Hazer Group (ASX: HZR) has confirmed the company’s Commercial Demonstration Plant (CDP) performance and reactor test program has been successfully completed, achieving significant operational milestones substantially de-risking the scale-up and commercialisation strategy.
As updated in September, the CDP was to complete statutory inspections and commence a long duration run focused on stable production of high-purity graphite in Q42024.
The most recent campaign has achieved over 450 hours of stable production operation, the longest continuous operating run in the 2024 performance program. With the extended run in a very stable regime, the plant achieved a production uptime of 99.6% reinforcing the thermal stability and process reliability of the Hazer technology and importantly validating the design of solids handling equipment over a multi-tonne production envelope. In total, the CDP has now achieved more than 1250 hours of continuous operation.
This recent campaign has successfully produced sizable volumes of high-quality graphite which will be shipped to the company’s strategic partners and potential buyer universe for further testing. Graphite inventories have over doubled since the start of this run and the average purity has moved consistently toward design levels.
These strong operational results provide confidence in the reliability of the Hazer process and validate the design basis and operability of commercial scale projects.
“The performance of our first-generation Hazer reactor in the CDP has provided a real world, end to end demonstration of the Hazer technology including production of high-quality graphite,” Hazer CTO, Tim Forbes, said.
“I am very pleased with the results of the 2024 testing programme data and confident these substantially de-risk large commercial scale performance, establishes a deep understanding of the technology operation, design and performance and validates the attractive economics of the technology. We remain confident in our commercialisation readiness as we head into 2025.”
Specific Hazer process performance data, including temperature, flow, pressure and methane conversion collected over the past 11 months are currently being analysed. The Company’s proprietary process model is also being updated and then used to optimise the design parameters for the commercial scale-up programme including the Canada FortisBC plant currently under development.
The CDP is now being warm stacked while the engineering work associated with the integration of the next generation reactor and heat exchange equipment is being undertaken. The strong results and early completion of the current reactor and performance testing program accelerates the installation of the next-generation reactor to validate the technology operating envelope at commercial scale.
The second-generation reactor concept, as previously announced, has been developed to demonstrate scale up of the technology to large scale commercial levels of more than 20ktpa of hydrogen production. Installation and testing of the next generation reactor at the CDP will commence in 2025 and will provide data to further validate the commercial design for the large commercial scale projects, including FortisBC in Canada.