The world’s first offshore platform for the production of green hydrogen, ammonia and methanol has been completed off the coast of China’s Shandong province.
The pilot project is entirely self-contained, with no access to onshore power grids or external energy sources and will act as a proof-of-concept to allow clean ocean-going vessels to be refuelled at sea.
A host of solar panels — both on the platform and on floating solar modules beside it — provide the electricity to power three sets of electrolysers. One of these uses seawater directly to produce hydrogen, while two use up to five tonnes of fresh water a day provided by an onsite seawater desalination module.
The platform also contains equipment that convert the green hydrogen into ammonia (by combining it with nitrogen from the air) and methanol, although it is unclear how the CO2 needed for methanol production is sourced.
The project is now in the commissioning stage, but plans are already in place for a second phase that will use offshore wind and solar panels to enable megawatt-scale offshore hydrogen and methanol production off Jiangsu province by 2027.
A third phase would build a 1,000-tonnes-a-day green hydrogen-based clean fuel offshore platform in deep waters in the South China Sea by 2030.
The current pilot project is being jointly built 5km off the coast of Yantai city by China Energy Group Hydrogen Technology (a subsidiary of state-owned China Energy), Yantai CIMC Raffles City Offshore Engineering (a subsidiary of offshore engineering giant CIMC Raffles) and research institute Guoneng Hydrogen Innovation Technology.
"Converting wind and solar resources into green hydrogen and hydrogen-based fuels on-site can solve the problem of deep-sea renewable energy consumption, extend the value chain to hydrogen-based green fuels, and strongly support the construction of global green shipping corridors,” said China Hydrogen Energy Alliance secretary-general Liu Wei.
“It will become a strategic tool to ensure national energy security and promote international trade in hydrogen-based fuels, promote the development of international hydrogen energy trade, and help achieve zero-carbon commercial applications of marine hydrogen energy.”
China Energy Group Hydrogen Technology general manager Liu Congmin added: “Green hydrogen produced off-grid using offshore new energy can be further converted into easily stored ammonia and methanol. These two chemical products are not only clean fuels for ships, but also important industrial raw materials and can be widely used in chemical production and energy fields.”
Chinese scientists first produced green hydrogen directly from seawater at an offshore platform back in June 2023.
