Israeli Startup to Provide Hydrogen Power to Moroccan Renewable Energy Developer
2 min read
H2Pro, a hydrogen company in Israel, and Gaia Energy, renewable energy developer in Morocco signed a strategic agreement on Tuesday for the supply of green hydrogen.
The said agreement was signed during the COP27 Climate Conference of the United Nations, which is taking place in the resort town of Sharm El-Sheikh in Egypt.
The elements that make up water are separated and then reunited via a process involving electrolysis, which helps harvest hydrogen power.
If renewable sources are used for obtaining the energy that powers electrolyzers, the energy is considered green.
H2Pro
The Grand Technion Energy Program developed an innovation and its commercial arm is called H2Pro. A system called E-TAC has been developed by the company.
This stands for Electothermal – Thermally Activated Chemical and it uses a number of steps for separating oxygen and hydrogen via a technique that makes more efficient use of electricity.
As for Gaia Energy, the company works with national grid operators, large utilities and the government for providing renewable energy to power Africa.
The renewable energy leader currently has projects under development of about 6 gigawatts and it is planning on introducing 7 more that will have a capacity of 40 gigawatts.
The deal
The CEO and founder of Gaia Energy, Moundir Zniber said that there were large areas of territory in Morocco that could be used for energy production on the giga-scale that would be powered mostly by solar photovoltaic panels and wind turbines.
He said that the land could be used for producing green hydrogen for meeting 20% of the demand in Europe and at the lowest possible price.
The chief executive said that the new deal they had signed with H2Pro would help in integrating its technology and consider the feasibility of producing its electrolyzers in the country.
More details
The CEO of H2Pro, Talmon Marco, stated that this was the biggest commercial deal that the company has made so far.
It has already entered into a partnership with Doral Energy of about 200-megawatt and another factory in Northern Israel.
Marco also went on to say that the deal was worth hundreds of millions of dollars where the gigawatt scale is concerned.
He said that it was going to take time because the technology needed to mature, but it was definitely a step forward.
He said that they would undertake initial pilot projects next year outside the lab. The first one would be in Haifa Bay at the Bazan oil refineries and Doral Energy would be the second.
The chief executive said that it would produce demonstration units of 10 megawatts in 2024 and the first commercial systems would come in 2025 that would be about 25 megawatts.
He said that they would have to have several systems in the range of 50 to 100 megawatts in order to reach a gigawatt.
He also added that the agreement with Gaia Energy was for one gigawatt of hydrogen, but they wanted bigger deployments.
