With its goal to produce up to a million tonnes of renewable hydrogen from as much as 10GW of offshore wind power, AquaVentus is among the most ambitious green hydrogen projects in the world.
And with more than 60 companies and organisations from all parts of the hydrogen supply chain already on board, backers of the plan focused on the German North Sea island of Heligoland hope it is also among the most likely projects to actually take off in practice, thanks to Germany's and the EU's determination to rapidly ramp up a green hydrogen economy.
Senior figures from two of the initiative's leading partners, turbine giant Siemens Gamesa and RWE, one of the world’s biggest offshore wind operators, told Recharge the vast project has all the ingredients for success – if regulators at all levels to do their parts to make AquaVentus a reality.
“There is a very high likelihood that the project will be built, because there is enormous demand for green hydrogen,” Martin Gerhardt, deputy chairman at AquaVentus and senior vice president for offshore platform and portfolio management at Siemens Gamesa, told Recharge.
Berlin in its national hydrogen strategy launched last year said Germany should set aside 10GW of renewable energy installations for the production of green hydrogen by 2035 via electrolysers, and seek to import H2 made using a further 5GW of renewables. The EU in its own strategy aims at green hydrogen produced from 40GW of renewables capacity by 2030.
“AquaVentus is one of the most ambitious green hydrogen initiatives in Germany,” Sven Utermöhlen, chief operations officer, wind offshore global, at RWE Renewables and deputy chair on the AquaVentus board, told Recharge.
“It covers everything from the generation of green power by offshore wind farms and production of hydrogen offshore through to transportation to customers on land.”
The German utility is rapidly expanding its green hydrogen business and via its involvement in 30 green hydrogen projects in Europe across all steps of the value chain is emerging as a potential future H2 champion.
We need the regulatory framework for the sites, so we need locations and sites at sea.
But both Siemens Gamesa and RWE make clear that companies alone cannot shoulder the Herculean effort of building up a green hydrogen economy from scratch.
“We need the regulatory framework for the sites, so we need locations and sites at sea where we can deploy that,” Gerhardt said.
Policies needed
“We also need regulations and technical requirements for producing hydrogen out of the sea. At the moment, all this doesn’t exist. It needs to be created.”
Utermöhlen adds: “Production of offshore hydrogen does require a high degree of seeding investment in pilot projects, so I am pleased that two projects of the AquaVentus family have been shortlisted for financial support as part of the IPCEI programme. This will give AquaVentus added impetus.”
Germany’s economics and transport ministries recently pre-selected 62 large renewable hydrogen projects to receive support under the EU’s Important Projects of Common European Interest (IPCEI) programme. The projects, which are earmarked to receive more than €8bn ($9.7bn) in federal and state funding if approved by the European Commission, include two sub-projects of AquaVentus, the AquaPrimus 2 pilot and the AquaDuctus hydrogen pipeline plan.
'Show case' AquaPrimus
At AquaPrimus 2, RWE, Siemens Gamesa, Siemens Energy and oil supermajor Shell are teaming up to install two 14MW Siemens Gamesa offshore machines near Heligoland with an integrated water electrolyser to produce green hydrogen at the turbine.
A prototype electrolyser called AquaPrimus 1 will be tested at the port of Mukran in the Baltic Sea before that, without attaching it to a wind turbine. The green gas from AquaPrimus 2 subsequently will be transported to Heligoland via a small hydrogen-only pipeline. The pilot is expected to be installed by 2025, RWE said.
AquaPrimus is in effect the embryo of the entire AquaVentus project, and expected to be scaled up to competitive utility-scale dimensions.
“At AquaVentus, we have a multi-stage plan. We start with two small turbines next to Heligoland, then as a next step we want to have 300MW,” Gerhardt said.
“And then we go into this ‘Duck’s Beak’, this long part of the German economic zone, that goes almost into the Dogger Bank [off the UK].”
The AquaVentus initiative in its entirety is slated to function like an umbrella of different, scalable projects, each with its own financial investment decision, Gerhardt explained.
To ensure green hydrogen (made using renewables as opposed to blue hydrogen made from natural gas) will be competitive, it needs to be scalable and affordable, he added.
“We believe in green hydrogen, but we also need to prove it, and we need to have a showcase that works and that can be scaled fast.
“With climate change, it is a race against the clock. So we don’t have a lot of time.”
Siemens Gamesa already has erected a prototype of a turbine with an integrated electrolyser at a test field in Brande, Denmark, which is producing first green hydrogen onshore.
AquaDuctus hydrogen pipeline
RWE, Shell, and the Dutch and German gas grid operators, Gasunie and Gascade, have teamed up for a second sub-project that has been pre-selected under the EU’s IPCEI funding programme, called AquaDuctus.
The companies have already signed a declaration of intent to carry out a detailed feasibility study for the project, which aims to eventually pipe up to one million tonnes of green hydrogen per year from 2035.
As the green hydrogen from the AquaVentus initiative will be produced directly at sea, it can be transported to shore via pipelines instead of first producing electricity, transmitting it to shore and then using it to make hydrogen there.
“To build a pipeline is actually cheaper, it can be built much faster. And it also requires less space,” Gerhardt said.
When reaching the dimensions of 10GW, one hydrogen pipeline can be built instead of five high voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission systems, which currently are the preferred option for bringing far-offshore wind energy to land.
Using up less space at the bottom of the sea is particularly important in the German North Sea, as all transmission lines or pipelines have to cross the Nationalpark Wattenmeer, the Wadden Sea national park, an intertidal zone with a high biological diversity. The Wadden Sea is on UNESCO’s World Heritage List, and an important area for both breeding and migrating birds.
The cost factor obviously is also key, especially the further from shore wind farms are built.
“The scarcity of sites for offshore wind will push the offshore wind production further out to sea,” Gerhardt explained.
“We will go really far out, and there a decentralised model becomes even more advantageous, because you have even more capacity and less losses, and infrastructure building can be reduced to a pipeline.”
The multi-stage plan foresees scaling up green hydrogen output to up to 100,000 tonnes by 2030, and eventually one million tonnes by 2035 produced from 10GW of offshore wind – more than Germany currently has installed for electricity generation.
Tapping into wind farms in Norway?
To build the enormous offshore wind capacity for the production of green hydrogen alone, the German government must at first tender off a priority wind area in the German Bight called SEN-1 by mid-next year at the latest, the AquaVentus initiative reckons.
To achieve the full 10GW of offshore wind capacity, wind arrays by various developers should be built far-offshore. That could be either in the German waters' ‘Duck’s Beak’ that stretches almost into the UK’s Dogger Bank area in the middle of the North Sea, or even in areas belonging to the sea space of neighbouring countries.
“When you think big, from there [the area close to Dogger Bank] you could connect to the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway and the UK,” Gerhardt said.
“Norway has a smaller population, but they have a lot of space up there. So we could maybe use a pipeline to then also get energy from there.”
Norway’s petroleum and energy ministry last week put out proposals to public consultation for its upcoming up to 4.5GW offshore wind tender. One of the areas to be auctioned off, the Southern North Sea 2 zone, has been earmarked for some 3GW in bottom-fixed installations and geographically lies relatively close to the German economic zone.
The Norwegian government is mulling allowing hybrid projects there, which would be grid-linked both to Norway and neighbouring countries, although Oslo so far hasn’t contemplated hydrogen pipelines.
Those considerations at the moment still sound somewhat far-fetched. The task of implementing the AquaVentus concept with all its sub-projects is not a sprint, RWE stressed, but a marathon.
Next milestones in the long haul will be achieving the EU’s green light for funding at AquaPrimus and AquaDuctus, subsequently a financial investment decision (FID) for those, and securing a site for the first two turbines.
“If this all comes together, we can take an investment decision,” Gerhardt said.
