Public sector support helped to build an innovative e-fuels facility in Denmark – now cross-industry collaborations are critical to reaching scale.
In the town of Herning in central Denmark, a newly opened electrolyzer manufacturing facility – the size of three football pitches, and employing 150 people – is poised to help decarbonize a diverse range of industries, from steel and cement to shipping and aviation.
Emissions in these sectors are hard to abate because they depend on “molecules” rather than “electrons”, explains Sundus Cordelia Ramli, Chief Commercial Officer for Power-to-X at Topsoe, a global provider of technologies and solutions for the energy transition. “Power-to-X” is a catch-all term for converting the electrons of renewable power into the molecules of industrial fuels and chemicals.
Topsoe’s facility in Herning produces a state-of-the-art technology called Solid Oxide Electrolyzer Cells (SOEC) that can be used to make green hydrogen, to be turned into fuels such as e-methanol and e-ammonia. SOEC produces between 20% and 30% more hydrogen than alternative technologies for a given input of power.
The factory is a culmination of decades of research and development, explains Poul Georg Moses, Chief Technology Officer for Power-to-X: “The road to this facility started 30 years ago when our team was researching fuel cell technology. Pilot projects evolved into the launch of our Power-to-X business in 2021. We took the final investment decision on the factory in Herning in 2022.”
The factory was supported by EUR 94 million from the European Union Innovation Fund. As Sundus Cordelia Ramli says: “Public-private collaboration is critical to mobilizing the courage to implement innovative business models to help derisk first-of-its-kind projects.”
According to Kim Hedegaard, Chief Executive Officer of Power-to-X at Topsoe, it was not only investment the company wanted from the EU Innovation Fund, but a mark of approval: “The fact that our technology is validated by a trusted third party is as important as the grant we received.”
Topsoe can leverage that validation to galvanize change across industrial ecosystems, supporting the case for a switch from fossil fuels to hydrogen-derived alternatives.
The Renewable Hydrogen Coalition, which Hedegaard co-chairs, is a key part of this mission. Bringing together innovative start-ups and entrepreneurs with investors and industrial off-takers, the coalition aims to establish Europe as a leader in renewable hydrogen solutions.
Given the high cost of capital and the relatively short operational track record of e-fuels, Ramli points to the importance of “strong commercial partners that have the foresight and willingness to move forward with projects that are first of a kind.” They include First Ammonia – which plans to produce green ammonia in Texas – and Forestal, which is building an e-methanol plant in Spain.
According to the International Energy Agency, meeting net-zero targets will require renewable hydrogen production capacity to increase four hundred fold between 2023 and 2030. Achieving this dramatic scale-up requires action from the public sector, says Ramli: “E-fuels are still a nascent industry compared to mature technologies like solar and wind, and those industries had many years’ worth of policy support”. She calls for policymakers to send market signals through mandates and incentives.
Insurance likewise has a role to play in de-risking investment in this relatively new technology. Topsoe has partnered with insurance provider New Energy Risk to support customers with risk management in their projects.
Finally, standardization can be an important way to lower costs and enable faster deployment of e-fuels: “Standardization is something that Topsoe champions,” says Ramli, “from the components of our SOEC stacks all the way down to how we build our production facilities”.
While it takes knowledge, expertise, planning, and partnerships to take green technologies to industrial scale, CEO Kim Hedegaard wants to make sure that the very first step in the process – imagination – is not overlooked.
“I don’t think we recognize often enough the effort we exercise in imagining better alternatives in the first place,” says Hedegaard. “Every great concrete solution started from this beginning. No matter who you are or what your professional background may be, I would argue that many of your accomplishments were made by first imagining something great was possible.”
