Kawasaki Heavy Industries (KHI) hosted the Mayors of Mornington Peninsula Shire Council, Latrobe City Council, and the Japanese City of Kawasaki at the HESC Pilot Project site in Hastings. This was followed by J-Power and Sumitomo Corporation Joint Venture (JPSC JV) hosting all three mayors in Latrobe Valley, Victoria.
The visit started at the Port Hastings where the mayor’s enjoyed a tour of the Suiso Frontier, the world’s first liquefied hydrogen (LH2) carrier, which successfully delivered LH2 from Hastings to Kobe, Japan in 2022. The group then travelled to the Latrobe Valley, where they visited the pilot project’s hydrogen production facility at Loy Yang.
These visits were a great opportunity to bring together the three councils that represent the three key locations of the commercial phase of the project. Each of them playing their own part in helping the project to support the clean energy transition in their respective communities.
The commercial demonstration project will produce clean hydrogen by extraction from Latrobe Valley coal supported by carbon capture utilisation and storage. This will deliver an initial 30,000 tonnes per annum for export to Japan and 10,000 tpa for domestic use.
At full commercial scale, HESC has the potential to reduce CO2 emissions by 1.8 million tonnes per year, equivalent to taking 350,000 cars off the road.