Ørsted and BP have signed a letter of intent to work together to develop a ‎project for industrial-scale production of green hydrogen.

In their proposed Lingen Green Hydrogen project, the two firms intend to build an initial 50 ‎megawatt (MW) electrolyser and associated infrastructure in Germany at a BP refinery. This will be powered by renewable energy generated by an Ørsted offshore ‎wind farm in the North Sea and the hydrogen produced will be used in the refinery. ‎The companies anticipate the project could be ‎operational by 2024.

The 50 MW electrolyser project is expected to produce one tonne an hour of green ‎hydrogen or almost 9,000 tonnes a year. This would be sufficient to replace around 20 per cent of ‎the refinery’s current ‘grey’ hydrogen consumption, avoiding around 80,000 tonnes of CO2 ‎equivalent emissions a year.

Green hydrogen, made by the electrolysis of water using ‎renewable power, ‘grey’ hydrogen is more common and ‎produced by reforming natural gas, which does result in CO2 emissions.

Martin Neubert, executive vice president and CEO of offshore wind for Ørsted, noted: ‎‎“Heavy industries such as refineries use large quantities of hydrogen in their manufacturing ‎processes. They will continue to need hydrogen but replacing the current fossil-based ‎hydrogen with hydrogen produced from renewable energy can help these industries ‎dramatically lower their CO2 footprint. But first, renewable hydrogen has to become cost ‎competitive with fossil-based hydrogen, and for that we need projects such as this with BP’s ‎Lingen refinery which will demonstrate the electrolyser technology at large scale and ‎showcase real-life application of hydrogen based on offshore wind.”‎

In addition to green hydrogen production, bp and Ørsted intend to focus on maximising the ‎efficiency of the project’s electrolysis system, including assessing sustainable uses for the ‎main by-products of the process, primarily oxygen and low-grade excess heat.‎ The project is also intended to support a longer-term ambition to build more than 500MW of ‎renewable-powered electrolysis capacity at Lingen. This could provide green hydrogen to ‎both meet all the refinery’s hydrogen demand and provide feedstock for potential future ‎synthetic fuel production.

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