News Releases 2021

Jan. 22, 2021

FEED Contract for Hydrogen Production Plant in Australia

Sumitomo Corporation (Head Office: Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo; Representative Director, President and Chief Executive Officer: Masayuki Hyodo) and JGC Holdings Corporation(Head Office:Yokohama, Kanagawa; Representative Director, Chairman and CEO : Masayuki Sato)announced that Sumitomo Corporation and JGC Holdings Corporation, which operates the overseas engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) business of the JGC Group, have signed a Front End Engineering and Design (FEED) contract for the hydrogen related project planned by Sumitomo Corporation in Gladstone, Australia.

The Australian Government's National Hydrogen Strategy, formulated in 2019, sets out a vision of becoming a major global player by 2030, and the Australian Government is presently working to create a national hydrogen industry.
The City of Gladstone, which is located in the State of Queensland, is attracting attention as a suitable location for hydrogen production and consumption. This is due to its existing industrial infrastructure, with government's initiative on climate change, and having potential to decarbonise existing sectors such as industry, mobility, ports etc. It also has rich solar radiation with long daylight hours, which leads to the Green Hydrogen production site.

This project is part of broader program that aims long term to build local hydrogen production and consumption in Gladstone by producing hydrogen from electrolysis of water using electricity from Solar PV as the main power source. The initial hydrogen production plant, plans to produce 250-300 tonnes of hydrogen annually, with plans to scale up production.

In addition to producing hydrogen at the initial plant, we are in parallel creating hydrogen demand in this region.

Sumitomo Corporation expects hydrogen to be one of the important energies in the future, and promotes hydrogen related business such as Local Production and Consumption projects and Large Scale Value Chain projects, that utilises the regional requirements of energy and the characteristics of hydrogen.

In order to greatly contribute to the achievement of our long-term goals toward climate change mitigation, "Carbon neutralisation in 2050" and "Realisation of a sustainable energy cycle", we will accelerate our efforts for the materialisation of a hydrogen society by promoting hydrogen related businesses.

As one of the key issues (materiality) to be addressed as a corporate group, the JGC Group is making extensive efforts to expand the use of hydrogen energy, which is expected to be an energy source that does not emit CO2 when burned, and ammonia, which is expected to be one of the most promising hydrogen energy carriers* in hydrogen transportation, where there are issues from an economic and safety perspective.

In October 2018, in collaboration with the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), we became the first in the world to successfully synthesise ammonia from hydrogen produced by electrolysis of water using renewable energy sources and to generate electricity from gas turbines fueled by the synthesised ammonia, and we are currently collaborating with other companies to explore fuel ammonia production projects overseas.

In addition, we are proposing a hydrogen production system that will produce hydrogen from synthetic gas made from waste plastics, in order to continue to contribute to the realisation of a hydrogen society in Japan and abroad.

* Hydrogen energy carriers

A method of efficiently storing and transporting hydrogen, which is inefficient in its gaseous form for storage and long-distance transport, by converting it into a liquid or hydrogen compound.