Hydrogen

Globeleq planning 3.6 GW green hydrogen project in Egypt

Eng. Yehia Zaki, Chairman, General Authority for Suez Canal Economic Zone. Picture: SZone.

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Globeleq has announced today the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding with Egypt’s New and Renewable Energy Authority (NREA), the General Authority for Suez Canal Economic Zone (SCZONE), the Sovereign Fund of Egypt for Investment and Development (TSFE), and the Egyptian Electricity Transmission Company (EETC), to jointly develop a large-scale green hydrogen facility within the Suez Canal Economic Zone.

The project will be developed in three phases totalling 3.6 GW of eletrolysers and 9 GW of solar PV and wind power generation. Globeleq will act as lead developer and investor and start with an initial pilot phase relying on a 100 MW electrolyser and focusing on green ammonia fertilizers.

Egypt’s vast solar and wind resources have already attracted global investors into some of the world’s largest green energy projects there, including the Benban Solar Park.

Earlier this year, Scatec had also signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the General Authority for Suez Canal Economic Zone (SCZONE), The Sovereign Fund of Egypt (TSFE), the Egyptian Electricity Transmission Company (EETC), and the New and Renewable Energy Authority (NREA), to jointly develop a green ammonia facility with a production capacity of one million tonnes per year, with a potential for an expansion to three million tonnes annually.

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Senegal is planning to use its natural gas for ammonia and urea production

Senegal’s Petrosen Trading & Services, a subsidiary of the country’s national oil company, has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Turkey’s Çalık Enerji and Japan’s Mitsubishi for the pre-feasibility study of an ammonia and urea manufacturing unit. The agreement was signed in the presence of Senegalese President Macky Sall during the 8th Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD8) held in Tunis on August 27th and 28th. The production of fertilizers is one of the option Senegal is exploring to monetise its offshore gas reserves, currently being developed by bp and Kosmos Energy for the export market. The Greater Tortue/Ahmeyim (GTA) project that straddles the Senegal-Mauritania border will start exporting LNG next year, but has an allocation of 35 MMscf/d reserved for the domestic market. Such allocation is expected to increase once the second phase of GTA is sanctioned, leaving Senegal with plenty of gas to process domestically. While the country’s strategy relies on switching several of its thermal power plants from diesel and HFO to natural gas, additional industries could also benefit from the processing and transformation of gas reserves. The pre-feasibility study for a gas-based ammonia and urea plant will be financed by the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry (METI) of Japan and conducted by Mitsubishi Corporation and Nippon Koei.

Rwanda has broken ground on new CNG project from Lake Kivu

On August 18th, Rwanda’s Prime Minister Dr. Edouard Ngirente officiated the groundbreaking ceremony of GasMeth Energy’s new compressed natural gas (CNG) project on the shores of Lake Kivu. The project will be extracting gas from Lake Kivu before processing it and distributing it across Rwanda as CNG, an alternative to imported diesel and HFO. GasMeth Energy holds a 25-year concession with the Government of Rwanda to extract 40 MMscf/d of natural gas from Lake Kivu. The gas will be extracted offshore before being sent to an onshore gas processing and compression facility. This is the third project to be developed in Rwanda to extract gas from the Lake, which serves as a natural boundary with the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). In 2016, ContourGlobal commissioned its 26 MW KivuWatt project, a floating gas-to-power barge turning Lake Kivu’s deadly methane into power for Rwandan households and industries. Since 2019, Shema Power Lake Kivu, owned by Highland Group Holdings, has also been constructing a 56 MW methane gas extraction and gas-to-power plant under a public-private partnership (PPP) there. The project is structured as an independent power producer (IPP) and is currently being completed.