Thread Content
The reporter learned from the Hydrogen Energy Branch of the China Industry Development Promotion Association that recently, the country’s first commercial hydrogen production project using water photolysis, along with the nation’s first civilian liquid hydrogen refueling station – the Madian Liquid Hydrogen Refueling Station – were put into operation in Panzhihua City, Sichuan Province. This marks new progress in China’s hydrogen industry chain, which covers production, storage, transportation, and utilization. Industry experts say that hydrogen possesses both energy and raw material properties, making it an important component of a new energy system. For the development of hydrogen energy, vanadium and titanium serve as the basis for producing high-performance electrolysis water catalysts, hydrogen storage materials, and photocatalytic materials. As the \"Capital of Vanadium and Titanium,\" Panzhihua enjoys unique natural resource advantages for developing the hydrogen industry, boasting renewable resources that enable large-scale and low-cost production of green hydrogen. “The project utilizes the ‘polyhedral strontium titanate concentrated quantum hydrogen and oxygen production integrated thermal system’ technology; through a array of 144 heliostats, 24 concentrated hydrogen production reactors, and associated equipment, it converts the collected sunlight directly into hydrogen energy, providing a new technical approach for the large-scale production of green hydrogen. ”Duan Dongping, a researcher at the Institute of Process Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, said that the project is designed to produce 200 tons of hydrogen per year, with a production cost of 21 yuan per kilogram; the hydrogen produced will be primarily used in the transportation sector. As China’s first civilian liquid hydrogen refueling station, the Madian Liquid Hydrogen Refueling Station, located in the Panzhihua Vanadium-Titanium High-Tech Zone, has an investment of 83 million yuan. It expands upon the existing hydrogen refueling capacity of 35 megapascals, thereby providing new impetus for the industrial development of hydrogen-based transportation in Panzhihua. It also offers various application scenarios for the commercial operation of low-temperature liquid hydrogen refueling stations. “The Madian liquid hydrogen refueling station is the first demonstration project in China that covers the entire chain of \"production, storage, transportation, refueling, and utilization\" of liquid hydrogen. It is also a refueling station equipped with a \"pipeline hydrogen delivery + parent-child refueling\" system. ”A relevant official from the management committee of the Panzhihua Vanadium-Titanium High-Tech Zone said that this project will be integrated with the Panzhihua Hydrogen Energy Industrial Park to create a hydrogen energy industry cluster with an annual output value of over 10 billion yuan. “A high proportion of renewable energy sources has issues of intermittency and volatility. ”Guan Xiaohong, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and director of the Department of Electronics and Information at Xi’an Jiaotong University, said at the 2025 Hydrogen Energy Industry Chain Ecology Conference that, backed by hydrogen-to-electricity conversion technology, hydrogen can not only empower distributed multi-energy systems to support zero-carbon industrial and residential complexes, industrial energy systems, and data computing centers, but it will also help achieve regional energy balance and improve the economic efficiency of such systems.