China’s carbon neutral goal: Hitachi to build world’s biggest plant in Shaanxi to mix carbon dioxide, hydrogen into methane
- Plant is one of 14 new projects announced during the Japan-China Energy Conservation and Environment Comprehensive Forum
- Hitachi Zosen will deploy its technology in cooperation with potential partners at Yulin Economic and Technological Development Zone
Hitachi Zosen, a Japanese sustainable energy engineering company, will build the world’s largest facility to produce methane from carbon dioxide and hydrogen generated at a coal-based industrial zone in Shaanxi province. The facility, a pilot project, is part of a Sino-Japanese collaboration on carbon reduction.
Osaka-based Hitachi Zosen, a 139-year-old former shipbuilding giant that now focuses on energy from waste, desalination plants engineering and industrial equipment manufacturing, has joined forces with government-mandated Japan Coal Energy Centre, which promotes clean coal consumption, for the project.
“Hitachi Zosen aims to realise a low-carbon, recycling oriented hydrogen society in China through the implementation of our methanation technology,” a spokesperson said. “Methane has almost the same composition as natural gas and can be used as an alternative to fossil fuels.”
Neutrality means any residual carbon dioxide emission after reduction measures is fully offset by amounts captured from the atmosphere.
While the methanation process using nickel as a catalyst was discovered by French chemist Paul Sabatier almost 120 years ago, the spokesperson said Hitachi Zosen and Tohoku University developed a catalyst in 1995 that gives its process the world’s highest performance. This process synthesises methane – the main component of natural gas – through chemical reactions between hydrogen and carbon dioxide.