Worley, ABB, and IBM have signed a memorandum of understanding to work on assisting energy firms in more efficiently and effectively building and operating green hydrogen plants.
The planned collaboration between the three parties intends to establish an integrated, digitally enabled system that enables facility owners to build green hydrogen assets more rapidly, affordably, and safely, as well as to run them more efficiently.
Green hydrogen is a form of clean energy produced by electrolysis of water using renewable energy. While several companies are interested in investing in green hydrogen, the high cost of manufacturing prevents market adoption and scale over natural gas or blue hydrogen. Additionally, manufacturing facilities demand an abundant supply of renewable energy. This collaboration seeks to assist clients in overcoming these obstacles by scaling up technologies and lowering manufacturing costs, thereby enabling the widespread usage of green hydrogen.
Worley will provide engineering, procurement, and construction expertise throughout the project’s lifecycle. ABB will provide solutions in the areas of electrical infrastructure, automation, digitalization and optimization of processes, and energy management. IBM will provide systems integration and data structure and management services. The three businesses will collaborate to deliver operations and maintenance services by combining their digital capabilities.
“This collaboration aims to help turn net-zero solutions into reality. It will build on the key learnings of our ground-breaking Ambition to Reality paper, written in collaboration with Princeton University, USA. By fast-tracking and standardizing how we engineer-design-operate, this collaboration is expected to reduce the levelized cost of green hydrogen and help our customers to decarbonize their operations further,” says Chris Gill, Senior Vice President of Low-carbon Hydrogen at Worley.
“Hydrogen is at the heart of the energy transition and is essential to decarbonizing a wide range of hard-to-abate industries. Together with Worley and IBM, we’re dedicated to enable a new concept to accelerate the adoption of low carbon hydrogen and efficiently meet the growing demand. Complementing our partners expertise with our electrification, automation and digital solutions, we will aim to enable lower production costs through smart, safe and sustainable operations,” says Bruno Roche, Vice President, Energy Transition at ABB Energy Industries.
“While many industries have been able to adopt wind and solar to help decarbonize operations, energy-intensive industries, such as petrochemical, cement and steel, require heat temperatures and combustion that cannot be achieved with these renewables. Green hydrogen can help address these distinct needs in a more scalable sustainable way. IBM’s collaboration with Worley and ABB aims to address those challenges by combining expertise and solutions from all three companies into a distinct ecosystem of industry leaders to help form a repeatable process to build, operate and manage green hydrogen facilities. We believe this kind of collaboration is critical to achieving decarbonization goals,” says Zahid ‘Z’ Habib, Vice President, Global Energy & Resources Industry Leader, IBM Consulting.
