SYDNEY and ZURICH and ARMONK, N.Y., Feb. 22, 2022 — Worley (ASX: WOR), ABB (ABBN: SIX Swiss Ex) and IBM have signed a memorandum of understanding to collaborate on helping energy companies build and operate green hydrogen facilities more efficiently and at scale.
The planned three-party collaboration aims to develop an integrated, digitally enabled solution for facility owners to build green hydrogen assets more quickly, cheaply, and safely, and operate them more efficiently.
Green hydrogen is a form of clean energy made from water through electrolysis, which is powered by renewable energy. While many industries want to invest in green hydrogen, high production costs pose a barrier to driving market adoption and achieving scale over natural gas or blue hydrogen. In addition, production facilities require an accessible and abundant renewable energy supply. This collaboration aims to help customers address these challenges by scaling up technologies and reducing production costs to enable green hydrogen to become more widely used.
Under the collaboration, Worley will provide engineering, procurement, and construction expertise across all stages of the project. ABB will provide offerings for electrical infrastructure, automation, operations digitalization and optimization, and energy management. IBM will provide systems integration services, as well as data framework and management solutions. Together, the three parties will provide operations and maintenance services, leveraging their combined digital expertise.
“This collaboration aims to help turn net-zero solutions into reality. It will build on the key learnings of our ground-breaking Ambition to Reality paper, written in collaboration with Princeton University, USA. By fast-tracking and standardizing how we engineer-design-operate, this collaboration is expected to reduce the levelized cost of green hydrogen and help our customers to decarbonize their operations further,” says Chris Gill, Senior Vice President of Low-carbon Hydrogen at Worley.
“Hydrogen is at the heart of the energy transition and is essential to decarbonizing a wide range of hard-to-abate industries. Together with Worley and IBM, we’re dedicated to enable a new concept to accelerate the adoption of low carbon hydrogen and efficiently meet the growing demand. Complementing our partners expertise with our electrification, automation and digital solutions, we will aim to enable lower production costs through smart, safe and sustainable operations,” says Bruno Roche, Vice President, Energy Transition at ABB Energy Industries.
“While many industries have been able to adopt wind and solar to help decarbonize operations, energy-intensive industries, such as petrochemical, cement and steel, require heat temperatures and combustion that cannot be achieved with these renewables. Green hydrogen can help address these distinct needs in a more scalable sustainable way. IBM’s collaboration with Worley and ABB aims to address those challenges by combining expertise and solutions from all three companies into a distinct ecosystem of industry leaders to help form a repeatable process to build, operate and manage green hydrogen facilities. We believe this kind of collaboration is critical to achieving decarbonization goals,” says Zahid ‘Z’ Habib, Vice President, Global Energy & Resources Industry Leader, IBM Consulting.
The planned relationship is subject to the parties reaching definitive agreements.