ABB Wins the Control System for Japan's First Commercial Liquid Hydrogen Terminal
System 800xA plus a SIL 3 safety instrumented system will run a 50,000 cubic metre liquefied hydrogen tank at Ogishima, where the cargo is stored at roughly one eight-hundredth of its gaseous volume.
ABB will supply the control and safety architecture for the Kawasaki LH2 Terminal at Ogishima, about 30 kilometres south of Tokyo — Japan's first commercial-scale liquefied hydrogen receiving terminal. Kawasaki Heavy Industries is the customer, Japan Suiso Energy is the project operator, and NEDO supports the work through its Green Innovation Fund.
The scope is ABB Ability System 800xA as the distributed control system, unifying process control, safety and operational data on one platform, plus a safety instrumented system rated to SIL 3, redundant AC 800M controllers and the server infrastructure behind system availability.
The site is what makes the SIL 3 rating unremarkable and the engineering interesting. It combines a 50,000 cubic metre liquefied hydrogen storage tank with cargo handling, liquefaction, hydrogen gas supply and lorry dispatch facilities. Liquefying hydrogen reduces its volume to roughly one eight-hundredth of the gaseous state, which is the entire economic argument for shipping it — and it requires holding the cargo at around minus 253 °C, close enough to absolute zero that ordinary instrument selection stops being ordinary.
Cryogenic hydrogen service is unforgiving in ways that are specifically an instrumentation and control problem rather than a mechanical one. Level and flow measurement on a boiling cryogen, boil-off gas management, leak detection for a substance that is colourless and burns with a nearly invisible flame, and the interlock logic that ties a marine loading arm to a tank's pressure envelope — these are the parts of the plant where a distributed control system either earns its place or does not.
The terminal sits inside the Liquefied Hydrogen Supply Chain Commercialization Demonstration project, whose demonstration phase is expected to complete by 2030, and follows the HySTRA-led pilot that moved hydrogen between Australia and Japan.
For automation engineers, the value here is not the vendor selection but the disclosure. Public descriptions of the control and safety architecture behind first-of-a-kind cryogenic infrastructure are rare, and this one names the platform, the safety integrity level and the redundancy arrangement — enough to argue from when the next one is specified.
Source: Process and Control Today