Off shore hydrogen production

Theme lead: Prof. dr. Dominic von Terzi

Main challenges:

• Techno-economics: How to produce green hydrogen from wind and/or solar energy with a competitive levelized cost of hydrogen (LCoH)?
• Scalability: How to produce the vast amount of hydrogen needed?  
• Sustainability: How to ensure circularity and acceptable environmental impact?
• System integration: How to ensure compatibility with the future energy and market systems including competition with other users of the sea and legal and regulatory aspects?

Ambitions / contributions: 

With the European plans for the development of large off-shore wind farms, off-shore hydrogen production is an interesting option because The North Sea can presumably accommodate half of the European offshore wind power (with over 200 GW installed capacity). An important aspect is that gas transport over longer distances is substantially cheaper than electricity transport per unit energy. Hydrogen can be stored in salt caverns that can be created in the large salt formations under the North Sea bottom, or in empty gas fields. Floating structures can provide space for central equipment such as electrolyzers and compressors.  

• Techno-economics: System studies to identify what combinations of technologies can achieve lowest LCoH and what new technology breakthroughs are needed to this end, e.g. hydrogen production integrated in turbines vs on separate platforms, floating vs fixed-bottom wind turbines, hybrid wind/solar vs single renewable source or electrolysis with desalinated water vs salt water.  
• Scalability: The vast amount of (green) hydrogen needed for a complete energy transition requires for floating offshore wind and/or solar energy to be employed at scale. Novel architectures are needed that can be deployed at the high seas, built and operated in large quantities and allow for a timely supply to the demand centers.
• Sustainability: Design optimization beyond economics for the full life-cycle and cradle-to-grave impacts for a range of operating conditions is needed. This may lead to different choices in materials, lifetime of the devices and system choices.
• System integration: Applying principles of inclusive design with key stakeholders and competing users of the sea and optimization across the full supply chain is envisioned. Considering scenarios for future energy systems and market structures in technology choices and system optimizations is needed.

Background

• Expertise: wind energy, hybrid renewable systems, floating wind and solar, electrolysis at sea, system optimization.
• Experience: projects on floating wind and solar and hybrid systems with storage, and various feasibility studies including wind turbine design for hydrogen production, dual use of offshore wind farms for electricity, hydrogen production and electrolysis under motion or with salt water and system integration, etc.
• Main research infrastructure: Floating Renewable Lab (to be built up) that virtually connects research labs across faculties, e.g. simulating the wind turbine in a water tank for floaters or the floater in a wind tunnel with turbine model.