Assessment of offloading pathways for wind-powered offshore hydrogen production: Energy and economic analysis

Coupling offshore wind with hydrogen production can leverage the growth of both technologies due to synergies related to high capacity factors and the possibility of taking wind farms to areas where it would be impossible if these had to be connected to land. This work studies the competitiveness of different pathways of exporting hydrogen from offshore production plants, with special focus on the offloading to export hydrogen (pure hydrogen or hydrogen carriers) to land. This analysis relies on a techno-economic assessment of these pathways, including the determination of their levelized cost of hydrogen, the net present value and their energy expenditure. Among the studied pathways, the use of pipelines to transport hydrogen presents as the best solution, providing a levelized cost of hydrogen of 5.35€/kgH2 for the baseline case, with the potential of being as low as 2.17€/kgH2 if the EU support to hydrogen deployment achieves its targets. The energy requirement for this pathway is 0.46 MWh/MWhH2 (of lower heating value), being one of the less energy intensive methods. Another key insight of this work is that the commercialization of produced oxygen improves greatly the viability of the project, increasing the net present value by more than 150 M€ without major added complexities in the infrastructure. Also, a sensitivity analysis is performed to different variables (electrolyzer cost, capacity factor, electrolyzer system efficiency, plant distance to shore and the levelized cost of electricity) showing that the levelized cost of hydrogen is very dependent on the electricity and electrolyzer costs.