Progress propelled in Scotland by the power of hydrogen

Large scale renewable projects like Ørsted’s Hornsea Three project or SSE’s Seagreen, will be instrumental to the UK and Scotland delivering on its net zero target, each project providing power to millions of homes each and limiting the negative consequences of climate change and the threat it poses to the environment. 

Fossil fuel use in industry and transportation is one of the biggest obstacles to decarbonising the global economy. These two sectors account for more than a third of global greenhouse gas emissions; without a rapid re-imagining of how these sectors are fuelled, it will be impossible to constrain global temperature increase to less than 1.5°C.

Over the past decade, significant cost reductions in renewable energy have allowed its use to become more widespread, which in turn is driving decarbonisation through greater electrification.

For example, batteries in cars are increasingly replacing the need for diesel or petrol driven engines. In buildings, high-efficiency electric heat pumps are delivering cleaner and less costly space heating. However, while these gains are valuable, the hard work of deep decarbonisation remains.

Direct electrification is, quite simply, not feasible for many sectors such as heavy-duty road transport, deep-sea shipping and aviation.

HOW RENEWABLE HYDROGEN CAN HELP US DECARBONISE

LARGE-SCALE and low-cost generation from wind and solar is opening up new pathways to achieve this decarbonisation. Renewable electricity can now be used to create clean, renewable hydrogen. 

Hydrogen is currently produced almost exclusively from fossil fuels, in the main natural gas which involves producing hydrogen from methane while the carbon is released as CO2.

At present, fossil hydrogen production accounts for about 6% of global natural gas and 2% of global coal consumption, and around 2% of all global energy related greenhouse gas emissions come from production of hydrogen.  But renewable hydrogen is completely carbon free. 

It is created by splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen through a process known as electrolysis. The hydrogen is collected and used, while oxygen is released as the by-product if there is no need for it locally.

Renewable hydrogen can also be used to produce synthetic fuel ('e-fuels'), which can replace its fossil-derived counterpart across many applications, including aviation and deep-sea shipping.

At Ørsted, our vision is a world running entirely on green energy. Since commissioning the world’s first offshore wind farm in 1991, we have been leaders in the quest to make this vast resource cost-competitive.

Now, building on renewable energy production from offshore wind, onshore wind and solar, we believe there is a path to establish and scale up production of renewable hydrogen and e-fuels.

In this way, power-to-X technologies can deliver ‘indirect electrification’. And a good starting point is by converting existing hydrogen demand from heavy industry to demand for renewable hydrogen.

Crucially, delivering affordable, low-carbon energy for traditional industries will also help protect the many hundreds of thousands of skilled workers employed in these industries in regions such as Grangemouth, the Humber, Teesside and right across the UK. 

Benj Sykes, the company's Head of Market Development in the UK

SO HOW DO WE ACHIEVE THIS?
DEVELOPMENT of renewable hydrogen is ongoing, with more and larger electrolyser projects announced year by year. 

To maximise the decarbonisation potential of this fuel, costs must be brought down through industrialisation and scale. We know this is possible, with the right framework conditions – because we have done it for the offshore wind sector.

But what else needs to happen to ensure renewable hydrogen can be delivered at scale?

First is the need for further development of renewable energy generation at scale.Today, costs of generating power from solar, onshore and offshore wind are lower than from new coal, gas or nuclear power plants. This is a game-changing enabler, making electrification a key driver for decarbonisation.

Access to low-cost renewable energy is a prerequisite for sustainable production of renewable hydrogen or e-fuels. 

Hence, to enable these power-to-X technologies to expand, policymakers must ensure that renewable power generation can scale further as well. Second is creating demand for renewable energy and renewable hydrogen in particular. 

As with renewable electricity, the desired shift to renewable hydrogen needs to be supported through demand creation whilst the technology develops and scales up, bringing costs down to – or below – the costs for fossil-fuel based hydrogen.

To underpin this the industry will need measures to incentivise and support use of renewable hydrogen and e-fuels and in parallel, incentives to support the growth of demand for products from businesses using renewable hydrogen to ensure that early industrial adopters are rewarded, not disincentivized.

Finally, we have seen in the offshore wind sector that the technologies we need to decarbonise our economy can and will come down rapidly in cost, as long as they receive the right policy support in their early days allowing the local market to develop. 

Governments play a huge role in this - setting clear and ambitious long-term targets provides investment visibility for the private sector, which again drives innovation, cost reductions, and large-scale deployment.  

We’ve seen that in spades in offshore wind, where the right policy mechanisms have helped costs drop by two thirds in just a decade.

When governments set ambitious targets and enact clear policies, the private sector can and will further accelerate the build-out of green energy. And it’s this kind of vision that we are seeing in Scotland and in the UK.

Now is the time for companies to innovate in the technologies that will put them at the forefront of the renewable hydrogen revolution – from more efficient electrolysers to stackable designs and high volume manufacturing that can follow the industrialisation and cost reduction route that offshore wind took. 

Companies like Ørsted have been a key part of that cost reduction journey for offshore wind and are now well-placed to assist with the development of renewable hydrogen and the end-to-end integration of renewable energy sources, renewable hydrogen production and supply to end-users.

Ørsted is involved in a number of renewable hydrogen projects and they demonstrate the large number of opportunities that hydrogen can create.  In the Humber, we are working with Philips66 to develop the production of renewable hydrogen for use in their refinery.  

In Copenhagen, we are developing a project that will produce renewable hydrogen for use in aviation and in shipping, working alongside an airport, an airline, shipping companies and others to progress the opportunity.  

We are also working with a fertiliser producer in the Netherlands to work on the production of low-carbon fertiliser for agriculture. All of these are opportunities that have the potential to be replicated easily in Scotland. 

The Scottish Government’s ambition to generate 5GW of renewable and low-carbon hydrogen by 2030 is a very positive signal with research suggesting that the industry could be worth up to £25 billion a year to the Scottish economy by 2045. 

The good news is that there are exciting opportunities to realise this potential  almost immediately through the ScotWind leasing round. The Covid-19 pandemic has given us an opportunity to refocus and, if we make the right choices now, potentially accelerate our progress to a more sustainable, low-carbon future.

---------------------------------------------

New wave of offshore energy innovations energise the nation’s net zero ambitions

IT is frequently argued that offshore wind, like other renewables, suffers from being intermittent and from generating power at times when not much power is needed, such as at night. The bigger the UK and Scotland’s offshore generating capabilities become, the sharper these issues will become, unless the industry finds some great solutions.

Benj Sykes, Head of Market Development in the UK for Ørsted, argues that the solution to the problem lies in the emerging hydrogen economy. 

By using offshore wind to power the electrolysis required to split off hydrogen from water, the industry will be able to generate as much stored energy as is required by society, he points out, with visions such as Ørsted's SeaH2Land project – a huge renewable hydrogen production facility projected to be built by 2030.

Ørsted already has a number of hydrogen-related projects running. It is part of the Gigastack consortium, along with ITM Power, Phillips 66 Ltd., and Element Energy. The Gigastack project aims to show how renewable hydrogen derived from offshore wind can support the UK’s 2050 net-zero greenhouse gas emissions target. 

Producing hydrogen from water, using offshore wind to drive the electrolysis process, enables the process to be completely de-carbonised. 

Sykes notes that this means that energy-intensive industries and the transportation sector will have the opportunity to reduce the carbon intensity of their fuels by using renewable hydrogen.

For the first part of the project ITM Power developed designs for a low-cost modular five-megawatt electrolyser. 

The second phase begins a Front-End Engineering Design (FEED) study on a 100MW electrolyser, which will specify the detailed workings of a system connected to a wind farm and industrial users. 

The offshore wind power will come from Ørsted’s Hornsea Two offshore wind farm. 

Anders Christian Nordstrøm, Vice President for Hydrogen, Ørsted, comments, “Creating renewable hydrogen with offshore wind really has the potential to decarbonise industrial processes, and what is needed now is to scale up the electrolyser technology and bring the cost down. At the right cost, this technology has the potential to play a huge role in meeting the UK’s decarbonisation targets. 

“We’re excited to be part of this project in the Humber region where we are already very active, including constructing the biggest offshore wind farms in the world, Hornsea One and Two, and with them setting the global standard for deployment of offshore wind at scale.”

In another project, Ørsted and BP have agreed to the joint development of a large-scale renewable hydrogen project at BP’s Lingen Refinery in North West Germany. 

The project, which is expected to be operational in 2024, will comprise a 50 Megawatt (MW) electrolyser system capable of generating one ton of renewable hydrogen per hour or almost 9,000 tonnes a year. 

This would be sufficient to replace approximately 20 percent of the refinery’s current fossil-based hydrogen consumption, avoiding around 80,000 tonnes CO2 equivalent emissions a year – equivalent to emissions from around 45,000 cars in Germany. 

The project is also intended to support a longer-term ambition to build more than 500MW of renewable hydrogen capacity at Lingen. 

This could provide renewable hydrogen to both meet all the refinery’s hydrogen demand and provide feedstock for future synthetic fuel production. The electrolyser is expected to be powered by an Ørsted North Sea offshore wind farm.

Martin Neubert, Executive Vice President for Ørsted comments: “Heavy industries such as refineries use large quantities of hydrogen in their manufacturing processes. 

"They will continue to need hydrogen, but replacing the currently fossil-based hydrogen with hydrogen produced from renewable energy can help lower their CO2 footprint.

"But first, renewable hydrogen has to become cost competitive, and for that we need projects such as BP’s Lingen refinery which will demonstrate the electrolyser technology at large scale and showcase real-life application of hydrogen based on offshore wind.” 

The partners have jointly applied for funding for the project named Lingen Green Hydrogen from the EU Innovation Fund, which is currently one of the largest programmes for low-carbon technologies focusing particularly among others on energy intensive industries.