The world’s biggest green hydrogen projects have long stressed their oil & gas-scale ambitions and one of the largest of all – the $36bn Asian Renewable Energy Hub in Australia – has its own supermajor after BP this week agreed to become its largest stakeholder and operator.
In an exclusive interview with Recharge, BP’s green energy chief Anja-Isabel Dotzenrath said the group has the scale and experience to build and run the vast 26GW project, and put the industry on notice of more similar deals to come.
It was quite a week all round for the H2 plans of the world’s biggest oil & gas players. Just a day before BP’s announcement, French peer TotalEnergies said it would buy a quarter stake in India’s Adani New Industries as the latter gears up for a $50bn spend to create “the largest green hydrogen ecosystem in the world”.
Recharge also reported how US oil giant Chevron, one of the fossil-fuel industry’s energy-transition laggards, will spend about $2.5bn in the next five-and-a-half years on green and blue hydrogen.
The slew of announcements shows how the world’s fossil giants are increasingly willing to put big money behind what one called “the next LNG”, a Recharge analysis article explained.
Even as floating wind goes from strength to strength – the week saw the launch of a 1GW plan led by Equinor to decarbonise Norwegian oil and gas – other branches of marine renewable energy are reaching milestones of their own.
Recharge reported how CorPower Ocean has unveiled its first commercial scale wave energy converter and a cluster system of linked buoys that could eventually form utility-scale ‘wave farms’, with plans for a pilot off Portugal.
Across the Atlantic, first power is now flowing to the grid in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia from the country’s first-ever in-stream tidal device operating in what’s known as ‘the Everest of tidal energy’.
Finally, it’s back to floating wind for the entry into offshore technology of auto giant GM, whose GM Ventures arm backed the futuristic Wind Catcher system.
Brazil has for some years been spoken of as a contender for offshore wind’s next big market, but with sluggish legislative progress and stiff competition from onshore renewables, little in the form of large-scale ambition from the sector’s biggest players.
That is changing fast, with Recharge first to report how Macquarie-backed Corio Generation has unveiled plans for a quintet of projects off Brazil totalling over 5GW – its first foray into the Americas.
It also emerged that the Ocean Winds joint venture of Engie and EDPR has big Brazilian plans of its own as it pursues permits for more than 15GW there.
Brazil is among a growing number of emerging offshore wind markets that, as noted by Recharge Editor-in-Chief Darius Snieckus, are helping the sector fulfil its historic mission as a main engine of the energy transition.
