A new 300-megawatt hydrogen plant on Finland’s west coast may have significance to the Nordic Hydrogen Route (NHR), an initiative which intends to build a hydrogen transmission network around the northern Baltic sea by 2030, creating an open hydrogen market.
The €500 million plant built by the company Flexens is to be completed by 2027 and will be located in Kokkola, a city on Finland’s west coast with a lot of chemical industry and wind energy.
The plant will be an addition to the national hydrogen transmission infrastructure planned by state-owned gas transmission network company Gasgrid Finland. The Nordic country hopes to have three hydrogen production hubs, or ”valleys”, linked to each other.
The new Kokkola plant is believed to have significance to the Nordic Hydrogen Route (NHR), an initiative launched in April this year between Gasgrid and the Swedish Nordion Energi. By the decade’s end, the intention is to build a 1,000-kilometre hydrogen transmission network around the Bothnian Bay and Bothnia Gulf.
The project should contribute to the EU decarbonisation goals as industry along its route is estimated to represent around 20% of the combined emissions of Finland and Sweden.
In the longer term, the Nordic Hydrogen Route is meant to be linked to a European hydrogen infrastructure, enabling exports of excess hydrogen production by 2040 to Central Europe.
Finland has the potential to produce 10% of hydrogen, ”the new oil,” Europe needs, the CEO of P2X Solutions, a green hydrogen producer, Herkko Plit, told YLE on Wednesday.
(Pekka Vänttinen | EURACTIV.com)
Source: euractiv.com
