Low-cost green hydrogen hopeful Hadean Energy has landed another grant to upsize its tube-based technology for a site in Victoria that is also earmarked for Australia’s first offshore wind energy dedicated shipping port.
It has won a $15 million grant from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) to cover half of the costs of building a pilot plant at BOC’s compressed gas plant at the Port of Hastings.
The pilot, which will be Hadean’s fourth at a commercial site, will be sized at 200-300 kilowatts (kW) and be able to produce up to 7 kilograms of hydrogen per hour for steelmaking.
That is enough to supply around 85 per cent of the hydrogen needed for an annealing process in steel manufacturing, ARENA says.
Although not named as the recipient, Bluescope’s Victoria operations are next door to BOC at the Port of Hastings.
Victoria hopes to launched its offshore wind industry from the state-owned port, which is now in the process of looking for contractors to start the multi-billion redevelopment that will allow it to handle the giant turbine parts and other infrastructure.
The Hadean project is at the other end of the scale: the remainder of the cost of of the project, about $15 million, is being covered by RFC Ambrian Funds Management which helped to spin the company out of Commonwealth research institute CSIRO, the engineering partner for the BOC project Amarna Energy, and unnamed private investors.
Brand new Hadean CEO Liz Boylan hopes the pilot will prove the technology can work at a commercial scale and change the economics of industrial green hydrogen use.
Hadean has won a series of grants to test its technology since the 2023 spinout from CSIRO.
In 2024, Hadean won an almost-$1 million grant to build a 5 kilowatt (kW) electrolyser for a power plant in the UK run by French nuclear energy giant EDF, and also built a small test system at BlueScope’s Port Kembla steelworks in New South Wales (NSW).
“This project is a great example of what Australia can achieve when our world-class scientists and innovative businesses work together,” said innovation minister Tim Ayres in a statement.
“Projects like this are at the heart of our Future Made in Australia agenda: rebuilding Australia’s industrial capability, growing more Australian firms, and turning Australian innovation into real businesses and good jobs.”
The CSIRO team which designed the Hadean electrolyser approached green hydrogen from a different angle: industrial heat electrolysers are built as square or rectangular solid ceramic electrolytes.
They are challenging to scale, degrade at high temperatures, and the long seals at the edges of the flat shapes create a lot of opportunity for leaks.
Instead, Hadean’s tubular solid oxide electrolysis technology instead uses tubes: instead of multiple flat edges to seal, there are only two ends.
The technology uses steam and heat from industrial processes to split into oxygen and hydrogen while lowering the energy needed to break the molecules apart.
It’s a system that Hadean says can reduce the amount of electricity needed to make green hydrogen by 30 per cent.
Even though the federal government wound down its commitment to green hydrogen this year, ARENA is still backing the technology as a way to decarbonise difficult industries, such as iron, steel and aviation.
Reducing electricity use is one way to make green hydrogen more affordable and practical, ARENA chief Darren Miller said in a statement today.
“The cost of production remains a major barrier,” he said.
“This pilot will demonstrate how Hadean’s technology performs in a real-world industrial environment and provide the evidence needed to assess its commercial potential.”
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