Greek energy company Motor Oil Hellas has signed an agreement with Swedish firm Metacon for another 20MW of pressurised alkaline electrolysers, manufactured by Chinese company Peric and assembled by Metacon in Greece, for a now-50MW green hydrogen facility at its Corinth refinery.
The plant will be the largest in Greece and, depending on when it is completed this year, could be the largest in Europe on start-up.
Last month, the EU approved €111.7m ($104.5m) in state aid from the Greek post-Covid recovery and resilience fund towards the 50MW project.
Metacon is supplying the initial 30MW of electrolyser capacity, for which the EU had supplied Motor Oil Hellas with €17.8m via the Clean Hydrogen Partnership, with the order valued at SKr225m ($21.8m).
The Swedish firm notes that the 20MW add-on is valued at SKr 117.8m ($11.4m) , although this will be recognised in regular instalments as the project is delivered in tandem with the first 30MW order.
This would suggest an aggregate price for the Peric-made electrolysers of around $0.66/MW of installed capacity across all 50MW — around a third of the price of equipment manufactured in Europe or the US, even after import costs.
The International Energy Agency estimates Western-made electrolysers cost $2m per megawatt of capacity.
Metacon and Peric have recently signed an agreement that would allow the Swedish company to manufacture the electrolyser stacks in-house, potentially to comply with EU restrictions on Chinese-made electrolysers in its European Hydrogen Bank subsidy auctions.
“The [Motor Oil Hellas] contract also adds nicely to Metacon’s financial targets for the year,” the Swedish firm’s CEO and president, Christer Wikner, said in a press release.
Back in 2022, the company had set a target of SKr 500m in sales in 2025, with the Motor Oil Hellas contract taking it more than two-thirds of the way to meeting this ambition.
Metacon has already received a SKr45m upfront payment from Motor Oil Hellas for the initial 30MW of capacity.
However, it is unclear how much Motor Oil Hellas is spending on equipment for the project beyond the electrolyser stacks, which appear to account for less than 28% of the grant amount.
In December 2023, the oil company had also secured a €127m grant from the EU Innovation Fund to build infrastructure for carbon capture and storage (CCS) and e-methanol production at the Corinth refinery, although a final investment decision on this is not due until the middle of this year.
