HyBRIDS Project
On 24th June 2021 SGI signed an agreement with Società Chimica Bussi ("SCB"), a chemical company based in Bussi Sul Tirino (Pescara, Abruzzo) part of Gruppo Gestioni Industriali ("GIG"), Italy's leading player in the basic electrolyte chemistry segment. The agreement aims to launch a first-of-a-kind pilot project to inject green hydrogen, i.e. hydrogen generated through industrial processes powered by renewable energy, into the gas network on a permanent basis, obtaining a blend of methane and 1% hydrogen with a possible increase in the decarbonised percentage as soon as legislation allows, in accordance with the National Hydrogen Strategy (up to 10%). HyBRIDS, that envisages an investment of about €7M and will run for approximately 24 to 36 months, is included among the 997 projects of the European Clean Hydrogen Alliance of which SGI is a member.
SCB is already producing green hydrogen through electrolytic processes powered by hydropower, which (up to 72 tonnes per year) will be predominantly allocated to the HyBRIDS project, and thus used for testing through the S.G.I. transmission network. Nevertheless, it will also be used in other projects on SCB site developing green gas applications, which will collectively achieve CO2 emission savings of at least 560 tons per year.
The industrial and ecological significance of the HyBRIDS project lies in the field-testing of procedures and facilities for the continuous blending process of hydrogen-methane, which varies throughout the day, and in demonstrating the functionality of a dynamic operation of the hydrogen pipeline, i.e. both as an H2 storage and as reverse flow redelivering H2 to the producer, concurrently with feed-in.
Innovative know-how will be developed for application in future projects related both to other hydrogen production sites of GIG group and across SGI’s gas network, also on the end user side. This will highlight the most effective ways of converting the existing S.G.I. gas network - r about 1800 km wide - into pipelines for transporting green hydrogen derived from renewable energies and/or with low CO2 levels, within plants where hydrogen is already produced, in line with national and European targets for sustainability and energy transition.
In addition, HyBRIDS will enable the development of market mechanisms to incentivise and enhance the production and consumption of green hydrogen.
More specifically, within the project SCB will build infrastructures for the capture, purification, compression and metering of the hydrogen produced on site in order to make it suitable for blending into S.G.I. gas transmission network. S.G.I. will build the connection infrastructure to SCB plants, an hydrogen pipeline with a diameter of 8 inches (about 20 cm) which will also have a storage functionality, like a traditional storage facility, with possible reverse flow, i.e. re-deliver hydrogen back to SCB for its production processes if needed. In addition, S.G.I. will build the hydrogen blending and injection plant, equipped with devices to control the natural gas flowing, automatically dose the H2 injected into the network, identify and monitor the hydrogen-methane blending percentage, which varies throughout the day, in the transmission infrastructure and remotely control the plant operations (adjusting the hydrogen input flow rate, operating pressure, etc.), as well as the metering and qualification of the energy vector.
in partnership with
HyBRIDS is included in the Entso-G’s Innovative Projects Platform: https://www.entsog.eu/hydrogen
and in the European Clean Hydrogen Alliance’s Project Pipeline (https://ec.europa.eu/growth/industry/strategy/industrial-alliances/european-clean-hydrogen-alliance/project-pipeline_it)
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