Hazer completes testing of its commercial demonstration plant

Hazer Group has announced that it has completed testing at its Commercial Demonstration Plant (CDP), marking a major milestone in advancing its clean hydrogen technology towards commercial scale.

The plan for this quarter was to commence a long-duration run focused on stable production of high-purity graphite, and as a result has achieved over 450 hours of stable production operation, the longest continuous operating run in the 2024 performance program. With the extended run in a very stable regime, the plant achieved a production uptime of 99.6%, reinforcing the thermal stability and process reliability of the Hazer technology, and validating the design of solids-handling equipment over a multi-tonne production envelope. In total, the CDP has now achieved more than 1250 hours of continuous operation.

The recent testing campaign has successfully produced sizable volumes of high-quality graphite, which will be shipped to the company’s strategic partners and potential buyers for further testing. Graphite inventories have more than doubled since the start of the run and the average purity has moved consistently towards design levels.

“The performance of our first-generation Hazer reactor in the CDP has provided a real-world, end-to-end demonstration of the Hazer technology including production of high-quality graphite,” said Hazer CTO Tim Forbes. “I am very pleased with the results of the 2024 testing program data and confident these substantially de-risk large commercial scale performance, establish a deep understanding of the technology operation, design and performance and validate the attractive economics of the technology. We remain confident in our commercialisation readiness as we head into 2025.”

Specific Hazer process performance data, including temperature, flow, pressure and methane conversion collected over the past 11 months are currently being analysed. The company’s proprietary process model is also being updated and then used to optimise the design parameters for the commercial scale-up program, including the Canada FortisBC plant currently under development.

The second-generation reactor concept, as previously announced, has been developed to demonstrate scale-up of the technology to large-scale commercial levels of more than 20 ktpa of hydrogen production. Installation and testing of the next-generation reactor at the CDP will commence in 2025 and will provide data to further validate the commercial design for the large commercial-scale projects, including FortisBC in Canada.

Image caption: Hazer’s CDP site in Perth, Western Australia.