Construction of Florida’s first clean hydrogen production plant kicked off last week
In Florida, WUSF News reported that construction on what is being billed as the state’s first clean carbon hydrogen production facility started in Polk County last week.
Hani Banoub, VP of Ocean Green Hydrogen of Tampa, one of the companies building the facility, said that the project will use state-of-the-art scrubbers to take carbon out of natural gas that’s heated to extreme temperatures to produce hydrogen.
“For every pound of hydrogen that’s produced by this technology, you’re producing 10 pounds of carbon. So we’re taking that old conventional technology and making it eco-friendly, by capturing the carbon,” Banoub said. “The beauty of this is that we’re not killing the fossil fuel industry. We’re utilizing natural gas and making it an eco-friendly fuel.”
“As the hydrogen becomes more popular in the industries, we want to be ready for it,” Banoub said. “But we want to have a clean, robust way of producing hydrogen by utilizing the carbon and using the old conventional technology from natural gas, which is very reliable.”
Most of the funds to build the plant is coming from LowCarbon, a firm based in South Korea. LowCarbon is expected to invest more than $100 million to develop the facility and provide 150 jobs on site.
