Haru Oni, World’s First Hydrogen Plant Provides Carbon-neutral Fuel

HIF Global’s pilot plant collaborated with Porsche and other partners. Siemens Energy designed and led the partnership.

The report further adds that the start of production of the first eFuels is a key step forward in decarbonizing the transportation sector, especially those segments that are difficult or impossible to electrify, like marine and aviation, or internal combustion engine cars that are still in use.

Anne-Laure de Chammard, Siemens Energy Managing Board Member, stated, "The Haru Oni project aims to demonstrate that e-fuels can be brought to market in large quantities and at competitive prices." She further added that it lays the foundation for bringing green energy to areas that are still heavily dependent on fossil fuels.

"This is key to achieving the climate goals of the transportation sector." "The knowledge gained from this project will also help develop climate-friendly solutions for many other applications," Chammard said, mentioning the report.

Siemens Energy has played a major role in designing the light house project as the co-developer and systems integrator.

By March 2023, the plant will be completed in less than two years in Magallanes Province in Chile’s southern Patagonia region, said the report.

Hydrogen, the basis of the fuel synthesis process, is produced in an electrolyzer from Siemens Energy. The wind turbine came from Siemens Gamesa.

According to the report, the project’s big challenge was to combine process steps for making synthetic fuels that had previously only been tested individually and coordinate them in a production chain for the first time in an efficient and trouble-free way.

The system is expected to produce 130,000 litres of e-fuel per year by 2023.

The first phase of scaling will take the project in Chile up to a projected 55 million litres per year by the middle of the decade. Around two years later, the capacity is expected to be 550 million litres per year.

As the report stated, the project is tapping Patagonia’s vast potential of renewable energy to assist the hydrogen economy and thus the energy transition in Europe and around the world.

Haru Oni is doing pioneering work and may serve as a role model for many other regions around the world.

The windy region offers as much as 6,000 full-load hours of operation for generating green electricity, around three times the amount available in Europe. Wind power is stored in liquid energy carriers using the power-to-X process.

Those liquids are easy to transport out of a region with lots of renewable energy to places that are hungry for energy, as mentioned in the report.

Haru Oni became the first hydrogen project to be funded as part of Germany’s national hydrogen strategy. Germany's Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action in 2020 also backs it.

The project is the first to apply the Clean Energy Certification solution developed by the TÜV Süd testing NGO and the German Energy Agency (DENA) in collaboration with Siemens Energy, the report concludes.

By Sumita Pawar