, provide extremely ideal circumstances to develop this technology given the outstanding wind and solar potential and the closeness to centers of demand.”

While European authorities and businesses have embraced hydrogen as a means of achieving the European Union’s objective of net zero emissions by 2050, detractors argue that it prolongs the use of fossil fuels when the goal should be to eliminate them totally and that it needs a lot of energy to generate.

Green hydrogen, which may also be created using fossil fuel as the energy source to electrolyze water, has the best environmental credentials of the several shades of clean-burning fuel.

In Aragon, the project’s partners will build wind and solar facility with an installed capacity of between 2 and 5 GigaWatts to power a 2GW electrolyzer.

According to CIP, the hydrogen produced will be sent south by pipeline to Valencia, where it will be utilized as a raw ingredient in the production of fertilizers.