China's successful operation of its first high-pressure pure hydrogen pipeline test heralds technical support for future large-scale, low-cost and long-distance pure hydrogen transportation in the country, said industry experts.

The country successfully carried out its first high-pressure pure hydrogen pipeline test at a testing ground in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region in Northwestern China on Sunday, according to operator China Oil & Gas Pipeline Network Corp, the nation's largest energy infrastructure owner, also known as PipeChina.

This is part of the company's efforts to accelerate the advancement of cutting-edge technologies for hydrogen storage and transportation and promote the integrated development of natural gas pipeline transportation and new energy, it said.

Zhu Shaolin, research director of the hydrogen department at Trend-Bank, an emerging industry research and consulting company, said that compared with hydrogen tube trailers, the current primary long-distance hydrogen transport method in China and worldwide — which is both costly and inefficient — pipeline transportation of hydrogen is an important method for achieving large-scale, long-distance and cost-effective movement of the chemical.

China's construction of pure hydrogen transportation facilities began late compared with developed countries, but the successful test provides technical support for future construction of hydrogen pipelines in China, Zhu said.

Domestic energy companies in China have been laying out plans to build long-distance hydrogen pipelines in the country to meet growing hydrogen demand in the transport sector and accelerate green energy development in the country, including China Petrochemical Corp and China National Petroleum Corp.

China Petrochemical Corp announced plans in April to build the country's first long-distance hydrogen pipeline stretching over 400 kilometers from the Inner Mongolia autonomous region to Beijing.

The pipeline in the first phase will be able to handle about 100,000 metric tons of hydrogen each year and has the potential to increase capacity by 500,000 tons over the long run in order to transfer clean fuel more effectively from the resource-rich west to energy-consuming regions in the east, said the company, also known as Sinopec.

The company, which is the nation's largest oil refiner and fuel supplier, claims that the pipeline will bolster China's efforts toward green energy transition.

After being put into operation, the supply from Inner Mongolia will replace the current hydrogen production from fossil fuels in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, play a pioneering role in trans-regional hydrogen transmission and help promote the country's energy upgrades, it said.

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