Now, a year and a half since the climate conference came and went, Fertiglobe — one of the partners on the project — has written in its latest annual report that it has set a deadline to take a final investment decision (FID) on the full project in the first half of this year.
To date, only a 15MW pilot of electrolysis capacity has been built by the development consortium, which also includes fellow fertiliser company OCI, Norwegian renewables developer Scatec, Cairo-based engineering and construction firm Orascom, and the Sovereign Fund of Egypt.
This pilot project feeds a small amount of green hydrogen into Fertiglobe’s existing ammonia production facilities in Egypt, with the full 100MW phase also going towards brownfield sites rather than a new ammonia production complex.
At the Connecting Green Hydrogen MENA conference in Dubai last week, Scatec’s head of development for Egypt, Mahmoud Shata, suggested during a panel discussion that increasing the capacity of existing ammonia production and feeding in renewable hydrogen, rather than building new integrated green hydrogen and ammonia complexes, could bypass the problem of intermittent renewable power input.
“The reason is that you don’t really have to worry about the ramp rate of the ammonia facility itself,” he said.
“Assume for example that the hydrogen production has ramped down by 50%. Then the ammonia facility, because you’re only providing, let’s say, 10% of the facility, you’re only seeing a drop of 5% — and that’s not much for an ammonia facility, it can happen, this kind of variation.”
However, depending on how the ammonia production facilities are powered, it is unclear whether the volumes of NH3 certified as “green”, ie, produced using renewable hydrogen, would count as renewable fuels of non-biological (RFNBO) under the EU’s Delegated Acts.
Fertiglobe, which is now fully owned by Abu Dhabi state-owned oil firm Adnoc following a $3.6bn deal, announced last year that it had shipped its first volumes of green ammonia from Egypt to India, for use in the production of laundry powder.
One possible reason for the delay on FID for the full phase could be the decision by Egypt Green’s developers to drop the initial electrolyser supplier, Plug Power, in November 2022.
Fertiglobe has refused to comment on whether a new electrolyser provider has been identified for the project, nor which markets it plans to target with its green ammonia.
“Going to 100MW, there’s lot of other regulatory issues as well that you need to overcome,” Shata said at the conference, citing transmission of renewable energy from one side of the country to the other as one topic of discussion with government. “You need to finalise several other aspects to really get it in place.”
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