Hungarian oil and gas company MOL Group has teamed up with green H2 provider Plug Power to build one of Europe’s largest-capacity green hydrogen production facilities in Hungary.
The facility is located at MOL’s Danube Refinery in Százhalombatta, Hungary. Green hydrogen is to reduce the carbon footprint of the Danube Refinery operation. In a longer term, it is to also enable emission-free mobility.
The facility will use a ten-megawatt (MW) electrolysis unit from Plug Power. MOL’s €22 million ($23.15 million) facility will be able to produce approximately 1,600 tonnes of green hydrogen per year. Therefore, it will be removing up to 25,000 tonnes of CO2 by displacing the currently used natural gas-based production process.
This investment supports MOL’s carbon neutrality goals and will contribute to energy independence for the region.
The green H2 will be operational in 2023. Then, MOL will use the green hydrogen in its Danube Refinery during fuel production of its own H2 system. It will be incorporated into the molecules of MOL fuels, lowering the carbon outputs from the production technology and the final product.
The production of green hydrogen does not generate any GHG emissions. The Plug equipment uses electricity from a renewable source to split water into oxygen and hydrogen gas by a process called electrolysis. This process does not produce any by-products that harm the environment. By producing one tonne of hydrogen, eight-to-nine tonnes of pure oxygen is also produced by the equipment, saving nearly 10,000 tonnes of natural gas consumption in the process.
Plug’s electrolyzers are modular, scalable hydrogen generators optimized for clean hydrogen production.
Plug’s independent green hydrogen production network is targeting 70 TPD by the end of 2022 and remains on track to have 500 TPD of green hydrogen generation network in North America by 2025 and 1,000 TPD on a global basis by 2028.
MOL will make a total investment of €1 billion ($1.05 billion) into the low carbon circular economy through 2025; it OL will reduce the carbon footprint of its operations by 30 per cent by 2030 and will spend 50 per cent of investment expenditures on sustainable projects. MOL aims to implement a carbon-neutral operation by 2050.