Offshore engineering firm Aquaterra Energy has partnered with renewable hydrogen producer and supplier Lhyfe and offshore drilling contractor Borr Drilling to develop a concept for offshore green hydrogen production in the North Sea.
The organizations behind Project Haldane plan to develop an industrial-scale offshore green hydrogen production concept through the deployment of an electrolyzer system on a converted jackup rig.
“With our expertise in complex offshore operations and fleet management, Borr Drilling will leverage its core capabilities to evaluate the adoption of this alternative energy source in an environment with a large untapped potential,” said Darren Sutherland, Borr’s director of operations. “While we will continue to work in our traditional drilling market, this project reinforces our ambition to continuously improve the sustainability of our activities and align our service offering with the changing expectations of our customers and stakeholders.”
Reliable winds far out in the North Sea are an exceptional renewable resource, yet remote locations create challenges around grid connectivity and intermittency of supply. The planned concept is expected to solve this issue by providing an off-take for the electricity produced in the immediate vicinity of the windfarm and aims to use existing platforms, pipelines, terminal infrastructure, and offshore equipment, using the existing infrastructure to reduce costs.
“Lhyfe is already producing renewable hydrogen in industrial quantities onshore, with a direct connection to renewable energy, pumping sea water, and purifying it to feed the electrolysis process,” said Matthieu Guesné, Lhyfe’s CEO. “Over the last few years, we have also been working on different projects to deploy our production process offshore. Offshore wind offers the greatest potential for sustainable hydrogen production because of the cost effectiveness that can be achieved through scalability and technological innovation. The market is yet to deliver a flexible solution that benefits from the existing infrastructure in the North Sea, and Lhyfe wants to be at the forefront of this change by creating a world-first green hydrogen production of this kind.”