ENGIE has formed a subsidiary called Yuri to develop the project. It has entered a joint venture with Mitsui & Co. Ltd. to operate the project. Mitsui will acquire a 28% stake in the Yuri subsidiary.
Yuri will build the plant adjacent to Yara Australia’s world-scale ammonia production facility in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. The plant will produce up to 640 tonnes of renewable hydrogen a year for the facility. Yara Australia is a unit of Norway’s Yara International, the world’s leading crop nutrition company.
The Yara facility is one of the largest ammonia production sites in the world. It will be the first established operational facilities in Western Australia to receive and use green hydrogen molecules to produce clean ammonia.
Yara Pilbara General Manager Laurent Trost says Project Yuri is a transformational project for the company’s processing operations in the Pilbara.
The Yuri project received A$47.5 million from the Australian Government’s ARENA Renewable Hydrogen Deployment Funding Round. ARENA (the Australian Renewable Energy Agency) has supported 628 projects with A$1.86 billion in grant funding since 2012.
The project is also receiving A$2 million from the Renewable Hydrogen Fund as part of the Western Australian Government’s Renewable Hydrogen Strategy