“If you are standing on the Q13a platform, just 12km off the coast of Scheveningen and The Hague, you can see really the energy transition at work.” So says Lex de Groot, Netherlands managing director for UK-headquartered producer Neptune Energy.

 “First of all, you see the shore, so you know why you are doing it,” he says of the platform that will host the PosHYdon pilot project. “Then you see The Hague and, to the right, the port of Rotterdam and the refineries in that area.

“It is more efficient to produce hydrogen offshore than to invest in relatively expensive electrical infrastructure to deal with it onshore”; de Groot, Neptune

“But you also see, on the sea, a large windfarm, Luchterduinen, which is just a few km away. So you can see where the wind energy will come from, you can see the industrial and domestic customers, and you know you are standing on this platform where everything can be integrated together—the wind production, existing E&P infrastructure and who you are producing for.”  

De Groot acknowledges that there is a debate over whether green hydrogen production can be done most economically and efficiently onshore or offshore. But he thinks offshore is a winner. “With the offshore infrastructure we have here in the Netherlands which can handle—with relatively minor modifications—hydrogen, it is more efficient to produce hydrogen offshore than to invest in relatively expensive electrical infrastructure to deal with it onshore,” he says.

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Author: Peter Ramsay<BR>Editor-in-chief