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Sunday, July 20, 2025

NewGen and Tringen sign MOU for green hydrogen feasibility study

by

Curtis Williams
1789 days ago
20200826

It is no se­cret that Trinidad and To­ba­go’s petro­chem­i­cal sec­tor has been in trou­ble due to low in­ter­na­tion­al prices for am­mo­nia, methanol and urea and the rel­a­tive­ly high cost of nat­ur­al gas in T&T, plus the con­tin­ued nat­ur­al gas cur­tail­ment.

Nat­ur­al gas is a ma­jor feed­stock in the pro­duc­tion of those petro­chem­i­cals. Hy­dro­gen is a crit­i­cal in­put in am­mo­nia pro­duc­tion. Cur­rent­ly, all hy­dro­gen utilised in am­mo­nia pro­duc­tion in T&T is gen­er­at­ed sole­ly from the steam methane re­form­ing of nat­ur­al gas.

The sign­ing of a Mem­o­ran­dum of Un­der­stand­ing (MOU) for the po­ten­tial sup­ply of green hy­dro­gen to the Trin­gen Am­mo­nia Plant by New­Gen En­er­gy Lim­it­ed (New­Gen) brings some hope to a sec­tor that has been plagued by bad news for the last six years.

A joint press re­lease from New­Gen and Trin­gen not­ed that the MOU is de­signed to progress a fea­si­bil­i­ty study for the use of car­bon-neu­tral and green hy­dro­gen in the pro­duc­tion of am­mo­nia from the Trinidad Ni­tro­gen Com­pa­ny (Trin­gen) fa­cil­i­ties. The MOU will al­low for a full range of da­ta shar­ing be­tween New­Gen and Trin­gen to fa­cil­i­tate the de­vel­op­ment of a ro­bust tech­ni­cal and com­mer­cial case for a Car­bon-Neu­tral & Green Hy­dro­gen plant for Trin­gen’s am­mo­nia fa­cil­i­ties.

“Once suc­cess­ful the fea­si­bil­i­ty study would al­low for the pro­gres­sion of Hy­dro­gen Off-Take Agree­ment ne­go­ti­a­tions,” the re­lease read.

In an in­ter­view with the Busi­ness Guardian Philip Julien, the man­ag­ing di­rec­tor of New­Gen said green and car­bon-neu­tral hy­dro­gen is a game chang­er be­cause it rep­re­sents an op­por­tu­ni­ty to “re-frame the game”. Specif­i­cal­ly, up­on com­ple­tion, the New­Gen hy­dro­gen pro­duc­tion fa­cil­i­ty will, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Trin­gen am­mo­nia pro­duc­tion plant, re­duce T&T’s use of nat­ur­al gas for the pro­duc­tion of am­mo­nia, in­crease the glob­al val­ue of its am­mo­nia pro­duc­tion, and im­por­tant­ly-re­duce the car­bon foot­print per tonne of am­mo­nia pro­duced.

“One of the el­e­gant com­pet­i­tive ad­van­tages that T&T has in this game change sce­nario, is that we are al­ready pro­duc­ing and man­ag­ing hy­dro­gen at a glob­al scale, since it is the es­sen­tial in­ter­me­di­ary step that oc­curs in both am­mo­nia and methanol pro­duc­tion from nat­ur­al gas—which is es­sen­tial­ly methane—that is the sep­a­ra­tion of the methane in­to its con­stituent el­e­ments of car­bon and hy­dro­gen via a Steam Re­form­ing Process, Julien, who is al­so an en­gi­neer, ex­plained.

He ar­gued that the New­Gen Project is propos­ing to gen­er­ate hy­dro­gen from a non-hy­dro­car­bon source—via the sim­ple process of the elec­trol­y­sis of a com­pa­ra­ble amount of wa­ter that an ex­ist­ing am­mo­nia or methanol plant cur­rent­ly is us­ing on the Point Lisas Es­tate.

This will al­so be done by har­ness­ing the waste heat from the coun­try’s sim­ple cy­cle pow­er plants to help pro­duce the hy­dro­gen and is ex­pect­ed to al­so im­prove the en­er­gy ef­fi­cien­cy of T&T’s ex­ist­ing pow­er gen­er­a­tion sec­tor, Julien told BG.

Julien said the MOU al­lows the par­ties to ex­change in­for­ma­tion and de­ter­mine the ma­jor agree­ments that would be need­ed in part to progress the sale of hy­dro­gen by New­Gen to Trin­gen. It al­so en­ables both New­Gen and Trin­gen to work col­lab­o­ra­tive­ly and trans­par­ent­ly with each oth­er to ad­dress top­ics rang­ing from feed­stock price to an off­take agree­ment, as well as the tech­ni­cal in­te­gra­tion as­pects that will al­low the low car­bon hy­dro­gen to be in­cor­po­rat­ed in­to the ex­ist­ing Trin­gen fa­cil­i­ty.

Asked if green hy­dro­gen will re­duce the unit cost of am­mo­nia at the Trin­gen fa­cil­i­ty and al­low it to be more com­pet­i­tive glob­al­ly, Julien could not say for sure.

He ar­tic­u­lat­ed: “Our work to-date on the project has in­di­cat­ed suf­fi­cient­ly favourable eco­nom­ics to al­low us to now work with Trin­gen on re­fin­ing the an­swer to that very ques­tion dur­ing our fea­si­bil­i­ty study work with them over the com­ing weeks. What I can al­so say is that a pos­i­tive and like­ly out­come is for T&T’s “green­er” am­mo­nia to fetch a high­er glob­al com­mod­i­ty price than tra­di­tion­al am­mo­nia, since coun­tries —par­tic­u­lar­ly in Eu­rope—are con­sid­er­ing a pre­mi­um for am­mo­nia that is pro­duced with a low­er car­bon foot­print.”

Based on the pre-fea­si­bil­i­ty study, the scale and plant foot­print that New­Gen cur­rent­ly an­tic­i­pates a project cost that is in the re­gion of around US$300 mil­lion.

Julien said in­creased ac­cu­ra­cy to this fig­ure will be de­vel­oped as part of the fea­si­bil­i­ty study, as the com­pa­nies work to re­fine the en­gi­neer­ing de­signs and in­fra­struc­ture needs.

New Gen is al­so in the process of iden­ti­fy­ing and ex­plor­ing cur­rent com­mer­cial­ly avail­able elec­trol­y­sis tech­nolo­gies to iden­ti­fy the op­ti­mum tech­nol­o­gy for its hy­dro­gen pro­duc­tion fa­cil­i­ty.

“It is worth not­ing that this is not a new tech­nol­o­gy, rather it’s an emerged tech­nol­o­gy that is be­gin­ning to be de­ployed on an in­dus­tri­al scale around the world. Each of the tech­nol­o­gy providers will have el­e­ments of their spe­cif­ic process that will be pro­pri­etary, but the over­all in­tent will be the pro­duc­tion of hy­dro­gen us­ing elec­tric­i­ty,” Julien told BG.

In or­der to keep it green the project will be us­ing elec­tric­i­ty gen­er­at­ed from the re­new­able en­er­gy project pro­posed by the con­sor­tium of BPTT, Shell and Light­source.

Julien re­vealed: “Some elec­tric­i­ty will al­so be pro­duced us­ing waste heat gen­er­at­ed by ex­ist­ing elec­tric­i­ty pro­duc­ers, to sup­ply car­bon-neu­tral elec­tric­i­ty for the New­Gen Project. The com­mon­al­i­ty that ex­ists be­tween both of these sources is that no ad­di­tion­al nat­ur­al gas is con­sumed for their elec­tric­i­ty pro­duc­tion; sourc­ing the elec­tric­i­ty for the elec­trol­y­sis process from the afore­men­tioned green, car­bon neu­tral sources is a bedrock of the ben­e­fit of the hy­dro­gen to be pro­duced by New­Gen.”

He said the co­or­di­na­tion and align­ment be­tween the re­spec­tive projects and re­lat­ed stake­hold­ers is im­por­tant, and has been on-go­ing dur­ing the New­Gen project’s de­vel­op­ment over the past months.

“As such, we have been in reg­u­lar com­mu­ni­ca­tion with the Ligh­sourcebp/Shell project de­vel­op­ers, as well as T&T’s ex­ist­ing Pow­er Pro­duc­ers and T&TEC—through whom we will pur­chase this elec­tric­i­ty. In fact, New­Gen is poised to be T&TEC’s biggest pri­vate-sec­tor in­dus­tri­al cus­tomer, and with ze­ro ad­di­tion­al car­bon foot­print,” Julien added.

It will al­so dri­ve a healthy de­mand for the fur­ther de­vel­op­ment of our coun­try’s so­lar pow­er gen­er­a­tion ca­pa­bil­i­ty, which can al­so help pro­duce ad­di­tion­al green hy­dro­gen, Julien ar­gued.

Ac­cord­ing to New­Gen’s Man­ag­ing Di­rec­tor with ma­jor chal­lenges fac­ing the lo­cal petro­chem­i­cal sec­tor New­Gen is com­mit­ted to make this project a re­al­i­ty as soon as rea­son­ably pos­si­ble, with the sup­port of all stake­hold­ers.

New­Gen’s in­tent is to ex­pe­di­tious­ly and care­ful­ly de­vel­op the project to full fea­si­bil­i­ty, and ide­al­ly there­after work to­wards con­struc­tion com­ple­tion and plant start-up in 2023.


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