- German sustainability consultant and business developer GreenSinnergy GMBH has partnered with Argentine renewable energy experts for a proposed decarbonisation project in southern Argentina.
- GreenSinnergy said it expects basic and detailed engineering phases for ECO-Refinerías del Sur to advance in the coming years, with Phase 1 of the proposed project.
German sustainability consultant and business developer GreenSinnergy GMBH has partnered with Argentine renewable energy experts for a proposed decarbonisation project in southern Argentina’s southern province of Chubut. If completed, it would use regional wind energy resources to generate green hydrogen for the production of up to 500,000 tonnes/year (tpy) of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF).
Known as ECO-Refinerías del Sur and planned for development in three phases, the project will use a power-to-liquid (PTL) production pathway and the Fischer-Tropsch technology process in which green hydrogen derived from wind energy would be combined with captured carbon dioxide (CO2) to produce SAF, GreenSinnergy said in a series of December 10 posts to official company social media accounts.
Planned for construction in Argentina’s province of Chubut, “home to one of the world’s most attractive wind resources,” GreenSinnergy said in a December 6 presentation to Senado de la Nación Argentina that the project is nearing its final stages of preliminary development as the company works to build out an extensive network of stakeholders consisting of “technologists, [customers], and strategic investors, among others.”
Targeted for an initial SAF production capacity of 100,000 tpy, the project’s first phase—estimated to require an investment of $2.5 billion— will be supported mainly by wind power generation, helping to reduce CO2 emissions by about 500,000 tpy, GreenSinnergy said.
Anticipated at an overall investment that could exceed $6 billion to reach the project’s maximum SAF production capacity of 500,000 tpy, ECO-Refinerías del Sur could ultimately achieve a CO2-reduction rate of about 1.5 million tpy in support of broader global efforts to decarbonise the aviation sector and attain carbon neutrality by 2050.
GreenSinnergy said it expects basic and detailed engineering phases for ECO-Refinerías del Sur to advance in the coming years, with Phase 1 of the proposed project currently planned for startup in 2030.
“We are looking forward to implementing the large-scale green hydrogen project together with [Argentine] local partners,” Dr Bertram Lohmüller, GreenSinnergy’s managing director, said on December 10, stressing that developing a sustainable ecosystem and capacity building via professional and academic training of the regional workforce comprise “key elements of [the] large-scale green industrialisation project.”
While details regarding updated official wind power capacity in Chubut have yet to be made available, the latest data from the Department of Energy Transition and Planning of Argentina’s Ministry of Economy showed wind energy accounted for 2 per cent of the country’s overall energy balance in 2023.
Chubut, which leads Argentina’s wind generation, is followed by the provinces of Buenos Aires and Santa Cruz, respectively, with more than 900 wind turbines installed across the country’s 36 wind farms, according to a recent release from the national Ministry of Defense.