The Suiso Frontier Departs Australia for Japan

HESC Project Partners are proud to announce that in the early evening of Friday 28 January, 2022, the Suiso Frontier serenely sailed out of Hastings for its return journey to the Port of Kobe in Japan.

The HESC team were able to test and validate the loading of liquefied hydrogen into the Suiso Frontier’s specially built vacuum insulated tank.

“We are very happy with how things have progressed at Hastings,” said Hirofumi Kawazoe, Hydrogen Engineering Australia’s General Manager.

“We have successfully completed all safety, technical and operational aspects of the loading of liquefied hydrogen,” he said.

The hydrogen gas was cooled to -253 degrees Celsius at the Hastings hydrogen liquefaction plant and then transferred to the purpose built tank aboard the Suiso Frontier. The Suiso Frontier is able to maintain the liquefied hydrogen at the required temperature throughout the voyage.

The Suiso Frontier is expected to arrive back in Kobe in mid-late February.

A significant event for the HESC Project as much as for the world’s hydrogen industry, HESC has now demonstrated the world’s first fully integrated Hydrogen Energy Supply Chain.  

On her arrival in Hastings, Project Partners, Government representatives and project guests celebrated the final phase of the pilot. Over 130 guests heard the author of Australia’s Hydrogen Strategy, Dr Alan Finkel OM, explain the importance of hydrogen and projects such as HESC to Australia’s energy future. 

Once she arrives in Kobe, Japan, the team will unload the liquefied hydrogen into a purpose-built storage tank onshore, similar to that utilised onboard the Suiso Frontier.

The next phase of the project will involve the HESC Project Partners undertaking analysis of the pilot’s learnings with the intent of moving to a commercial scale project in the mid-to-late 2020s.

HESC’s vision is to produce carbon neutral hydrogen through extraction from a mix of Latrobe Valley coal and biomass, capturing and storing CO2 via the CarbonNet Project and optimising energy efficiency in the HESC supply chain.

In a commercial phase, the project will create 30,000 full-time jobs across the Gippsland and Mornington Peninsula regions over the life of the project.

The HESC project partners are: Kawasaki Heavy Industries, Ltd (KHI), Electric Power Development Co., Ltd. (J-POWER), Iwatani Corporation (Iwatani), Marubeni Corporation (Marubeni), AGL Energy (AGL) and Sumitomo Corporation (Sumitomo). Royal Dutch Shell (Shell), ENEOS Corporation and Kawasaki Kisen Kaisha, Ltd. (K-Line) are also involved in the Japanese portion of the project.

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