Hy­drogène de France (HDF En­er­gy) has ac­quired a 70 per cent ma­jor­i­ty stake in the New­Gen project in T&T.

Ke­nes­jay Green Ltd, the project de­vel­op­er, will re­tain the re­main­ing 30 per cent of the share cap­i­tal of New­Gen, which will be joint­ly owned by KGL and an in­vest­ment ve­hi­cle that will al­low for the in­clu­sion of ad­di­tion­al lo­cal in­vestors.

When com­plet­ed, the US$200+ mil­lion New­Gen plant will be the world largest clean hy­dro­gen pro­duc­ing fa­cil­i­ty of its kind, us­ing a smart com­bi­na­tion of so­lar and en­er­gy ef­fi­cien­cy-sourced pow­er, it stat­ed.

“It will com­pet­i­tive­ly gen­er­ate car­bon-free hy­dro­gen to meet 20 per cent of the hy­dro­gen re­quire­ment for an ex­ist­ing world-scale am­mo­nia plant in the petro­chem­i­cal hub of Point Lisas, Trinidad. Once up and run­ning, the project will save ap­prox­i­mate­ly 200,000 tonnes of CO2 per year,” it stat­ed.

This is the third ma­jor in­vest­ment in the Caribbean this last year for HDF, which an­nounced hy­brid “Re­new­stable” base­load pow­er plants us­ing green hy­dro­gen and so­lar pow­er in French Guiana and Bar­ba­dos along­side its re­gion­al part­ner and in­vestor, RU­BIS.

Com­ment­ing on the HDF ma­jor­i­ty ac­qui­si­tion, KGL’s chair­man Philip Julien said: “ KGL wel­comes this sig­nif­i­cant en­dorse­ment and in­vest­ment in New­Gen by HDF, and looks for­ward to our col­lab­o­ra­tion and shar­ing of ex­per­tise. Our part­ner­ship en­ables im­proved lo­cal ac­cess to in­ter­na­tion­al fi­nance and tech­nol­o­gy, op­ti­mum op­por­tu­ni­ties for lo­cal own­er­ship, and an ac­cel­er­a­tion of T&T’s en­er­gy tran­si­tion com­mit­ments.”

CEO of HDF En­er­gy Damien Havard said: “We be­lieve we have the ide­al part­ners in Ke­nes­jay Green, giv­en their ex­ten­sive knowl­edge of the in­dus­try, busi­ness acu­men and their com­mit­ment to lo­cal de­vel­op­ment.

“Our in­vest­ment in New­Gen af­firms our be­lief that T&T’s en­er­gy in­dus­try of­fers a unique op­por­tu­ni­ty for the de­vel­op­ment of world scale and cost com­pet­i­tive car­bon-free Hy­dro­gen. This project demon­strates that green so­lu­tions can ef­fec­tive­ly sup­port the tran­si­tion of hy­dro­car­bon-based economies like T&T and HDF is poised to be a part of lead­ing the change.”