ExxonMobil Teams Up for Hydrogen Pilot in US

November 18, 2025 jasonspiess The Crude Life 0

 

US supermajor ExxonMobil and German chemicals giant BASF have announced that they will partner on a methane pyrolysis pilot in the US that would produce so-called “turquoise” hydrogen.

While “blue” hydrogen is produced via natural gas in processes that generate carbon dioxide, which has to be captured and stored for the hydrogen to be considered low-carbon, methane pyrolysis splits natural gas under high heat in the absence of oxygen.

This means that no CO2 is produced during the process, but rather solid carbon, which proponents argue can be sold to existing markets for the material.
The pilot project would be sited at ExxonMobil’s Baytown refining complex in Texas and produce 2000 tonnes per annum of hydrogen with 6000 tpa of solid carbon by-product, Upstream’s sister title Hydrogen Insight reported.

ExxonMobil noted in a press release that methane pyrolysis requires five times less electricity than electrolytic hydrogen production, as well as not requiring the use of water.

Meanwhile, although both blue hydrogen production and methane pyrolysis can leverage existing natural gas infrastructure, the latter does not depend on suitable geology for carbon storage and additional infrastructure to transport CO2 to these sites — making it easier to deploy in regions where carbon capture and storage is more difficult.

ExxonMobil is developing a massive blue hydrogen complex at Baytown, which would produce 1 billion cubic feet (or more than 2000 tonnes) per day of hydrogen, much of which will be converted to ammonia.

In May, the company signed an offtake agreement with Marubeni to ship 250,000 tonnes of ammonia to Japan, which would be co-fired with coal at the Kobe Power Plant.

However, ExxonMobil has yet to take a final investment decision on the Baytown facility, with rumours that it will delay this step beyond the end of this year.

Meanwhile, BASF had installed its own methane pyrolysis testing site at Ludwigshafen in Germany in 2020, and brought the largest operational green hydrogen plant in Europe — a 54 megawatt proton exchange membrane electrolyser — on line earlier this year.

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