Jürgen Peterseim is Senior Manager at PwC.
(Photo: obs)
In Berlin we have the dictum “Wedding is coming”. It describes the state of hopeful waiting for a social upswing in the district.
For a long time, hydrogen was something like Wedding among the renewable energy sources. There has been a lot of talk about the technology, but not much has really happened.
That is now changing – numerous pilot plants are currently being built. They still act and produce largely in isolation and serve local projects – such as hydrogen-powered buses in public transport.
These pilot plants have to be scaled up so that they can produce competitively. This is only possible with the appropriate networks for transporting hydrogen and networking. We need physical pipeline infrastructure on land and in the North and Baltic Seas, as well as new hydrogen projects covering production, transport and use.
Top jobs of the day
Find the best jobs now and
be notified by email.
Since the turn of the century, politicians have been calling for ever more ambitious goals. But defining expansion goals is one thing, achieving them is something else. This shows the development of renewables in recent decades. At the same time, we have less and less time. So we have to use what is already there – and think creatively.
Floating hydrogen production saves time and money
So far, wind energy has been converted directly into electricity in wind farms near the coast, in order to then either feed it into the grid or generate green hydrogen with the help of an electrolyser. However, for a variety of reasons, the coastal areas can only be used to a limited extent for wind farms.
This is why wind turbines are being erected more and more at sea. However, longer and longer cables are required to derive the electricity generated there, which leads to significantly higher investment and maintenance costs.
An exciting alternative is offshore electrolysis, i.e. the conversion of wind power into hydrogen directly on the high seas on platforms, ships, artificial or natural islands. The gas is then transported away through converted natural gas pipelines, a large number of which are already lying on the bottom of the North Sea.
The bundling of wind power and electrolysis, for example, is being promoted by the Aquaventus Group: The Alphaventus project is intended to generate up to 22,000 tons of green hydrogen on one or more electrolysis platforms in the German Bight with an installed capacity of around 300 megawatts transported to land by pipeline. If this amount were used in steel production, for example, around 0.6 million tons of CO2 could be saved.
>> Read here: Industry fears high additional costs for wind at sea
Another approach is the so-called FPSO concept, which has long been established in the oil and gas industry: floating production, storage and unloading are bundled on ships, comparable to liquefied natural gas (LNG) tankers. The ships unload their “catch” at LNG terminals and then return to the offshore wind farms.
The alignment with existing oil and gas technologies has great advantages: the infrastructure is there and only needs to be modified. Since we don’t have the time or money to set up a completely new hydrogen infrastructure, technology recycling is a big plus. Floating solutions save time – the liquefied natural gas terminal in Wilhelmshaven can therefore go into operation as early as December 2022.
But there are also ships built specifically for offshore hydrogen production. It was only in September that a test platform was put into operation on the French Atlantic coast, which will convert the green electricity produced on an offshore wind turbine that is also floating into green hydrogen.
The North Sea is perfectly suited for offshore hydrogen production
Even if we don’t have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to technology, there are no limits to the creativity of companies when developing new value creation models. There is a lot of music behind the dry term “sector coupling”: offshore operators are developing the gas business, and chemical companies are entering the offshore wind business in order to generate green electricity and possibly soon green hydrogen.
The North Sea economic area in particular is perfectly suited to forming the basis for regional hydrogen production due to the many European neighbors, the climatic conditions and the existing technical infrastructure.
We should therefore pursue the vision of expanding the European Hydrogen Backbone from land to the North Sea. I am convinced that by setting up hydrogen production in the North Sea, we can give the energy transition additional impetus and thus strengthen energy independence and economic and political resilience.
In other words: the hydrogen is coming.
The author:
Jürgen Peterseim is Senior Manager at PwC.
More: Four countries want to turn the North Sea into the EU’s “green power plant”.