New Zealand-based hydrogen developer Hiringa Energy has begun construction of its 15MW Good Earth Green Hydrogen and Ammonia (GEGHA) project near Moree in northwest New South Wales (NSW).
Argus spoke with the firm's commercial and business development lead Jack Rickers on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Hydrogen Summit in Sydney about the company's future plans.
Can you talk us through the GEGHA project and what stage it is at?
We're aiming to be operational in the first quarter of 2027, [joint venture partner] Sundown Pastoral saw a similar project that we were doing over in New Zealand, where we working with a fertilizer manufacturer to decarbonise urea feedstocks. We built a 41MWh BESS system at GEGHA providing affordable, reliable supply of power into the electrolysers to make hydrogen for anhydrous ammonia supply.
What is the opportunity for expanding this project into agricultural markets in Australia?
Anhydrous ammonia isn't a big market on the east coast of Australia, a lot of growers used to use anhydrous but shifted due to supply chain security. What we're doing is transferring that supply chain to provide price competitiveness against fossil fuel products. More importantly for a lot of growers though is the security and the availability of that fertiliser input.
What are the other uses for the hydrogen GEGHA produces?
Some of the hydrogen is going to displace diesel in irrigation pumping as well as in other mobile and static on-farm equipment. Fuel and fertilizer produce the greatest emissions but also form the highest costs for these farming operations, so via GEGHA we're looking at low-carbon alternatives.
What is the growth potential for green ammonia in Australia?
If you look at the direct-use ammonia opportunity it's not large, I think it's averaged about 40,000-50,000 t/yr over the last 10 years. GEGHA is 4,500 t/yr but we've got a couple of other expansion projects underway. We got quite a significant [A$35.8mn ($23mn)] government grant for GEHGA, but what we're working on now is improving the economy of scale, by doing it at about five times the volume we don't think that we need the government to achieve competitive pricing of those products into the market.
We've got two other projects planned in NSW, both at the 20,000 t/yr scale, meeting the market's anhydrous demand. The broader nitrogen market, though, is really our target market — which is primarily the 2mn t/yr urea market in Australia's eastern states. Farmers prefer that granular or liquid form but we're having a look at other fertilizer derivatives using anhydrous ammonia as feedstock.
What model does Hiringa see as ideal for growing its anhydrous ammonia footprint?
We're looking at when does it become expensive for traditional fertilizers and how does that help us compete? That's around what that delivered price is so we're producing hub and spoke projects — rather than going giga-scale then trucking [fertilizer] 500km inland, we're doing it within those regions where people are going to use it, so we don't have that transport cost. We're looking at another 20,000 t/yr plant in the [NSW] Gwydir region, a 20,000 t/yr plant in the Riverina and probably a third plant in the Darling Downs of Queensland.
Why have you targeted cotton-growing regions so far? Is it a crop that supports the margins involved?
Cotton uses about 75pc of Australia's direct-use anhydrous supply, it's the largest direct market for us to address. But as we start to move from that 5,000 t/yr to 20,000 t/yr scale we're looking at what other cropping products make sense, how do we produce a product suitable for winter [grains] cropping to smooth that seasonality curve of [summer-grown] cotton.
