French oil major TotalEnergies and its partner Tree Energy Solutions (TES) will jointly develop electric natural gas (e-NG), also known as e-methane, with Japanese firms Osaka Gas, Toho Gas and ITOCHU.
The partners have signed a joint development and operating agreement, granting the Japanese companies a 33.3 per cent stake in the Live Oak project, a large-scale facility for e-methane, that is currently in development in Nebraska, U.S.
TotalEnergies and TES will each maintain a 33.35 per cent stake in the project.
The agreement positions Live Oak as the leading project for carbon-neutral gas production for Japan. The project will leverage Nebraska’s abundant biogenic CO₂ resources and the growing renewable power generation capacity in the U.S.
The partners are now working on the Front-End Engineering Design (FEED) phase, targeting a capacity of 250MW of electrolysis and 75 kilo tonnes per annum of methanation.
The Live Oak project is scheduled to begin commercial operations by 2030, with plans to export e-NG to Japan.
The project will help the Japanese gas majors achieve their goal of injecting 1 per cent of carbon-neutral gas, such as e-NG, into the gas grid by 2030.
Osaka Gas and Toho Gas have agreed to be the primary offtakers for e-NG, which is a synthetic gas produced from renewable hydrogen and carbon dioxide.
e-NG is chemically identical to conventional natural gas, and it can be seamlessly integrated into existing LNG infrastructure with any additional modifications to consumer equipment.