Austria’s first off-site production plant for “green” hydrogen will be built by Energie Steiermark in Gabersdorf in southern Styria.
With an investment of around 10 million euros, a new type of production plant will be realized on a 10,000 square meter site. A large-scale photovoltaic plant with a collector area of 6,000 square meters is being built and combined with the resources of an existing biogas plant.
“This is another step in our comprehensive sustainability strategy. Construction will start in spring 2022, and completion is planned for the end of the year,” said the management duo Christian Purrer and Martin Graf. Around 300 tons of green hydrogen are to be produced annually. This will enable a hydrogen car to cover more than 40 million kilometers. The project can save up to 5,200 tons of CO2 annually.
There is great interest in green hydrogen. A first supply contract has now been signed with Wolfram Bergbau & Hütten AG (Sandvik Group). The industrial company based in St. Martin has secured a volume of 840,000 cubic meters of hydrogen (around 70 tons) per year to make its production even more sustainable from October 2022.
“The contract with Energie Steiermark enables us to enter the “green hydrogen” market and strengthen our sustainability strategy. The proximity of our own site in St. Martin im Sulmtal to the hydrogen production plant is a further contribution to the regional supply of our state-of-the-art metallurgical plants,” said Andreas Bock and Alex Nieuwpoort.
“With this new production plant and the accompanying research project, we are sending a clear signal throughout Europe in terms of the energy turnaround,” say Purrer and Graf, “at the same time we can further expand our green partnership with industry in cooperation with the Climate and Energy Fund.”
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