Impact with clients
Developing green hydrogen power from offshore wind
Using the power of hydrogen could significantly reduce carbon emissions, create jobs and make industrial processes cleaner and greener, benefitting the whole economy as the United Kingdom work towards net zero by 2050.
ERM is working on an innovative project to help roll out hydrogen at scale by the 2030s – a crucial step towards the end of the United Kingdom’s contribution to global warming. We recently completed the first phase of the Dolphyn project, a floating platform design that will provide access to offshore wind resources in deep water up to several hundred kilometers from land.
We completed a preliminary front-end engineering design (FEED) for a 2-megawatt hydrogen prototype facility to be built in the United Kingdom by 2024. The floating facility will produce zero-carbon hydrogen from offshore wind and is being funded as part of the UK government’s £33 million hydrogen supply program.
A single 10-megawatt unit will produce in excess of 800 metric tons of hydrogen per year. The hydrogen can be exported back to shore via a pipeline, without any external power source.
Dolphyn is a completely scalable technology which, once established, can be expanded across the North Sea, providing the United Kingdom with low carbon energy as we gradually reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. Our country’s abundance of offshore wind, coupled with our leading oil and gas and offshore wind industry expertise, means we are ideally placed to benefit from this new technology.
The Dolphyn system is designed such that it can be deployed in stand-alone mode or as multiple connected units to form an offshore hydrogen wind farm. A 400 turbine farm (20 x 20 array) would have a capacity of 4 gigawatts, producing over 350,000 tons of hydrogen per annum, sufficient to heat more than 1.5 million homes with no carbon emissions.
The design has been developed through a detailed technical and financial evaluation process to achieve the lowest predicted cost for producing hydrogen from renewables at scale in the United Kingdom. The initial engineering work is now complete, and the project has received a further £3.1 million of funding to move forward to the detailed design stage, with a view to making a final investment decision on a 2-megawatt prototype facility by March 2021.
The development plan for the project has a target date for the operational start-up of the 2-megawatt facility in 2024. A 10-megawatt full scale pre-commercial facility is planned to follow 3 years later.