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Saudi Aramco outlined plans to invest in blue hydrogen but said it will take at least until the end of this decade before a global market for the fuel is developed, Bloomberg reported.
“We’re going to have a large share” of the market for blue hydrogen, Aramco’s chief technology officer, Ahmad Al-Khowaiter, said in an interview with Bloomberg Television on Sunday.
“The scale up isn’t going to happen before 2030. We’re not going to see large volumes of blue ammonia before then.”
The state energy firm may end up spending roughly $1 billion on capturing carbon for every 1 million tons of blue ammonia produced, Khowaiter said. That would exclude the expense of producing the gas, he said.
Aramco, the world’s biggest oil company, sent its first shipment of blue ammonia in September to Japan, a pilot project to show the fuel could be exported. Aramco will decide on further shipments depending on the level of demand, Khowaiter said.
He declined to comment on how much gas Aramco was planning to produce for its blue-hydrogen efforts or on whether the company had abandoned plans to make liquefied natural gas, Bloomberg said.
Aramco needs to make deals with buyers before investments in blue hydrogen can begin properly, said Khowaiter.
Globally, the hydrogen industry is expected to grow to $183 billion by 2023, from $129 billion in 2017, according to Fitch Solutions. French investment bank Natixis estimates that investments in hydrogen will exceed $300 billion by 2030.
(Writing by Brinda Darasha; editing by Daniel Luiz)
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