PARIS, France, December 2, 2021 (ENS) – The world’s first floating wind turbine with an integrated hydrogen production system onboard has advanced one step closer to realization.
Known as the Nerehyd™, the offshore green hydrogen facility is the result of a new partnership between two French companies – the fledgling hydrogen production company Lhyfe (say life), and the clean energy engineering company DORIS with its floating wind turbine solution Nerewind™.
Nerehyd incorporates a hydrogen production facility into the floater of the wind turbine. It could be deployed for on-grid or off-grid applications, from small-scale 10-megawatt wind turbines to large-scale wind farms with several hundred megawatts of capacity.
Lhyfe produces and supplies green and renewable hydrogen for use in the transport sector and industry; the company opened its first industrial green hydrogen production site on September 30 in Vendée on the Atlantic coast in western France.
The Hydrogen Council, a global CEO-led group of companies that believe hydrogen is central to a clean energy transition, anticipates a 2050 hydrogen market as large as the current oil and gas market.
DORIS is planning to be at the forefront of the offshore hydrogen market as it has been for the last decade on the offshore oil and gas market and for the last 20 years on the offshore wind.
Representatives of Lhyfe and DORIS signed a memorandum of understanding late last month that commits them to combine their technical innovations and expertise, and sets up a €60 million budget for the project that includes R&D and production of the first prototype, due in 2025.
Executive Deputy Managing Director of DORIS Engineering Xavier Grandiaud said, “While we have no doubts that producing green hydrogen on land will be the first step in large-scale global development, we deeply believe in the need to move rapidly offshore to meet the strong demand ahead, which will require a massive amount of electricity.”
“With Lhyfe, we believe that offshore production will be the best way to successfully produce large amounts of green hydrogen without impacting terrestrial landscapes or relying on an existing grid connection,” Grandiaud said.
“Our Nerehyd solution is the perfect tool for large-scale, sustainable and economically viable green hydrogen production. With Lhyfe, we now have all the keys in hand to make Nerehyd a success,” he said.
The whole venture is very new. While DORIS has been in business for 50+ years, the MoU was signed just weeks after four-year-old Lhyfe’s first production site in Vendée began producing the first few hundred kilos a day of carbon-free green hydrogen. The operational knowledge gained from this world’s first will help finalize the development of the Nerehyd.
Matthieu Guesné, CEO and founder of Lhyfe, said, “At Lhyfe, the reason we located our first production site near the ocean was to start producing in offshore conditions, because from day one we have been certain of one thing: offshore is the key to the massive development of renewable hydrogen.”
“We are starting to see more and more offshore wind farms and traditional players are keen to find ways to scale-up their infrastructures and solutions,” Guesné said. “We are therefore very optimistic about the development of this sector and are working to offer a range of solutions to adapt to each situation.”
Featured image: The DORIS and Lhyfe proprietary NereHyd™ solution, a floating wind turbine with hydrogen production capacity aboard (Illustration courtesy Lhyfe/DORIS)
