The company accelerates in its race to end emissions and produce clean fuels
The
Repsol refinery in Escombreras took a new step, this time of a giant, in his career to
achieve to eliminate CO2 emissions into the atmosphere and produce totally clean fuels that do not harm the environment. He gave it to the successful conclusion of a pioneering project in Spain in which he produced renewable hydrogen using biomethane as a raw material, a gas made with urban waste, which he will use as an energy source in his industrial complex.
The production of renewable hydrogen in this way is a further advance towards the transformation of not only the refinery but also the rest of Repsol’s industrial complexes into multi-energy poles capable of manufacturing decarbonised and therefore less polluting products. It is, for the moment, the first successful test to be carried out in Spain. Specifically, the Spanish company has used 500 megawatt hours of biomethane to produce 10 tons of this raw material, which has already been used to manufacture low carbon footprint fuels, such as gasoline, diesel and kerosene for aviation. This avoided emitting about 90 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere.
Repsol announced it on Monday and indicated that in the medium or long-term future it could replace conventional natural gas. In this way, Repsol continues to promote the circular economy and state-of-the-art technologies to transform waste into products with high added value and with a low, zero or even negative carbon footprint, according to sources from the oil company.
An industrial test
This first industrial test will also serve as an example for the development of the system of guarantees of origin for renewable gases that will be launched in Spain and that the Ministry for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge has just released to public information as a draft of Real Decree.
In this way, the company accelerates its strategy that it launched in 2018. This includes 230 initiatives and the ambition to use four million tons of waste annually by 2030 as raw material for its products. In October 2020, it announced the construction of the first advanced biofuels plant in Spain, which will start up in 2023. It will also be located at its Escombreras facilities and will have a capacity of 250,000 tons per year of hydrobiodiesel, biojet, bionafta and biopropane. produced from cooking oils and valid for cars, trucks and airplanes.
Precisely, the Cartagena City Council announced this Monday that it has already authorized the license for the construction of the biofuel plant, whose works will begin throughout this month. In them, the company plans to invest 188 million euros. The City Council also needs to give the go-ahead for hydrogen, which is necessary to produce biofuel. The intention of the oil company is that from this project it leads the market of the Iberian Peninsula through the installation of a production plant with a capacity of 552 megawatts in 2025 and another of 1.9 gigawatts in 2030, although not yet the employments have been made public.
Large consortia
Currently, Repsol is the leading producer and consumer of hydrogen in Spain and uses this gas regularly as a raw material in its industrial processes. The company is already deploying a multitude of projects throughout the renewable hydrogen value chain and is promoting the creation of large regional consortia to promote large industrial projects, such as the Renewable Hydrogen Pole around the Escombreras Valley, in Cartagena, the Basque Corridor of Hydrogen, the Hydrogen Valley of Catalonia, and the Hydrogen cluster in Castilla-La Mancha.
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