The global green ammonia sector entered 2025 with a well-established pattern: ambitious announcements, slow progress to construction, and a persistent gap between stated ambition and deployed capacity. By the end of the year, that pattern had been interrupted — not by the megaprojects of Saudi Arabia or Australia that have attracted the most financial press coverage, but by a cluster of industrial facilities in the Jilin and Inner Mongolia provinces of northeast China.
Northeast China is not an obvious candidate to lead the green energy transition. The region is historically associated with heavy industry, coal-fired power, and conventional chemical production. It is also, however, endowed with some of the country's best wind resources, a pre-existing ammonia industry with port access to the Sea of Japan and the Yellow Sea, and a national policy environment that has strongly supported domestic green hydrogen deployment. The combination proved decisive.
The Chifeng plant: production at commercial scale
The most significant development of 2025 was the commissioning of Envision Energy's Net Zero Hydrogen Industrial Park in Chifeng, Inner Mongolia. Phase one of the project — with a nameplate capacity of 320,000 tonnes of green ammonia per year — came online in July 2025, making it the largest green hydrogen and ammonia facility to reach operation anywhere in the world at that point.
The plant operates entirely off-grid, drawing power from a dedicated portfolio of wind and solar assets with battery storage. This configuration eliminates the need for grid connection agreements and the associated additionality complications that have complicated certification for projects elsewhere. Envision applied for and received ISCC PLUS certification, audited by Bureau Veritas, covering the renewable origin of the ammonia produced. Marubeni, the Japanese trading house, secured offtake from the project — establishing the first certified green ammonia trade flow between China and Japan under a formal commercial agreement.
Exports from Chifeng began in Q4 2025. The facility is on track to expand to 5 MTPA across multiple phases, with the next increment of capacity expected to come online in 2027.
Also in July 2025, Jilin Electric Power commissioned its Da'an project in Jilin province, adding 180,000 tonnes per year of renewable ammonia capacity. Da'an draws on dedicated wind and solar generation in one of China's highest-wind-resource corridors. The two plants together put approximately 500,000 tonnes per year of certified green ammonia capacity into operation in northeast China by mid-2025 — a figure that dwarfs the combined operational green ammonia capacity of Europe and the rest of Asia at the same date.
The bunkering milestone
Production and certification alone do not constitute a supply chain. The step that most clearly demonstrated the maturity of what had been assembled in northeast China came in July 2025, when Envision Energy powered the world's first green marine ammonia bunkering operation at Dalian Port. Green ammonia produced at Chifeng was transported to Dalian — approximately 500 kilometres by road — and used to bunker a 5,500 horsepower ammonia-fuelled port vessel operated by COSCO Shipping.
The significance of this event is partly symbolic and partly structural. Symbolically, it demonstrated that the full value chain — renewable electricity, electrolysis, ammonia synthesis, certification, road transport, port storage, bunkering, and vessel operation — could be executed end-to-end using currently available technology and without experimental infrastructure. Structurally, it positioned Dalian as the world's first port capable of offering bunkering services in biofuel, green methanol, LNG, and green ammonia simultaneously — a combination that no port elsewhere can currently match.
What the infrastructure build-out looks like
The supply chains that have emerged in northeast China are not simply individual plants. They represent the early stages of a regional green energy infrastructure that is being developed at pace. Envision's longer-term plan involves the construction of a 300-kilometre liquid ammonia pipeline connecting Chifeng to Jinzhou Port on the Bohai Sea, where an ammonia storage terminal and dedicated export jetty are under development. Once complete, this would replace the current truck transport with a purpose-built export corridor capable of handling volumes several times larger than current production.
A consortium including Energy China (CEEC) and its subsidiary CEEC Hydrogen Energy is constructing a further green ammonia facility at Songyuan in Jilin province, with Phase One targeting 200,000 tonnes per year and a full-scale build-out of 800,000 tonnes per year. CEEC has also co-founded the Northeast Asia Green Bunkering Fuel Supply Chain Alliance, which aims to develop coordinated bunkering infrastructure across the region's major ports in anticipation of ammonia-fuelled vessel deployments from South Korean and Japanese shipyards expected from 2026 onwards.
What remains unresolved
The achievements in northeast China are genuine and substantial, but several questions remain open. The current distribution method — truck transport from production sites to ports — is workable at 2025 volumes but will not scale efficiently. The economics of liquid ammonia transport by road over several hundred kilometres add meaningful cost to a product that is already more expensive than conventional ammonia. The pipeline projects address this in principle, but they are capital-intensive and will take time to complete.
Certification frameworks also remain in flux. ISCC PLUS certification is accepted for certain markets, but EU RFNBO requirements — which will govern whether ammonia exported to Europe can qualify for the highest-value applications — impose more demanding additionality and temporal matching conditions. Whether the northeast China projects can meet these requirements at the volumes and prices that would make European export commercially attractive is still being worked through.
The northeast China developments demonstrate that commercial-scale green ammonia production is achievable now, with existing technology. The remaining question is not whether it works, but whether it can be made to work at the cost levels that global demand requires.
For the global green ammonia sector, the clearest implication of what happened in northeast China in 2025 is that the technology works at commercial scale and that a supply chain can be assembled. The challenge now is replication: building comparable infrastructure in the export geographies — the Middle East, Australia, India, Africa — that are positioned to supply the European and East Asian demand centres that represent the sector's largest near-term markets.