The Hydrogen City project is planned to be a 60 GW green hydrogen production, salt cavern storage, and transportation hub, expected to produce over 2.5 billion kilograms of green hydrogen per year. The project will be powered by 60 GW of solar and wind, with additional energy drawn for the grids at lower cost times. The project will be built in phases, with the first phase expected to be operational in 2026.
The proposed RuggedCell manufacturing facility will also be built in stages, with a goal of 5 GW a year of electrolyzer production. GHI plans to purchase the output for the first 10 years to supply its Hydrogen City project. Locations being considered for the factory include the Austin, Houston, Dallas, and Corpus Christi areas.
GHI’s plan for gigawatt-scale green hydrogen production requires very large-scale water electrolysis technology, and Hydrogen Optimized high-current RuggedCell technology meets that requirement. Most systems on the market today scale up to 20 MW per unit, according to GHI. However, RuggedCell was designed for large-scale hydrogen production, as the company is targeting individual installations of 100 MW up to 400 MW. Other advantages of RuggedCell are its fast, dynamic response to variations in electrical current levels from 0 to 100% power load, and the fact that the systems do not use costly iridium and other expensive platinum group metals, according to GHI.
GHI has acquired salt storage rights at strategic sites globally, with a potential for 100 TW hours of energy storage capacity. Hydrogen City is GHI’s first project, and it will be centered on the Piedras Pintas salt dome in Duval County, Texas. It is planned that the green hydrogen will be delivered through pipelines to Corpus Christi and Brownsville, where it will be turned into green ammonia, sustainable aviation fuel, and other products, or it will be delivered by pipeline directly to hydrogen power plants and other users around the state.
“We’re particularly excited to explore GHI’s plan to store green hydrogen in salt caverns, an approach that inherently recognizes the need to produce and store green hydrogen on a massive scale to unlock a region’s renewable energy potential and drive the transition to clean energy,” says Andrew T. B. Stuart, president and CEO of Hydrogen Optimized.
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