The pioneering Dolphyn offshore wind-to-hydrogen pilot being developed in the North Sea off Scotland by ERM has taken a key step towards first generation in 2025 with the award to floating technology outfit Principle Power of front-end engineering and design (Feed) work on the 10MW project.
Being run off the Vestas turbine-powered ACS Cobra’s 50MW Kincardine array off Aberdeen – currently the sector’s largest floating project – the demonstrator will trial an innovative modular wind-powered electrolysis system wired into one of the wind farm’s WindFloat platforms to generate H2 from seawater and flow it to shore via a pipeline for industrial decarbonisation use.
“It is now established that to meet net-zero ambitions in the UK and all around the world, hydrogen from offshore floating wind needs to be a significant component in any viable long-term solution for heat, electricity generation, and transport,” said ERM partner David Caine.
“The project, a first-of-a-kind, is an innovative integrated system combining all the technologies required to bring the latest floating wind and hydrogen production technologies together to enable offshore wind resources to contribute toward hydrogen production at scale.”
Gregory-Campbell Smith, senior business development manager for Europe at Principle Power, said: “Moving to Feed on the Dolphyn project is a significant milestone towards our collective carbon-free future.”
Dolphyn – an acronym of deepwater offshore local production of hydrogen – is slated to be in operation “in late 2025”, with commercial-scale 300MW-plus projects “under development and expected for operation pre-2030”, and gigascale deployment to follow.
ERM Dolphyn recently won £8.62m ($9.5m) in funding from a UK government low carbon hydrogen supply competition.
The developer, which has been collaborating with Principle Power on decentralised hydrogen production since 2019, calculates that deployed at total capacity of 4GW, the project could supply zero-carbon power and heat to more than 1.5 million homes.
Though currently much pricier that bottom-fixed offshore — or, of course, onshore — wind, floating wind-fuelled hydrogen plants in the world’s deepwater regions could be an industrial reality sooner than many thought, with Dolphyn among the pilots currently heading for the water along with others backed by oil & gas and power giants TotalEnergies, Shell and Engie.
