Port of Oostende, DEME Concessions, and PMV have launched a project to establish a plant in the Oostende port that produces green hydrogen from the electricity produced at Belgium’s offshore wind farms.
The goal of the project, HYPORT® Oostende, is to build the green hydrogen facility in the Plassendale 1 port area and have it up and running in 2025.
In the first phase of the project, the general feasibility will be further investigated and a development plan will be worked out, according to the developers. A demonstration project with mobile shore-based power will then be started. A demonstration project with an electrolyser of around 50MW is also scheduled. By 2022, the roll-out of a large-scale shore-based power project, running on green hydrogen, will start.
By the end of 2020, 399 wind turbines will be operating off Belgium’s coast with a combined installed capacity of 2.26GW, the developers said. The new marine spatial plan leaves space for several hundred more wind turbines with a combined capacity of around 1.75GW. That brings Belgium’s offshore wind generating capacity to around 4GW, supplying half of Belgian households with electricity.
However, the wind turbines’ production peaks rarely coincide with consumer demand peaks, meaning that there is an opportunity to compensate for the discontinuity between production and consumption.
The green hydrogen plant in Ostend is estimated to deliver a CO2 reduction of around 500,000 to 1,000,000 tons per year.