Hydrogen, ammonia and carbon capture
Commissioning first-of-a-kind plants with evidence a lender will read.
Electrolysers, ammonia loops, capture units and CO₂ injection wells are being built by teams doing them for the first time, on schedules set by subsidy deadlines and offtake agreements. Deskely gives these scopes the same completions discipline as an LNG train, with the tightness, purity and measurement evidence these plants are judged on.
- Plant type
- First-of-a-kind
- Critical evidence
- Tightness and purity
- Extra audience
- Lender and regulator
- Gate
- Performance test
Choose your project type
The problem
No one on the team has commissioned this exact plant before.
An electrolyser, ammonia loop or capture train is staffed from refining, power and equipment supply, and each discipline arrives with a completions convention built for a different process. The default fallback is that every package vendor brings its own forms and none of them line up.
That would be survivable if the only reader were the owner. It is not. These projects are financed against milestones, permitted against leakage and emissions conditions, and often sell a certified product attribute, so the evidence pack has to satisfy a lender's technical adviser and a regulator as well as an operations team.
The unfamiliar risks are technical, not administrative: hydrogen embrittlement and molecular-scale tightness, ammonia toxic release and relief sizing, dense-phase CO₂ moisture corrosion, and a measurement chain that has to be defensible because it underwrites a subsidy or offtake claim rather than just an internal KPI.
The reverse of a normal ladder
Performance test, not RFSU, is the gate the money is written against.
The certification ladder still runs through mechanical completion, but the commercial gate sits one step further out than on a conventional plant.
- 01
MC
Loop checks, tightness testing and analyser loop calibration complete per subsystem
Commissioning manager and package vendor lead
- 02
RFSU
Nitrogen purge, hydrogen or CO₂ tightness certificate issued, ESD proven
Commissioning manager and process safety engineer
- 03
First gas / first CO₂ in
Analyser calibration current, purity specification agreed with offtaker
Operations manager
- 04
Performance test
Sustained run at rated purity, flow and pressure against the offtake or storage agreement
Owner's engineer and lender's technical adviser
- 05
PAC / commercial operation
Performance test accepted, MRV baseline instrumentation certified
Owner and financing parties
One register
Package suppliers, one convention, no template chaos.
Electrolyser stacks, rectifiers, compressors, dryers, capture absorbers and regenerators arrive as vendor packages with their own numbering and test regimes. Each becomes a subsystem inside the project's own hierarchy, with vendor records attached to project tags rather than living in a parallel document set.
Vendors sign their own works test records directly, scoped by access rights to their package only, so what the project receives is signed data against tags already in the certification register rather than a folder of PDFs to reconcile after the fact.
The ITR set is configured for the process actually being built — molecular-scale leak testing, purity sampling, analyser calibration, DC electrical isolation on the rectifier and stack side — instead of a generic oil and gas form stretched over an unfamiliar chemistry.
The evidence that decides whether the plant can run
Tightness, purity and calibration recorded against the system, not the file.
Hydrogen finds every joint, dense-phase CO₂ punishes trace moisture, and ammonia carries a relief and detection scope that a regulator will read line by line.
Tightness / leak test
System holds pressure with the actual process medium at the acceptance criteria specified
Pre-commissioning, before nitrogen purge or first introduction of process gas
Purity / moisture sampling
Product meets offtaker or storage specification
Loop dry-out, first gas-in, and periodically through performance test
Analyser calibration certificate
The instrument behind a purity or MRV result can be trusted
Pre-commissioning and on the recurring calibration cadence
DC isolation and electrical safety record
Rectifier and stack circuits are isolated and proven dead before work
Before any electrolyser package intervention
Relief and detection function test
Ammonia or hydrogen relief and gas detection responds within design limits
Pre-commissioning and periodically thereafter
Measurement and monitoring
The instruments behind a credit have to be traceable, not just installed.
A capture or storage project claims a quantity, and that claim rests on flow meters, composition analysers, pressure and temperature transmitters, and, for storage, the monitoring instrumentation around the injection well and containment complex.
Those tags carry calibration certificates, loop test records and their own re-calibration cadence, held in the same register as the rest of the plant so the measurement chain is a filtered view rather than a reconstruction from calibration folders when a verifier asks.
Injection well and well pad scopes sit in the same hierarchy as the surface plant, so the boundary between capture facility, transport line and storage site is a subsystem edge with records on both sides, not an organisational gap.
What actually blows the schedule
First-of-a-kind risk concentrates in four places.
Vendor template proliferation
Each package supplier arrives with its own ITR forms and none map to the project's certification structure.
Configure the project's own ITR templates up front and require vendors to sign against project tags, not their own paperwork.
Undetected small-molecule leaks
Hydrogen tightness failures found late in commissioning cascade into re-work on joints that were assumed proven.
Record tightness tests against the system with medium, pressure, hold duration and instrument, and gate RFSU on the signed certificate.
Unverifiable purity claims
A product specification result has no value if the analyser behind it was never shown to be in calibration.
Attach the calibration certificate to every purity and moisture sampling record, not just the reading.
Milestone evidence assembled from scratch
A lender's technical adviser asks for evidence behind a completion milestone and the project spends weeks compiling it manually.
Generate the milestone pack as a filtered export of the same register used for the operator's dossier.
Handover
One export, three audiences: operator, lender, regulator.
The dossier exports per subsystem with certificates, signed records, tightness and purity evidence, calibration certificates, punch position and preservation history, in the structure the operating organisation retains.
The same register answers the other two audiences without a separate reporting exercise: a lender's technical adviser can be given the evidence behind a completion milestone, and a regulator or verifier can be given the measurement chain and containment-related records as a filtered set.
Because every signature carries name, role, organisation and timestamp, none of those packs depend on a covering letter to be believed.
MRV baseline and the years after start-up
A capture or hydrogen project is audited for decades, so the commissioning record becomes the first year of the monitoring record.
Measurement, reporting and verification starts at handover: the CO₂ mass flow meter on the export line, the composition analyser after dehydration, downhole pressure and temperature gauges, wellhead sampling points and leak detection along the route all need calibration certificates in hand, not promised.
After start-up, four audiences read that evidence for different reasons — the regulator against permit conditions and injection limits, the verifier against tonnes stored, the lender's technical adviser against availability, and the offtaker against hydrogen purity and delivery pressure.
First-of-a-kind plants are audited harder than proven ones. Holding the baseline instrument set and its certificates in the same register as the construction records means each audience exports what it needs instead of everyone maintaining a private spreadsheet.
How it runs
How a hydrogen, ammonia or CCS scope is set up in Deskely.
The aim is to give a first-of-a-kind plant the completions discipline of a mature one, without forcing it into forms written for a different process.
- 01
Structure by process block and package
Electrolysis, compression, purification, ammonia loop, capture, regeneration, transport and injection become subsystems that can be certified independently.
- 02
Configure the ITR set for the process
Tightness, purity, analyser and DC electrical checks are defined once as the project's own templates rather than adopted from each vendor.
- 03
Bring package suppliers into the register
Vendors sign records against project tags under scoped access, so works test evidence arrives already attached to the right tag.
- 04
Tag the measurement chain
Meters, analysers and monitoring instrumentation are marked so calibration and loop evidence can be filtered as one view for a verifier.
- 05
Gate on performance, not completion
The ladder runs through mechanical completion and ready for start-up to the performance test the offtake agreement is written against.
- 06
Export for each audience
The same register produces the operator's dossier, the lender's milestone evidence and the regulator's measurement pack without re-assembly.
FAQ
Questions about Hydrogen and CCS scopes.
Keep reading
Oil and gas commissioning
The full sector view: certification ladder, preservation, handover and the terminology behind them.
Read moreITR records
A, B and C records completed on tablets in the field and signed against the tag they belong to.
Read moreCertificates
MC, RFSU and handover certificates issued from signed records, with the gates enforced by the data.
Read moreOther oil and gas scopes: LNG trains and gas processing, FPSO and floating production, Brownfield tie-ins and turnarounds, Fixed platforms and jackets, Subsea tie-backs, Refineries and petrochemical, Pipelines and compressor stations, Terminals, tank farms and jetties, Decommissioning and late life.
