Worley, ABB and IBM partner to build green hydrogen assets

Worley, ABB and IBM have signed an MoU to collaborate on helping energy companies build green hydrogen facilities at scale.

The planned tripartite 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.  

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 supply offerings for electrical infrastructure, automation, operations digitalisation and optimisation, and energy management; and IBM will lend its expertise in systems integration services, as well as data framework and management solutions. Together, they will provide operations and maintenance services, leveraging their combined digital expertise.

“This collaboration aims to help turn net-zero solutions into reality," said Chris Gill, Senior Vice President of Low-carbon Hydrogen at Worley. "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 standardising how we engineer-design-operate, this collaboration is expected to reduce the levelized cost of green hydrogen and help our customers to decarbonise their operations further."

Bruno Roche, Vice President, Energy Transition at ABB Energy Industries, said hydrogen is essential to decarbonising a range of hard-to-abate industries.

"Complementing our partners with our electrification, automation and digital solutions, we will aim to enable lower production costs through smart, safe and sustainable operations," he said.

Zahid ‘Z’ Habib, Vice President, Global Energy & Resources Industry Leader, IBM Consulting, said while many industries have been able to adopt wind and solar to help decarbonise 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," he said "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 decarbonisation goals."

The planned relationship is subject to the parties reaching definitive agreements.