Belgian engineering firm John Cockerill plans to ramp up its global electrolyser manufacturing capacity to over 18 GW/yr by 2030 from less than 1 GW/yr currently, according to the firm's vice president of strategy, partnerships and mobility solutions Roland Hequet.
China could be the largest production location — accounting for over one-third of John Cockerill's global capacity — followed by the Middle East and Europe, based on the firm's projections.
In the shorter term, John Cockerill targets 8 GW/yr of manufacturing capacity by 2025, Hequet said at the World Hydrogen Congress in Rotterdam this week. The company, which specialises in pressurised alkaline electrolysers, has launched construction of a new "gigafactory" in France which will deliver its first electrolysers at the end of 2023. It also intends to add 2 GW/yr in India, while expanding existing capacity of 600 MW/yr in China to 2 GW/yr. The firm is also planning sites in the US, the Middle East and north Africa, Hequet said.
While the company is pursuing ambitious expansion plans, Hequet warned that global electrolyser supply could fall short of what will be required by the end of the decade. Electrolyser supply could struggle to keep pace with surging demand in the second half of the 2020s, he said. Many recently-announced renewable hydrogen projects are targeted for realisation in the second half of this decade.
According to Hequet, many estimates for global electrolyser output are too optimistic. In the short term, production capacity announced by manufacturers would provide ample excess supply if it was realised — but some manufacturing peers will probably struggle to meet their bold targets, Hequet suggested. He noted that some companies had been in the news recently for being unable to meet previously-announced targets. UK-based ITM Power last month scaled down its expansion plans for the coming years, while other European manufacturers have reported delays in production and deliveries to customers.
Hequet stressed that getting new manufacturing facilities up and running is a time-consuming process. "We measure it takes 24-36 months to produce the first stacks" at a factory, he said. "It's a long process to obtain permitting, financing, sometimes subsidies… then you still have to source the equipment, optimise the layout. Even once producing first stacks you're not going to reach 1GW right away, it takes time."
Supply chains provide an additional challenge for electrolyser manufacturers, Hequet said, pointing out that producers are dependent on suppliers of membranes as well as raw materials like nickel and — in the case of proton exchange membrane electrolysers — especially platinum group metals. Hequet added that John Cockerill is less dependent on scarce materials because of its focus on alkaline technology and the firm has decided to implement its own nickel plating lines to solve difficulties around finding suppliers of large components with nickel plating.
Market leader
John Cockerill sold more electrolyser capacity than any other company globally in 2021, according to Hequet. It delivered electrolysers with a combined 153MW of capacity to customers in 2021, giving it a 33pc global market share, he said.
The company has supplied the majority of its electrolysis equipment to two of the world's largest hydrogen projects in China — it delivered 110MW to Ningxia Baofeng Energy's 150MW plant which came online in April 2021 and has just dispatched 120MW to China's state-owned Sinopec for its 260MW Kuqa project in the northwest Xinjiang region.
For those projects, John Cockerill produced 46 of its 5MW stacks. According to Hequet, these weigh half as much as an equivalent 5MW system comprising five 1MW units, thanks to combining functions like gas separation and purification. The 5MW units are easier to manufacture, Hequet added, meaning the company should reach large capacity faster than through a strategy focused on smaller modules. The company's largest offering is now 6.5MW, which could extend these economies of scale.
