Norwegian partnership assessing hydrogen production from offshore wind

Offshore staff

OSLO, Norway — Deep Wind Offshore formed a collaboration with Hydepoint in late January to pursue offshore hydrogen production from offshore wind.

Deep Wind Offshore is developing offshore wind farms with EDF Renewables in Norway and with bp in South Korea.

HydePoint, owned by Kongsberg, Moreld and Arendals Fossekompaniis, is a technology company specializing in offshore hydrogen production. The company has proprietary designs for offshore structures housing a substation and hydrogen production unit, from smaller bottom fixed units up to 500-MW bottom fixed and floating units. It is working on solutions to integrate hydrogen production with offshore wind developments.

“By producing hydrogen offshore close to the wind farms, the wind farms can be built farther out to sea, to avoid conflicted areas, and at the same time increase utilization and profitability,” said Knut Vassbotn, CEO of Deep Wind Offshore.

There are plans to construct hydrogen export pipelines from Norway, Sweden and Finland to Germany, and these could facilitate offshore hydrogen production close to the wind farms with the hydrogen delivered directly into the pipelines. 

HydePoint CEO Elin Steinsland said, “Exploring the best possible integration of offshore wind and hydrogen in an early project development phase can further optimize the value of the combined asset and reduce dependency on upgrades to existing infrastructure. In addition, the time it takes to start production of green hydrogen offshore can be significantly reduced by planning the wind farm and the hydrogen processing plant in parallel.”

02.06.2024