Lhyfe, one of the world’s pioneers in green and renewable hydrogen production, announces that its offshore hydrogen production pilot, known as Sealhyfe, will return to the Quai des Frégates in Saint-Nazaire.
In launching, on September 23, 2022, 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.
The company therefore voluntarily chose to confront Sealhyfe under real offshore conditions during several months. It has thus been tested on a floating platform, which has been re-engineered to stabilise the production unit at sea (the WAVEGEM platform, engineered by GEPS Techno), and connected to Central Nantes’ SEM-REV offshore testing hub operated by the OPEN-C Foundation, which was already linked with a floating wind turbine (FLOATGEN, engineered and operated by BW Ideol).
For this, Lhyfe and its partners designed, built and assembled all of the technology necessary for producing hydrogen offshore, including the 1 MW electrolyser supplied by Plug. The Sealhyfe platform is capable of producing up to 400 kilograms of hydrogen a day.
As soon as it was launched in September 2022, the platform underwent an initial phase of start-up trials at quay (benchmarking tests, technology and system optimisation, development of key solutions…).
Sealhyfe was then towed to the SEM-REV offshore testing site, for the second phase focused on a strict comparison with the results initially observed at quay and then on additional offshore-specific tests (reliability of offshore production of hydrogen in an isolated environment, management of the platform’s movement and environmental stresses, validation of green and renewable hydrogen production software and algorithms…).
During this testing period at sea, the platform was subjected to a wide variety of weather situations and was able to carry out a series of tests enabling millions of data to be gathered.
At the end of these many months of experimentation, Lhyfe has decided to bring the platform back to dock, and Lhyfe will now analyse the data in greater depth, with the main findings likely to be shared as early as January 2024. These results will benefit all Lhyfe’s current and future sites, onshore and offshore, and will notably be used as part of stage 2 of its development of hydrogen production offshore: the HOPE project.
In June, Lhyfe announced that the HOPE project, which it is coordinating as part of a consortium of nine partners, had been selected by the European Commission under the European Clean Hydrogen Partnership and was being awarded a €20 million grant. With HOPE, Lhyfe and its partners are moving up a gear and aiming for commercialisation. From 2026, this unprecedentedly large-scale project (10 MW) 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. Therefore Sealhyfe will give HOPE a huge boost.
Furthermore, Lhyfe has signed partnership agreements with wind turbine developers and offshore power specialists, such as EDPR, Centrica and Capital Energy, as well as large-scale offshore projects, such as the Åland Energy Island project with CIP and Flexens, to develop an integrated large-scale renewable energy system based on offshore wind power, including the production of green hydrogen on Åland in Finland.
Matthieu Guesné, Founder and CEO of Lhyfe said: “We’re extremely proud to have brought this unique experimentation to a successful conclusion, and to have taken a new step on the road to producing hydrogen offshore! Our teams have brought their many skills to bear on this world first. We’re already benefiting from the experience we’ve gained and putting it to good use in our next steps towards offshore production. The production of hydrogen at sea is now a reality, and the countdown to scale up has begun!”
Photo of Lhyfe
Press release https://is.gd/ORaxzj
