Hive Hydrogen awards Coega green-ammonia FEED to Técnicas Reunidas, with a FEED-to-EPC roll-over and a 2027 FID in view
Hive Hydrogen South Africa (HHSA) has awarded the front-end engineering design (FEED) contract for its $5.8bn Coega green hydrogen and ammonia project to Spain’s Técnicas Reunidas, announced during the Africa Green Hydrogen Summit in Cape Town. Per Técnicas Reunidas’ 16 September statement — and Mining Weekly’s 15 September report of the award — the facility is designed to produce about one million tonnes a year of green ammonia at the Coega Special Economic Zone next to the deep-water Port of Ngqura, in Nelson Mandela Bay, Eastern Cape.
Two structural features make this more than a routine engineering award. First, the roughly $9m FEED — due to start in October — is explicitly intended to roll over into a full engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contract for the ammonia production plant, subject to FEED completion, project approvals, financing and a final investment decision. The EPC scope for the ammonia plant is put at about $1.8bn. Second, HHSA is targeting FID in Q3 2027, with commercial operation projected for 2031. The renewable generation and upstream electrical infrastructure — some 2,930 MW of wind and solar — sit in a separate workstream and are not part of this FEED award, which covers the molecule-production portion and associated process infrastructure.
Why this is a study-dense scope
The FEED scope named in the award is, in hazard-study terms, four different problems bolted into one plant: hydrogen production electrolysers, an air separation unit for nitrogen, the green-ammonia synthesis loop, and a desalination plant, plus storage systems with a capacity above 100,000 tonnes and pipelines running to the port.
Each block carries its own hazard signature. Water electrolysis at scale brings hydrogen-handling and the credible hydrogen/oxygen cross-contamination and flammable-atmosphere questions that dominate its PHAs. The air separation unit adds cryogenic and oxygen-enrichment hazards. The synthesis loop is high-pressure, high-temperature service with a large toxic-gas inventory. And ammonia storage above 100,000 tonnes, sited next to a working port with an export jetty, pushes the study well past the process battery limits into bulk-storage integrity, transfer operations, and the dispersion and facility-siting work that a toxic inventory of that size demands. The interfaces between an intermittently powered renewable front end and a synthesis loop that prefers steady operation are their own source of transient-mode scenarios — ramping, trips, and turndown — that a like-for-like reference plant elsewhere cannot answer for this site.
What it signals
A FEED award is where the concentrated hazard-study effort on a project like this begins to get contracted: design HAZOPs across the electrolysis, ASU, synthesis and storage blocks; SIL determination and verification against IEC 61511; and quantitative dispersion and siting studies driven by the ammonia inventory and the port-adjacent location. On the stated timeline — FEED from late 2026, FID in 2027 — that work lands across the next 12 to 18 months.
Coega adds another confirmed data point to the green-ammonia thread the sector has been tracking: after technology selection and, now, a FEED contractor with a defined path to EPC, the project has moved from prospect to funded engineering. For process-safety practitioners, the read-through is the same one the ammonia and carbon-management pipeline keeps sending — design-stage study demand in the ammonia value chain is still building, and the energy-transition projects driving it carry hazard sets (bulk toxic storage, hydrogen, cryogenics, intermittent power) that make them heavier studies than their conventional-capacity equivalents.