French green hydrogen firm Lhyfe has announced that its offshore green hydrogen production pilot, known as Sealhyfe, has produced its first kilos of renewable hydrogen from floating wind turbines at sea in the Atlantic Ocean.
In launching the world’s first offshore hydrogen production pilot, Lhyfe wanted to prove the technical feasibility of such a project and acquire the operational experience needed to quickly scale up.
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Sealhyfe is based on a floating platform, which has been re-engineered to stabilise the production unit at sea and connected to Central Nantes’ SEM-REV offshore testing hub operated by the OPEN-C Foundation, which is already linked with a floating wine turbine.
Lhyfe and its partners designed, built and assembled all of the technology necessary for producing hydrogen offshore, including the 1MW electrolyser, in just 16 months. The Sealhyfe platform, which is less than 200sqm in area, is capable of producing up to 400kg of green hydrogen a day.
Lhyfe says it is now coordinating a follow-up project called HOPE as part of a consortium of nine partners, which has been selected by the European Commission under the European Clean Hydrogen Partnership and is being awarded a €20 million grant.
With HOPE, Lhyfe and its partners are moving up a gear and aiming for commercialisation. This unprecedentedly large-scale project (10MW) will be able to produce up to four tonnes a day of green hydrogen at sea, which will be exported ashore by pipeline, and then compressed and delivered to customers.
Through these two pioneering projects in offshore hydrogen production, Lhyfe aims to validate industrial solutions which it will submit in response to future calls for projects from various governments, to help achieve the target set by the European Commission as part of the REPowerEU plan of 10 million tonnes of clean hydrogen produced in the European Union by 2030.
To achieve this, Lhyfe has already signed partnership agreements with wind turbine developers and offshore power specialists, such as EDPR, Centrica and Capital Energy.
Lhyfe CEO and founder Matthieu Guesné said, “Our team, supported brilliantly by our partners, has achieved a genuine feat of technology in successfully designing this first floating green hydrogen production site. We are extremely proud to be the first in the world to produce hydrogen at sea.
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“This has been our wish since the launch of the company and we continue to move very quickly on offshore, which for us represents a tremendous development opportunity for mass producing hydrogen and decarbonising industry and transport. We are continuing to build on the successes we have had so far, firstly to prove to the world that transition is possible today, and of course to accelerate it.”
