Retrofitting existing gas-fired power plants to hydrogen, which is also a business model eyed by several energy firms in the Philippines for their mid-century net zero targets, could take five to seven years, according to an expert from a Japanese global engineering firm. Takakazu Morimoto, associate director for Frontier Business Division of Japanese firm Chiyoda Corporation, indicated that the conversion of gas-fed electric generating facilities could take  "7 years or more than 5 years, including FEED (front-end engineering design), feasibility study and EPC (engineering, procurement and construction)." He stated that while hydrogen is still regarded as a costly option at current pace, the overall cost for gas plants’ transformation could be less, compared to other industrial plants, like petrochemicals. “Hydrogen is still expensive … one-third of the cost is the hydrogen itself. But the upfront cost is not as expensive compared to petrochemical plants,” Morimoto said; qualifying though that as the technology matures commercially, the cost of conversion may eventually turn more cost-competitive. He also emphasized that “in using hydrogen for gas retrofitting, it is feasible – but that depends on the manufacturer (of the turbines) –companies like GE, Mitsubishi and Siemens, they are quite aggressive to accept up to certain percentage of hydrogen.” So far, he expounded that the viable percentage of hydrogen retrofit to gas plants is at “30-percent or something there, without modification of the current facility but just exchange of the burner, something like that.” Morimoto reckoned though that “if we talk about 100-percent hydrogen for the gas turbine, technology development is still ongoing – in that case, I think you just need to replace the gas turbines using hydrogen.” He acknowledged that at this stage, many countries are already accelerating discussion “to make gas fuel converted 100-percent to hydrogen, but that will be in the future. Now, the thinking is about intermediate mixing of hydrogen and certain percentage standard, while technology development is still gaining more progress.” In the Philippine market, one company that has been targeting the retrofit of its gas plants to hydrogen is First Gen Corporation of the Lopez group, which has more than 2,000 megawatts of capacity in that technology sphere. So far, the hydrogen journey it has been seeing will start from year 2030 and onwards. Frank Thiel, chairman of the Energy & Power Committee of the American Chamber of Commerce of the Philippines (AmCham) conveyed that their parent company, EGCO Group, already has a proof-of-concept when it comes to hydrogen experiment on its combined cycle gas facility in the United States. “Hydrogen as alternative fuel is something that a lot of companies are using…our own company, we’re burning hydrogen fuel in one of our combustion turbines successfully and this is done on a co-generation facility in the US, so we’re using hydrogen as fuel in combined cycles successfully – at least for 10-percent; and we ran for about a month. So that is an indication that hydrogen can actually be used in combustion turbines,” he stressed. With the decarbonization goals of many countries in the world, it is held that one promising solution will be the conversion of existing gas plants to hydrogen, which has the potential to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions while also maintaining reliable energy supply.