The collaborative project GreMeOH (Green H2 and MeOH in Denmark) funded by MissionGreenFuels is looking in to supply chains, integration, and manufacturing concepts with focus on speed and quality to pave the way for an increased capacity of installed plants producing green hydrogen and e-methanol.
By Julie Søgaard
As a part of the GreMeOH project, SDU researchers from two departments and the company European Energy are developing a set of innovative digital twins and simulation models aiming to support design and operations of one of the world’s first large scale PTX manufacturing plants and value chains for green hydrogen (which is hydrogen produced from renewable electricity sources) and methanol production.
European Energy is building an e-methanol plant at Kassø in the Southern part of Jutland, which is used as a case site for the project.
“The plant will produce e-methanol based on green hydrogen and biogenic CO2, which will be utilized by Maersk’s new methanol vessels and LEGO and Novo Nordisk for sustainable plastic production,” Martin Sloth Jensen, Project Manager from European Energy, says.
The case site features a 52 MW electrolyzer with Siemens PEM technology and will produce around 32.000 tons e-methanol annually using renewable energy from a co-located solar energy park of approximately 304 MW and the electricity grid. Also, district heating is integrated in the facility.
The largest solar park in the Nordics, Solar Park Kassø, will feed power directly to the methanol plant, for the production of hydrogen that combined with CO2 is synthesized through a methanol reactor to produce the end product e-methanol.
“The simulation models developed as part of the GreMeOH project can be utilized as inputs for maximizing the economics of Power-to-X plants, taking into account interconnections and constraints to the specific plant,” Martin Sloth says.
And this is what Ali Khosravi, who is Associate Professor at SDU Mechatronics (CIM), and his colleagues are working on.
“My role is to develop the software solution and the techno-economic analysis for the project. Here, we analyse different scenarios for the plant operation,” Ali Khosravi says.
This includes how efficient the solar panels are and the impact of solar radiation for different years using 23 years of data, plus the impact of each year on the price of the grid-based methanol.
“European Energy can use our model to investigate different scenarios by the market. The electricity market is so volatile and this bring a lot of difficulties for methanol production because the price of methanol is highly related to the price of electricity,” Ali Khosravi says.
The first results from the models have been published in the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy.