Facilitating Change (UK) Ltd is delighted to be supporting Vattenfall’s stakeholder engagement activities in relation to its ground breaking hydrogen project which has been awarded £9.3m innovation funding from the ‘Net Zero Innovation Portfolio Low Carbon Hydrogen Supply 2’ fund by the UK’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.
The funding will be used to develop the world’s first hydrogen-producing offshore wind turbine, with the 8MW hydrogen electrolyser sited directly onto an existing operational turbine at its test and demonstration wind farm in Aberdeen Bay.
The pilot project at Vattenfall’s Aberdeen Offshore Wind Farm will be able to produce enough hydrogen every day to power a hydrogen bus to travel 15,000 miles. The hydrogen will be piped to shore at the Port of Aberdeen.
Work on the project has commenced, with the goal of first production as early as 2025.
The availability of large quantities of fossil-free hydrogen will play a key role in the decarbonisation of heavy industry (predominantly in steel, chemicals, and fertiliser production as well as refining), and heavy transport.
The project – ‘Hydrogen Turbine 1’ or ‘HT1’ – aims to be first project in the world to test the full integration of hydrogen production with an offshore wind turbine. HT1 will also map out development and consent processes for large-scale hydrogen projects co-located with offshore wind farms to speed up future development.
Facilitating Change’s Managing Partner, Tori McCusker, explains the company’s role in the project: “engaging with stakeholders is an important component in the consenting success of any significant development. This project is particularly interesting as we are bringing our experience in offshore renewables to help map out the consenting processes for new types of development relating to the generation of green hydrogen.”
