Repsol Investing to Boost Renewable Hydrogen
Strategic Research Institute
Published on :
21 Oct, 2021, 6:30 am
Repsol has presented its renewable hydrogen strategy, a roadmap for the company to become market leader in the Iberian Peninsula and become the third largest producer in Europe. The company's new Hydrogen Director, Tomás Malango, gave an overview of the projects and initiatives that the company will deploy throughout the renewable hydrogen value chain, with an investment of EUR 2.549 billion until 2030. Repsol plans to use different technologies to reach a capacity of 552 MW equivalents in 2025 and 1.9 GW in 2030.
Renewable hydrogen is one of the key pillars in Repsol’s decarbonization strategy. It is currently the leading producer and consumer of hydrogen in Spain, having for decades used this gas as a raw material in its industrial processes, to manufacture a multitude of essential products for mobility, construction, healthcare, and agriculture, among others.
Repsol is undergoing a transformation process, moving forward in the evolution of its industrial complexes into multi-energy hubs capable of manufacturing products with a low, zero, or even a negative carbon footprint thanks to the use of sustainable raw materials, such as different types of waste, as well as the application of more efficient and decarbonized processes. To achieve this, Repsol will employ all available technologies and develop those that allow for an accelerated energy transition at the lowest possible cost.
Repsol has already announced that it will install electrolyzer plants at its industrial complexes. On September 20, Repsol announced that it will install the first electrolyzer at its Petronor refinery in Bilbao. With a capacity of 2.5 MW, the plant will enter into operation in the second half of 2022, and it will supply both the refinery and facilities at the Left Bank Technology Park, located in the nearby municipality of Abanto y Zierbena.
The company has also announced the installation of other electrolyzer plants in the vicinity of its industrial sites. Among the projects already announced are the 100 MW electrolyzers to be located at the Cartagena, Tarragona, and Petronor refineries. The company will also build a 10 MW electrolyzer, together with Enagas and the regional Basque Energy Agency (EVE), to produce renewable hydrogen for the synthetic fuels plant to be installed in the port of Bilbao.
Additionally, the company is adapting its conventional hydrogen production infrastructures to obtain renewable hydrogen from biogas, using different circular economy technologies, among others. In this way, it will be able to produce hydrogen from organic waste from different sources, such as urban solid waste, biomass, or by-products from the agricultural and livestock industries. Repsol has recently carried out the first tests in this regard at its Cartagena refinery, where it has manufactured low carbon footprint fuels using renewable hydrogen.
Repsol has also been working on photoelectrocatalysis technology for more than a decade. The main advantage of this technology over current solutions is that only water and sunlight are needed as raw materials to produce 100% renewable hydrogen. In 2018, Repsol incorporated Enagas into the project with the aim of accelerating the development and the scaling up of the technology. Together, the companies are running a pilot plant that is already generating renewable hydrogen at the Repsol Technology Lab research center in the outskirts of Madrid. The novel design allows the water molecule to be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen in a single step using only solar radiation, without the need to connect the devices to an electrical power source. This significantly reduces the costs of the process since it is not conditioned by the price of electricity, thus, increasing the competitiveness of the technology.