Datang Group Launches China's First Green Hydrogen Coal-to-Chemicals Pilot Project

State-possessed power mammoth China Datang Corporation has launched the nation's first airman design integrating green hydrogen product into a traditional coal-to-chemicals process.
The action, located at the group's Duolun factory in Inner Mongolia, marks a significant step in China's sweats to decarbonise its vast artificial and chemical manufacturing sectors.

The design employs a 100-megawatt (MW) wind and solar mongrel power generation system to produce electricity. This renewable energy is also used to power an electrolyser with a capacity of 13,000 standard boxy metres per hour, which produces "green" hydrogen — hydrogen made without carbon emigrations. The hydrogen is latterly fed into the being coal-to-chemicals product line.

Aiming for Industrial Decarbonisation

The core ideal of the airman is to incompletely replace the coal-deduced conflation gas (syngas) used in chemical product with clean hydrogen. By doing so, the design aims to directly reduce the carbon dioxide emigrations associated with manufacturing chemicals like methanol and olefins, which are abecedarian structure blocks for plastics and other accoutrements.

This integration model is viewed as a implicit pathway to lower the carbon intensity of China's coal-chemical assiduity, which is a major contributor to public emigrations. Success in Duolun could give a design for retrofitting other being coal-chemical complexes across the country, according to a leading media house specialising in energy sector analysis.

Strategic Importance for National Pretensions

The launch aligns directly with China's public hydrogen strategy and its binary carbon pretensions of peaking emigrations before 2030 and achieving carbon impartiality before 2060. The artificial sector, particularly heavy assiduity and chemicals, presents one of the most significant challenges for deep decarbonisation due to its reliance on fossil energies both for energy and as a feedstock.

Demonstrating the specialized and profitable feasibility of green hydrogen in such a critical and hard-to-abate sector is a strategic precedence. The state-backed nature of the design underscores the government's commitment to exploring all avenues for artificial greening, despite the current advanced costs of green hydrogen compared to hydrogen deduced from coal (slate hydrogen) or natural gas (blue hydrogen).

Challenges and Future Scale-Up

The airman will nearly cover crucial performance pointers, including the stability of the intertwined system, the factual emigration reduction rates achieved, and the overall operating costs. The high cost of green hydrogen product remains the primary hedge to wide marketable relinquishment without substantial policy support or a significant drop in renewable energy and electrolyser costs.

The data and functional experience gained from the Duolun design will be pivotal for informing unborn policy and investment decisions. If supposed successful, the model could be gauged up, potentially using the massive renewable energy bases being developed in regions like Inner Mongolia to produce green hydrogen for artificial clusters.