The work on a $6.5 billion green hydrogen plant in Saudi Arabia’s planned futuristic city NEOM is likely to begin in the first half of 2022, according to ACWA Power, one of the project partners.
ACWA Power, which debuted on Saudi Arabia’s stock market on Oct. 4, expects to finalize in the first quarter of next year billions of dollars in financing for the project, ACWA CEO Paddy Padmanathan told the media last week.
He had said about 20 percent of the project will be funded with equity and the rest will be limited-recourse project finance.
The project is a joint venture with NEOM Co. and American industrial gas company Air Products.
Padmanathan told a local media outlet that “this is the first project of this scale and quite a lot of work had to be done for the first time”.
“We are going to full construction as soon as we have achieved the financial closure,” he said.
The plant will need around 4.3 GW of clean energy to power it and ACWA plans to use solar in the day and wind in the night to eliminate the need for batteries and expensive storage solutions, the CEO said.
The project, which will be equally owned by the three partners, will export hydrogen in the form of liquid ammonia to the world market for use as a biofuel that feeds transportation systems.
It will produce 650 tons of carbon-free hydrogen per day and 1.2 million tons of green ammonia per year, reducing carbon dioxide emissions by the equivalent of 3 million tons per year.