Lhyfe’s (EPA:LHYFE) offshore hydrogen production pilot, called Sealhyfe, has successfully been deployed into the Atlantic, offshore France, after a trial phase at the quay in the Port of Saint-Nazaire that lasted from September 2022 to May 2023.
The French green hydrogen company today hailed the production of the first kilos of green hydrogen in the Atlantic Ocean by Sealhyfe, the world’s first offshore hydrogen production pilot.
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Sealhyfe has been towed 20 km (12.4 miles) off the coast of Le Croisic to the SEM-REV offshore testing site and connected to the site’s subsea hub, where BW Ideol’s Floatgen floating wind turbine is already connected. The platform began producing hydrogen on June 20, and it has the capacity to generate up to 400 kilograms of hydrogen per day.
Sealhyfe consists of a 1-MW Plug electrolyser located on a floating platform that is engineered by GEPS Techno to stabilise the production unit at sea. It will now undergo testing under the toughest real-world conditions.
Lhyfe has already incorporated the lessons learned from the first trial phase into updated specifications for all its onshore and offshore projects.
“We are extremely proud to be the first in the world to produce hydrogen at sea. This has been our wish since the launch of the company and we continue to move very quickly on offshore, which for us represents a tremendous development opportunity for mass producing hydrogen and decarbonising industry and transport,” stated Lhyfe founder and chief executive Matthieu Guesne.
The ambitions for large-scale offshore production of renewable hydrogen are moving up a gear with the HOPE (Hydrogen Offshore Production for Europe) project, coordinated by Lhyfe, which has signed a EUR 20 million (USD 21.8m) grant agreement with the European Commission, the French company also announced today.
Lhyfe aims to use these two projects to validate industrial solutions which it plans to submit in future calls for projects from different governments, in support of the EU’s target of 10 million tonnes of clean hydrogen production by 2030. It has already formed partnerships with this perspective with EDPR, Centrica and Capital Energy.
(EUR 1 = USD 1.092)
