Presentations

Abstract

The growing demand for sustainable energy is expected to give an increase in offshore wind generation. Traditionally, the generated power is exported to shore on high voltage power cables. Several industry reports have however concluded that it can be more cost efficient to convert the generated power to hydrogen and export the energy on a pipeline to shore. This is especially the case when the wind farms are large or located far from shore. Green hydrogen is needed to both fulfill growing industry needs, e.g. for green steel, and to help balance the grid being loaded with an increasing amount of variable renewable energy. In short, offshore wind and offshore hydrogen need to work in synergy to help both technologies to scale up. Critics often argue that hydrogen production at sea will increase the cost of the hydrogen. This paper will focus on design principles and guidelines which can be applied to optimize the levelized cost of hydrogen for an offshore production platform. The presentation will focus on two issues: On how an offshore hydrogen plant can be designed to keep initial investment cost low, and on long term solutions for optimized operability and maintenance to minimize the operational cost and maximize system lifetime. The design guidelines have been applied to develop a modular system based on building blocks that can first be used to qualify smaller pilot offshore hydrogen platforms, and later efficiently be scaled up to units of several hundred MW. In the presentation we will focus on a hydrogen production unit placed on a fixed bottom platform, but the principles can be applied also for floating platforms.