SK Gas to invest in U.S. turquoise hydrogen startup

SK Gas announced on Wednesday that it signed an investment contract with C-Zero, a U.S.-based company with source technology for manufacturing turquoise hydrogen. SK Gas plans to focus on proactively securing environment-friendly turquoise hydrogen production technologies based on the investment.

According to SK Gas, C-zero is a startup based in California that has natural gas pyrolysis source technology, which is the key technology to the production of turquoise hydrogen. With the technology, natural gas, which is the main ingredient of methane, is injected into a high-temperature reactor to react with a catalyst to be broken down into hydrogen and solid carbon. The hydrogen produced from this process is called turquoise hydrogen, which does not emit carbon dioxide, causing the greenhouse effect during the production process.

“If renewable natural gas from organic waste, such as food waste, sewage, and humanure, is used to produce turquoise hydrogen, we can expect to even achieve negative greenhouse emissions, which means the total amount of greenhouse gas emissions is below zero,” said a member of SK Gas. The company did not reveal the size of the investment.

SK Gas focuses on LPG and LNG businesses at the moment but is setting a goal to transition to low-carbon businesses in the future.


Hyun-Seok Lim lhs@donga.com