Start-up companies Norwegian Hydrogen and Australia-based Provaris Energy are studying shipping cargoes of renewable hydrogen from Nordic production plants to Europe's key import hubs using compressed hydrogen tankers.
The firms said they will jointly identify a preferred production and export site by March, and will assess feasibility of supply chains to ports in Germany and the Netherlands. They noted that Norway has 50pc of the EU's hydroelectricity generation capacity, and the country's government recently said it wants to become a long-term supplier of hydrogen to Europe.
The firms see compressed hydrogen shipping as complementary to rather than competition for a pipeline, which was the focus of the recent Norway-Germany joint statement. The seaborne route offers flexibility on exports and imports and unlocks trade for sites not connected to pipelines, the companies said, and provides a redundancy to hydrogen supply chains.
The compressed hydrogen solution works well with the sites at which Norwegian Hydrogen is looking, , and may enable the company to get to the market as early as 2027, its chief technology officer Oystein Torlen said.
Provaris' managing director Martin Carolan said it is confident of achieving transport costs below $1/kg for journeys in the 1,000-2,000 nautical mile range, if volumes above 100,000-200,000 t/yr are achieved. He said the process of compressing hydrogen is cheaper and less energy intensive than hydrogen liquefication, or conversion and reconversion to ammonia, and said Provaris will publish a study on these points in February.
Provaris received approval for its 26,000m³ H2Neo compressed hydrogen carrier designs from classification society American Bureau of Shipping in December, and eventually wants to develop a 120,000m³ carrier. The company initially focused on developing a new class of vessel for short-distance shipping of compressed natural gas — avoiding costly LNG liquefaction — but switched its attention to hydrogen because of a fall in gas prices and energy transition motivations, it said.
Norwegian Hydrogen, which last year received investment from Japanese trading firm Mitsui, plans to open a 1.3 t/d, 3MW pilot plant beside a fjord in western Norway in late 2023, and has a pipeline of "significantly larger projects all over the Nordics."
Transporting renewable hydrogen is a conundrum for the nascent industry, as the cheapest locations for production in solar or wind hotspots are often remote sites far from centres of energy demand. Studies tend to say pipelines would be the cheapest method, but maritime transport in the form of liquid hydrogen, ammonia, or liquid organic hydrogen carriers are sometimes seen as competitive over longer distances.
The idea of transporting compressed hydrogen cargoes has received less attention, because the low volumetric energy density of hydrogen in gas form appears to make the economics difficult. But Provaris and Norwegian Hydrogen said it makes sense within the short-distance niche they have identified.
