Linde opens green powered Air Separation Plant in Kėdainiai

March 20, 2021
Linde plant in Kedainiai
Photo from Linde
By Eko Diena in 
 

This January, Linde plc, the largest industrial gas company in the world by both market share and revenue, started full production at a new Air Separation Plant (ASU) in Kėdainiai, Lithuania. The plant, which will supply industry in the Baltic market with liquid oxygen and nitrogen, has actually been operating on a trial basis since the start of December, but gained approval to ramp up production in January.

There are a couple of nice things about this story, the first is that the €20m plant was built with the cooperation of Lithuanian companies for construction, hardware installation, and energy supply systems.

The second is that this new air separation plant has been designed “to have minimal impact on the environment and to use resources economically.” It will be run on green power produced from renewable sources, and aims to be highly energy efficient with the ability to adjust production loads as necessary.

It’s just one of a number of stories recently which show that Linde seem to be taking their environmental obligations quite seriously.

The company is a member of the Hydrogen Council, a group of companies investing in hydrogen vehicles, with the expectation that hydrogen fuel cell powered cars will be able to compete with battery powered vehicles in the near future. They have also invested heavily in wind powered plants that convert water to hydrogen.

Also in January, Linde revealed plans to build a new Proton Exchange Membrane (PEM) electrolyser plant in Germany to produce green hydrogen. They claim that the electrolyser, which will be operational in late 2022, will be the world’s largest. It will be capable of supplying fuel for a fleet of around 600 fuel cell buses, in addition to supplying green hydrogen to refuelling stations and industrial customers in the area.

While that might not sound very much, Jens Waldeck, Linde’s Regional President for West Europe says that “this project shows that electrolyser capacity continues to scale up and it is a stepping stone towards even larger plants.”

Let’s hope that he is right since green hydrogen is an important part of the German and EU strategies for mitigating CO2 emissions and climate change. Let’s also hope that Linde and other major industrial manufacturers continue to work on improving the sustainability of their industrial processes.

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