OMV Secures €450 Million EIB Loan for Austria's Largest Green Hydrogen Plant

The European Investment Bank has granted OMV a €450 million loan to support construction of a 140 megawatt green hydrogen plant in Bruck an der Leitha, Lower Austria, covering three-quarters of the project's €600 million total investment. The facility, already under construction and scheduled to begin operations by the end of 2027, will produce up to 23,000 tonnes of green hydrogen annually using renewable electricity, ranking among Europe's largest green hydrogen plants and becoming Austria's biggest. OMV estimates the plant will cut approximately 150,000 tonnes of carbon emissions per year, roughly 10 percent of the direct emissions from its Schwechat refinery.

 

Why a Refinery Needs Green Hydrogen

 

The project's logic rests on a fact often overlooked in hydrogen discussions: refineries are already among the world's largest hydrogen consumers, using it in processes that remove sulphur from fuels and upgrade crude fractions into finished products. Today that hydrogen is overwhelmingly produced from natural gas in a process that releases significant carbon dioxide, meaning a refinery's hydrogen supply is itself a major emissions source before any fuel is ever burned.

Replacing that fossil-based hydrogen with hydrogen produced by splitting water using renewable electricity attacks those emissions directly, without changing what the refinery fundamentally does. That is why the projected 150,000-tonne annual reduction maps to a tenth of Schwechat's direct emissions: the plant substitutes a cleaner input into existing industrial processes rather than requiring the refinery to be rebuilt. It is one of the most commercially straightforward applications of green hydrogen, since the demand already exists on-site and does not depend on new markets or transport infrastructure developing.

 

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The Aviation Fuel Connection

 

EIB Vice-President Karl Nehammer flagged a second strategic dimension during the site visit: the investment lays groundwork for future production of sustainable aviation fuels. Producing SAF at scale requires large volumes of hydrogen, and having captive green hydrogen production co-located with refining capability positions Schwechat to make lower-carbon aviation fuel as EU mandates requiring airlines to blend increasing shares of SAF take effect over the coming years.

Nehammer framed the loan within broader EU objectives, describing green hydrogen as a cornerstone of Europe's transition to a competitive, climate-neutral and secure energy system, and noting that industrial-scale production strengthens both competitiveness and energy security by reducing dependence on imported fossil inputs. The EIB's willingness to fund three-quarters of the project cost signals institutional confidence that industrial green hydrogen, long criticised as uneconomic, is reaching bankable scale when tied to guaranteed on-site demand.

 

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One Piece of a Larger Buildout

 

The Austrian plant is the largest of several hydrogen and renewable fuels projects OMV is executing under its Strategy 2030, which targets approximately 900 kilotons of renewable fuels and sustainable chemical feedstock production capacity by the end of the decade. The company already operates a co-processing plant and a smaller 10 megawatt green hydrogen facility at Schwechat, while OMV Petrom is building a sustainable aviation fuel and hydrotreated vegetable oil plant at its Petrobrazi refinery in Romania alongside additional 20 megawatt and 35 megawatt green hydrogen projects there.

Chief Financial Officer Reinhard Florey described the EIB commitment as a signal of confidence in OMV's transformation strategy and its ability to deliver large-scale industrial decarbonisation projects, positioning the plant as a milestone toward the company's stated net-zero ambition for 2050. Whether the facility begins operations on its end-2027 schedule, and whether the economics of producing 23,000 tonnes of green hydrogen annually hold up against the cost of the fossil-based hydrogen it replaces, will indicate how quickly similar refinery decarbonisation projects can spread across Europe's industrial base.

 

Source: OMV