NZTC gets funding for hydrogen project

The Net Zero Technology Centre (NZTC) has received a grant of £2.12 million ($2.36 million) from the Scottish government’s Just Transition Fund to support its Hydrogen Offshore Production Project (HOP2).

HOP2, a four-year development, will demonstrate whether offshore hydrogen production and storage is feasible at a scale of 500 MW to 1 GW through repurposing existing oil and gas infrastructure.

The program will also determine what a newbuild project for offshore hydrogen production could achieve on the UK Continental Shelf and the potential impact on the regional workforce in Scotland.

It follows the NZTC-led Offshore Hydrogen Production project, which received funding as part of the 2018 BEIS Low Carbon Hydrogen Supply competition, and recommendations made in the “Technology Driving Green Energy Growth” report, published with the Technology Leadership Board, NZTC and Accenture.

The report recommends an infrastructure plan for transporting, transmitting, storing and managing emerging energy sources, such as hydrogen, ammonia, renewable electricity and CO2, to make better use of in-place infrastructure.

HOP2 aims include exploiting wind resources further out offshore Scotland to deliver the 65 TWh of hydrogen required to deliver net zero by 2040 and to do this via a local, centralized export location for energy resource in the form of hydrogen, rather than having individual wind farm developers install electrical cables to shore.