Air Products plans to invest $4.5bn to produce blue hydrogen in Louisiana, providing the low-carbon fuel to oil refiners along its US Gulf coast pipeline.

The project in Ascension Parish will produce 750mn cf/d (21 m³/d) of hydrogen from natural gas when completed in 2026, Air Products said today. The project will capture 95pc of CO² emissions from the hydrogen production process, or about 5mn metric tonnes/yr of CO², for permanent sequestration one mile underground, making it the world's largest carbon capture and storage project, the company said.

The plant will join about two dozen conventional hydrogen plants and a blue hydrogen plant in Port Arthur, Texas, feeding the company's 1.9bn cf/d pipeline network stretching more than 700 miles from Texas City, Texas, to New Orleans, Louisiana. Oil refiners along the pipeline use hydrogen to remove impurities such as sulphur from fuels.

Some of the plant's blue hydrogen also will be used to make blue ammonia for global distribution. The delivered ammonia can be converted back to blue hydrogen for fueling buses and trucks, among other markets.

The project is Air Products' biggest US investment ever, reflecting rising interest in low-carbon hydrogen as companies and governments commit to cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Air Products, already the world's largest hydrogen producer, said it will become the world's top producer of blue hydrogen with the completion of the Louisiana project and a previously announced project in Alberta, Canada.

The company said it also will be the global leader in green hydrogen — which is produced via electrolysis using renewable power— with its recently announced $5bn joint venture in Neom, Saudi Arabia.

Louisiana has approved Air Products' plan to store captured CO² from the blue hydrogen project at multiple inland sequestration sites along a pipeline corridor extending 35 miles east of the plant.