The EU Innovation Fund will award a grant of €88 million to Neste’s green hydrogen and CO₂ capture & storage project, which aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at the Porvoo refinery in Finland. The project introduces carbon capture and storage (CCS) and electrolysis solutions that allow decarbonization of production at the refinery. The project is currently in the feasibility phase.

SHARC—Sustainable Hydrogen and Recovery of Carbon—will reduce emissions at the Porvoo refinery by moving from grey hydrogen towards green hydrogen through the introduction of electrolysis facilities and towards blue hydrogen by application of carbon capture and storage (CCS).

Hydrogen is essential in the production processes of transportation fuels, so the green and blue hydrogen will reduce the carbon intensity of these fuels.

SHARC will also scale the production of green hydrogen to help make it a viable transportation fuel itself.

The novel water electrolysis technology applied by SHARC has a capacity of 50 MW. This, combined with CCS will maximize the environmental impact and the development of a strong supply chain from the refinery, by ship to storage site and will lay the foundation for a European hub for renewable hydrogen and CO₂ utilization.

The project has a significant role in Neste’s target of carbon neutral production by 2035. With this transformation project, a reduction of more than 4 million tons of CO₂ emissions can be achieved at the Porvoo refinery in the first 10 years of operation.

We are proud to have been selected as one of the seven granted projects out of more than 300 applicants in one of the world’s largest funding programs for the demonstration of innovative low-carbon technologies. This is a great recognition for Neste and its innovations as a front runner and key contributor to the European energy transition. The funding for this project strongly supports our ambition to make Porvoo the most sustainable refinery in Europe by 2030.

—Peter Vanacker, President and CEO at Neste

Neste also aims to gather a network of leading European technology suppliers and R&D institutes, laying the foundation for a world-class European hub for renewable hydrogen and CO₂ utilization.

The EU Innovation Fund is investing more than €1.1 billion in seven large-scale innovative projects. Neste, among other successful projects, will start to prepare the individual grant agreements with the funding agency, which are expected to be finalized in the first quarter of 2022.

Projects also selected in this first Innovation Fund call for large-scale projects—i.e. projects with total capital costs above €7.5 million—are:

• Kairos@C, led by Air Liquide. Kairos@C will develop a complete carbon, capture and storage (CCS) value chain that will avoid ca. 14.2 Mt CO₂ over the first 10 years of operation. Kairos@C will initiate a cross- border CCS value chain and kick-start the Antwerp@C project, which is developing a multi-modal transport infrastructure for CO₂ in the port of Antwerp.

• TANGO, led by Enel Green Power. TANGO will develop an industrial-scale pilot line for the manufacture of innovative and high-quality bifacial heterojunction (B-HJT) photovoltaic (PV) cells. The innovative bifacial heterojunction technology ensures higher performance with respect to conventional modules, due to the intrinsic characteristics of the advanced bi-facial structure that allows for the maximization of energy production while minimizing the cost of electricity (LCOE) in utility scale installations. Furthermore, the project aims at enabling the application of the Tandem structure to B-HJT solar cells, in order to overcome the limit imposed by silicon bound to its band gap.

• BECCS@STHLM, led by Stockholm Exergi. BECCS@STHLM will create a full-scale Bio-Energy Carbon Capture and Storage facility at its existing heat and power biomass plant in Stockholm. The combination of the CO₂ capture with heat recovery will make the process more efficient.

• K6, led by EQIOM. K6 will reduce CO₂ emissions through implementation of a range of technological initiatives and innovations at the Lumbres cement plant. The project aims to maximise the usage of biomass-containing and other alternative fuels and to take advantage of already-decarbonated raw materials. A novel industrial-scale combination of an oxy-fuel kiln with carbon capture that replaces the existing wet kilns, will result in capturing of over 90% of the remaining CO₂. This CO₂ will be transported by train and ship for storage in North Sea sites or utilized in products of concrete, resulting in an avoidance of 8.1 Mt CO₂eq emissions over the first ten years of operation.

• ECOPLANTA, led by ECOPLANTA Molecular Recycling Solutions. ECOPLANTA aims to convert non-recyclable fractions of municipal solid waste to chemicals and biofuels. ECOPLANTA will produce 237 kt/y of methanol in a facility on a petrochemical complex near the port of Tarragona, Spain and thereby recover 70% of the carbon present in the municipal solid waste (MSW), achieving 3.5 Mt CO2eq of emissions reductions over the first 10 years of operation.

• HYBRIT, led by Hybrit Development, with SSAB and Vattenfall. HYBRIT (Hydrogen Breakthrough Ironmaking Technology) will replace coal-based blast furnaces with direct hydrogen-based reduction technology. HYBRIT will demonstrate a complete industrial value chain for hydrogen-based iron and steelmaking. The project will produce approximately 1.2 Mt crude steel annually, representing 25% of Sweden’s production. This will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 14.3 Mt CO₂ over the first 10 years of operation. A new facility will be established for first-of-a-kind hydrogen-based direct reduction, with 500 MW fossil-free electrolysis in Gällivare. Furthermore, two blast furnaces are replaced by an electric furnace in Oxelösund.