IBM, ABB, and Worley team up to help energy companies build and operate green hydrogen facilities

IBM, ABB, and Worley signed a memorandum of understanding to collaborate on developing an integrated, digitally enabled solution for facility owners worldwide to build green hydrogen assets more quickly, cheaply, and safely, and operate them more efficiently.

There is much interest in green hydrogen, yet one its greatest barriers are high production costs, achieving scale over natural gas or blue hydrogen, and the abundance of renewable energy required for operation. This collaboration aims to help customers address these challenges by scaling up technologies and reducing production costs.

While many industries have been able to adopt wind and solar to help decarbonize operations, energy-intensive industries, such as petrochemical, cement and steel, require heat temperatures and combustion that cannot be achieved with these renewables. Green hydrogen can help address these distinct needs in a more scalable sustainable way. IBM’s collaboration with Worley and ABB aims to address those challenges by combining expertise and solutions from all three companies into a distinct ecosystem of industry leaders to help form a repeatable process to build, operate and manage green hydrogen facilities, said Zahid ‘Z’ Habib, Vice President, Global Energy & Resources Industry Leader, IBM Consulting.

IBM, an expert in hybrid cloud and AI services, will provide systems integration services, as well as data framework and management solutions. ABB, a leading global technology company, will provide offerings for electrical infrastructure, automation, operations digitalization and optimization, and energy management. Worley is an Australian firm that provides project and asset services in the energy, chemicals, and resources sectors. Under the collaboration, Worley will provide engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) throughout the project. Leveraging their combined digital expertise, the three parties will provide O&M services.

“This collaboration aims to help turn net-zero solutions into reality. It will build on the key learnings of our ground-breaking Ambition to Reality paper, written in collaboration with Princeton University, USA. By fast-tracking and standardizing how we engineer-design-operate, this collaboration is expected to reduce the levelized cost of green hydrogen and help our customers to decarbonize their operations further,” says Chris Gill, Senior Vice President of Low-carbon Hydrogen at Worley.

The paper Ambition to Reality draws on research and analysis from Princeton’s Net-Zero America study, and with the view that net-zero is achievable, it focuses on the practical shifts required to develop and deliver the energy infrastructure needed to achieve net-zero ambitions. This paper is intended to be read by decisionmakers in government, industry, and the broader community who are involved with supply-side energy infrastructure, and it explores five key shifts needed to transform project delivery to enable the necessary changes.

“Hydrogen is at the heart of the energy transition and is essential to decarbonizing a wide range of hard-to-abate industries,” said Bruno Roche, Vice President, Energy Transition at ABB Energy Industries.

The planned relationship is subject to the parties reaching definitive agreements.