Hydrogen for power | Samsung wins $100m deal to build ammonia facilities for co-firing at controversial new coal plant
Operator Korea Southern Power Company plans to burn a mix of 20% NH3 and 80% coal at the Samcheok power station in eastern South Korea
Samsung C&T has signed a 140bn-won ($103m) contract to build facilities for unloading, storing and transporting ammonia at the controversial 2.1GW Samcheok coal-fired power plant in eastern South Korea.
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Korea Southern Power (KOSPO) — a subsidiary of the country’s largest utility, Korea Electric Power Corporation (KEPCO), which is majority-owned by the government — had first announced plans to burn ammonia at the plant in July 2022.
However, in 2023, the plant’s owner, Posco Energy (now Samcheok Blue Power), said it was exploring a deal with CF Industries to import blue ammonia for the project from Louisiana.
KOSPO says the move will reduce greenhouse gases by 1.1 million tonnes annually, but this would only strictly be true if green ammonia was used, with the Haber-Bosch process used to combine hydrogen with nitrogen from the air being powered by renewable electricity.
The fact that vast quantities of highly polluting coal would still be burned at the facility — which is not due to close until 2047 — was not mentioned by any of the companies involved.
The ammonia infrastructure “is significant as the first step in the transition to clean fuel, and we plan to successfully complete the project and contribute to reducing national greenhouse gases”, said Shim Jae-won, vice-president of KOSPO’s technology and safety division.
Critics have long labelled any attempts to co-fire ammonia with coal as “greenwashing”, pointing out that emissions would still be higher than from similar-sized natural-gas-fired power plants, while giving the green light to allow the burning of carbon-rich coal for decades to come.
In 2022, research house BloombergNEF released a report into ammonia/coal co-firing, which concluded that co-firing 50% green ammonia with coal would produce higher carbon emissions than a gas-fired power plant — and would be more expensive than any form of renewable energy backed with batteries.
According to non-profit organisation Transition Zero, “co-firing ammonia [with coal] could even be worse for the environment than burning unabated coal due to the very high embedded upstream [methane] emissions [when using fossil gas to make grey ammonia] and energy losses from production of hydrogen and NH3”.