NZ to collaborate with Singapore on hydrogen export potential

Friday, 16 July 2021

The Government has signed a memorandum of co-operation with Singapore to collaborate on hydrogen as the Government positions itself to be a “home” of export hydrogen in the Asia Pacific.

It follows a similar agreements to develop expertise with Japan and South Korea, and plans for a private sector hydrogen pilot plant near Taupo.

Energy Minister Megan Woods said the agreement marked the start of collaboration on the production, deployment and research into a new hydrogen economy in the two countries.

“Hydrogen is a key future fuel option that will help us meet our climate goals by enabling us to decarbonise transport and industry applications in particular that will be hard to electrify,” she said.

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“New Zealand has an abundance of renewable energy that could be used to produce hydrogen, potentially for export, so this cooperation between us and Singapore, one of our most trusted, reliable, and long-standing partners in Asia, is significant.”

In Taranaki, moves are afoot to create the country’s first hydrogen fuel network for heavy transport.

Woods signed the agreement with Dr Tan See Leng, Singapore’s Second Minister for Trade and Industry.

Efforts to ramp up the development of a hydrogen industry in New Zealand have gaining rapid momentum over the last three years.

In 2019, New Zealand and South Korea signed a letter of intent to investigate the feasibility and core technology required to develop a liquid hydrogen supply chain for green hydrogen.

Contact and Meridian are investigating whether the energy currently used by Tiwai could be redirected to make hydrogen.

If all went well, the energy would be made with renewable electricity in New Zealand and exported to Korea.

At the signing were Contact Energy, The Tindall Foundation's K One W One, and Refining New Zealand, while the Korean consortium included six commercial Korean companies.

A year earlier, New Zealand and Japan signed a similar memorandum of co-operation. Since then, work has begun on a green hydrogen plant using geothermal power near Taupo by iwi-owned Tauropaki Trust and Japan’s Obayashi Corporation.

And in December last year, Contact Energy and Meridian announced a $2 million feasibility study to investigate the potential of a large scale, renewable hydrogen production facility in the lower South Island.

Dr Linda Wright, chief executive of the New Zealand Hydrogen Association, said at the time that the potential closure of Tiwai Point aluminium smelter opened up a huge chance to reassess New Zealand’s energy needs.

“It’s been nearly 50 years since New Zealand has had the opportunity to push reset and take a fresh look at how such a massive amount of renewable electricity could be used to advance New Zealand, and in particular its goals of decarbonisation, fuel independence and energy resilience.”

Green hydrogen is already part of New Zealand industry, particularly at BOC's site in Glenbrook, south of Auckland.

Taranaki has also become a hub of hydrogen research, with Hiringa Energy and fertiliser company Ballance working with fuel and transport companies to produce a fuel supply chain for hydrogen-compatible heavy trucks.

Experts note that New Zealand already produces hydrogen industrially, most of it from steam reforming of natural gas, which is considered brown hydrogen. It is used to refine oil products, make methanol and fertiliser.

But the Government is betting on green hydrogen, made without fossil fuels, becoming a much bigger part of New Zealand's economy.

By creating an export industry, the country would at the same time advance its own aims to decarbonise the heavy vehicle transport fleet and change industrial heating processes, both heavily reliant on imported fossil fuels.

However, there are still hurdles to overcome, and the cost of new hydrogen trucks is currently high.

Finance Minister Grant Robertson told a business audience on Wednesday that he believed hydrogen fuelled vehicles were an important part of the future, particularly longer trips and heavy transport.

“New Zealand can be the home of green hydrogen and before Covid, I was up in Japan … and I signed up a couple of partnerships with Japanese entities, companies, interested in the development of hydrogen and some of those are being worked on right now in New Zealand.”

However, he said that did not mean coal would disappear from industries overnight.

“New Zealand generates in the region of 90 per cent and rising of electricity from renewable sources and the only thing preventing us from moving to 100 per cent is storage, and that’s what the [New Zealand] Battery Project that we’re looking at is about.

“We see this as a transition … and in fact, ironically, that’s the reason why right now, we will be bringing coal in, because that’s the redundancy in our system.”

By working on storage, the Government hoped to give itself other options in years when lake levels were low, he said.

“We not only see this as the right thing to do for the planet, the right thing to do for future generations, it also does offer us significant opportunity.”