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Press Release20 December 2022Siemens EnergyBerlin
A lighthouse project at the southern tip of Chile: Production starts at the world’s first industrial-scale facility for carbon-neutral fuel
Credit: HIF Global
Siemens Energy Managing Board Member Anne-Laure de Chammard stated: "The Haru Oni project aims to demonstrate that eFuels can be brought to market in large quantities and at competitive prices. It lays the foundation for bringing green energy to areas that are still heavily dependent on fossil fuels. This is key to achieving the climate goals of the transportation sector. The knowledge gained from this project will also help develop climate-friendly solutions for many other applications.”
By March 2023, the plant will be completed in less than two
years in Magallanes province in Chile’s southern Patagonia region. As the
co-developer and systems integrator, Siemens Energy has played a major role in
designing this lighthouse project. Hydrogen, the basis of the fuel synthesis
process, is produced in an electrolyzer from Siemens Energy. The wind turbine
came from Siemens Gamesa. The project’s big challenge was to combine process
steps for making synthetic fuels that had previously only been tested
individually, and to coordinate them in a production chain for the first time in
an efficient and trouble-free way. That integration is the basis for the
ramp-up for eFuel production. The system is expected to produce 130,000 liters
of eFuel per year by 2023. After the pilot phase, the first scaling will take
the project in Chile up to a projected 55 million liters per year by the middle
of the decade. Around two years later the capacity is expected to be 550
million liters per year.
The project is tapping Patagonia’s vast potential of
renewable energy to assist the hydrogen economy, and thus the energy transition
in Europe and around the world. The windy region offers as much as 6,000
full-load hours of operation for generating green electricity, around three
times the amount available in Europe. Wind power is stored in liquid energy carriers
using the power-to-X process. Those liquids are easy to transport out of a
region with lots of renewable energy to places that are hungry for energy. Haru
Oni is doing pioneering work here and may serve as a role model for many other
regions around the world. It enjoys support from Germany’s Federal Ministry for
Economic Affairs and Climate Action: in 2020, Haru Oni became the first
hydrogen project to be funded as part of Germany’s national hydrogen strategy.
The project is the first to apply the Clean Energy
Certification solution developed by the TÜV Süd testing NGO and the German
Energy Agency (DENA) in collaboration with Siemens Energy. That digital
certificate provides fake-proof documentation that a product has earned the
right to be called “green.” For a product to receive the certificate, the carbon
footprint is documented for the first time across the entire production chain –
in the case of eFuels, that means from the wind turbine to filling the tank.
The certified e-gasoline from the Chilean plant will meet the EU’s requirements
for sustainable fuels.
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Siemens Energy is one of the world’s leading energy technology companies. The company works with its customers and partners on energy systems for the future, thus supporting the transition to a more sustainable world. With its portfolio of products, solutions and services, Siemens Energy covers almost the entire energy value chain – from power generation and transmission to storage. The portfolio includes conventional and renewable energy technology, such as gas and steam turbines, hybrid power plants operated with hydrogen, and power generators and transformers. More than 50 percent of the portfolio has already been decarbonized. A majority stake in the listed company Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy (SGRE) makes Siemens Energy a global market leader for renewable energies. An estimated one-sixth of the electricity generated worldwide is based on technologies from Siemens Energy. Siemens Energy employs around 92,000 people worldwide in more than 90 countries and generated revenue of €29 billion in fiscal year 2022.