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Equinor is an international energy company committed to long-term value creation in a low-carbon future. Equinor owns and operates the largest methanol plant in North-Western Europe for which decarbonisation could be achieved through application of innovative technologies. In addition, the electrification of steam methane reforming to produce hydrogen is of interest for Equinor activities.

Learn more about Equinor's contribution to the ēQATOR project by reading the interview below, in which Alaa Faid explains the role of the organization within the project and the vision and goals that shape the development of
ēQATOR reactor technologies.

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Alaa Faid

INTERVIEW

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Please introduce yourself and your role in the project.

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I'm Alaa Faid, I'm a senior researcher and a project manager of clean hydrogen production at Equinor in the Technology, Digitalisation, and Innovation Department, and I'm representing Equinor in the ēQATOR project.

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How did you learn about the project and become a project partner?

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Equinor joined the consortium from the beginning, in writing the consortium proposal and so on, together with SINTEF. SINTEF is a well-known Norwegian research institution, and we have a lot of projects and connections. This project idea basically came from SINTEF and it was really interesting for us to join the consortium.

 

What's your organization's role in the project and what expertise do you bring to the table?

 

Equinor will provide input to business model development and impact paths in Task 7.6 and also continue working on the roadmap for scaling up, uptake and replication, in addition to standardisation and regulation activities in the project. Equinor will bring decades of experience in operation, research, and innovation in both reforming and methanol production to the project.

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How is your organization collaborating with other partners in the project?

 

Equinor interacts with many partners to provide insights and the feedback in process design and optimization, catalyst development and other areas of research in order to achieve the project goals in scaling up this innovative and efficient technology with costs comparable to existing technology in the market.

 

How do your project activities contribute to the goal of the project to achieve a cost competitive renewable methanol production with near zero CO2 emissions?
 

The project is really ambitious and in our activities the main focus is on cost competitive and efficient methanol production. So, we know that most of the new technologies are really not cost efficient and lacking a lot of commercial aspect. Our activities in business model development, decentralisation and roadmap for scale-up will help to ensure that, when scaling up this technology, it will be cost competitive and efficient for the industrial scale-up and use for other partners and industries.

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Regarding your task, what do you expect are or will be the greatest challenges during the project?

 

The challenges are related to the scale of innovative process and the materials. It’s always a challenge to go from lab to industrial scale. You can have really nice ideas, really good experiment results at lab, but it can be a challenge to scale up to industrial scale, working in 100 megawatts or gigawatts scale in industry, this is a challenge that we see in the future.
 

In order to overcome these challenges, what we need is collaboration and alignment with all partners, and research and industry. It's not only research and development and scaling up, but also, we need laws and regulations that support this scaling up and facilitate the scaling up. And encourage industry to utilize decarbonisation technologies in their facilities. This needs to be all happening at the same time in order to ensure that this is will scale up in the right time in order to decarbonise our energy systems and our chemical industry.

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If you had one wish regarding the project, what would that be?

 

I think it's just doing more pilot scale testing and testing the technology at larger scale, going to the phases up from the lab scale into a few 100 megawatts scale. That will really help the industry to understand what the challenge is, and what the opportunities are. But talking from the lab scale, it's very hard to determine the commercial and business case.

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