Nel ASA (Oslo, Norway) has opened a new automated electrolyzerplant at Herøya, which is contributing to unlocking new application areas where green hydrogen is the best or only option for decarbonizing.
The secret is scale-up and automation, which is lowering the unit cost of electrode production like never before. Nel is on track to make green renewable hydrogen as cheap, or cheaper, to produce than natural-gas-based hydrogen by 2025.
Nel is reiterating its goal of delivering green hydrogen at $1.5/kg, and to achieve this capex must be reduced to a quarter of today’s level.
“Half of the savings we need to make will come from scale-up and increased efficiency in production. The rest will come from the economy of scale, and from effective industrial partnerships,” says Jon André Løkke, Nel´s CEO.
“At Herøya we are producing the best alkaline electrolysers in the world. The next step would be to industrialize our PEM technology in the US in a similar way,” says Løkke, adding that Nel is also investing a lot of capital in the development of concepts as large as 800 MW and beyond based on 20, 100, 200 MW building blocks.
“Our large-scale concepts allow us to optimize the overall capex and realize synergies to reduce cost”, says Løkke.
This new plant at Herøya currently has 500 MW of production capacity. With further investment, this figure can rise to 2 GW, a sizeable portion of the 10 GW of capacity Nel is targeting to reach within 2025, if required by the market.