Saudi oil giant Aramco signed a cooperation agreement with British chemicals company Linde to jointly develop ammonia cracking technology and establish a demonstration facility in northern Germany, according to a company statement.

What’s happening at this new demonstration plant? The facility will be where the parties will evaluate the efficiency of Aramco’s ammonia cracking catalyst — jointly developed with the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) — against other catalysts.

A quick explainer: Hydrogen can be generated from ammonia through a process called thermal decomposition or catalytic cracking. This basically involves splitting ammonia into hydrogen gas and nitrogen using metal catalysts like nickel at very high temperatures.

And why is this important? To establish a commercially viable lower-carbon hydrogen supply chain, Aramco CTO Ahmad Al-Khowaiter says in the statement. In other words, effectively transporting hydrogen is notoriously difficult and ammonia is an ideal way to distribute hydrogen.

REMEMBER- Aramco said it was earmarking “multiple bns of USD” in a bid to establish itself as a major blue hydrogen exporter last November. Al Khowaiter said export discussions with Japan and South Korea were the ones “farthest along” with Aramco, which had sent test cargoes totaling 40 tons of blue ammonia to Japan in 2020. The Saudi oil giant and Sabic Agri-Nutrients shipped 25k tons of low-carbon blue ammonia to South Korea’s Lotte Fine Chemical (LFC) that same month.

Not the first ammonia cracking agreement in MENA this year: Adnoc and German industrial engineering multinational Thyssenkrupp signed an MoU for the joint development of large-scale ammonia cracking in January that would see the German firm provide Adnoc with its ammonia cracking technology and work on setting up “large scale” ammonia cracking plants — presumably in the UAE.

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