Air Products’ Hydrogen Fueling Technology to Use Landfill Gas to Power Vehicles in S. Korea

Air Products has signed a contract with SK Energy to construct a hydrogen fueling station for a novel energy project to be based in World Cup Park in Seoul, South Korea. The hydrogen fueling station to be onstream in July 2010 will supply hydrogen produced solely from landfill gas to fuel a fleet of vehicles.

The project is part of Seoul’s push to use alternative supply means to generate 10% of its energy consumption by 2020, and to use hydrogen for 30% of the switch.

This will be Air Products’ sixth hydrogen fueling station in South Korea.

Air Products’ compression, storage and dispensing technology will fuel hydrogen powered fuel cell buses for public transit initially, and a small fleet of cars targeted to increase to as many as 100 public use vehicles. World Cup Park is a combination of several small parks adjacent to World Cup Stadium, site of the 2002 FIFA World Cup.

Air Products, the leading hydrogen supplier to refineries to assist in making cleaner burning transportation fuels, has placed more than 110 hydrogen fueling stations in the United States and 18 countries worldwide, with more than 175,000 hydrogen fills per year and growing. The company has filled vehicles with its fueling station technology from hydrogen delivered to a site via truck, or produced by on-site natural gas reformation, biomass conversion, or by electrolysis, including electrolysis that is solar and wind driven.

Founded in 1962 as Korea’s first oil refiner, SK Energy a leading energy and petrochemical companies with nearly 5,500 employees, $31.3 billion in sales, overseas branch offices and subsidiaries in 19 countries as of the end of year 2009. The company is strategically positioned as Korea’s largest and Asia’s fourth largest refiner with a refining capacity of 1.12 million barrels per day. SK Energy has advanced rapidly as a total energy provider, expanding its business area to New & Renewable Energy technologies like hydrogen, bio-butanol and thin film solar cell for a sustainable growth.

SK Energy has developed its own hydrogen reforming technology and applied it to a hydrogen fueling station in World Cup Park.