Germany’s Uniper has teamed up with General Electric to decarbonize its gas-fired power plants and natural gas storage facilities.
GE’s Gas Power business and Uniper will explore, assess, and develop technology options for decarbonization, Uniper said. The company added this is GE’s first fleet-wide decarbonization program signed with a major power producer.
This agreement, signed in June 2020, aims at producing a detailed decarbonization roadmap by a joint working group composed of both GE and Uniper representatives by early 2021.
This roadmap is to develop an assessment of potential upgrades and R&D programs needed to drive decarbonization. This also includes increasing the use of hydrogen in GE gas turbines and compressors in Uniper’s power plants and gas storage facilities across Europe.
Through this agreement, Uniper has taken another step towards the decarbonization of its natural gas assets.
At the beginning of the year, Uniper set itself the strategic goal of climate-neutrality in its European generation business by 2035. Uniper already produces around 24 terawatt-hours of CO2-free electricity with its hydroelectric and nuclear power plants in Germany and Sweden.
Andreas Schierenbeck , CEO of Uniper, “From now on, our investments will focus primarily on the further decarbonization of the gas assets which could include post-combustion carbon capture, utilization and sequestration (CCUS) as well as blue or green hydrogen.”
He added that hydrogen will – as far as it is possible and sensible – replace the fossil components of the gas plants.
“If we also succeed in using our gas storage facilities to a large extent for hydrogen, we will be closer to a solution to the core problem of the European energy transformation: the lack of storage capacity for fluctuating renewable energies on an industrial scale,” Schierenbeck said.