NREL researchers say offshore wind turbines offer path for clean hydrogen production

On Friday, researchers with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) said that using electricity generated by offshore wind turbines is one way to economically produce clean hydrogen.

In a recently published article, “Potential for large-scale deployment of offshore wind-to-hydrogen systems in the U.S.,” which appears in the Journal of Physics: Conference Series, researchers said spots along the U.S. Atlantic Coast and in the Gulf of Mexico, where the water is not as deep and the wind is strong, are where the economics of using wind turbines to split water to produce clean hydrogen makes the most economic sense.

Producing hydrogen at a cost approaching the U.S. Department of Energy goal for low-cost clean hydrogen depend on both the technology used and the location of production, researchers said. Policy incentives could also play a role.

“Both offshore wind and clean hydrogen production are technologies that are rapidly evolving and when combined have the potential to generate and store a lot of renewable energy and decarbonize sectors that are hard to electrify,” said Kaitlin Brunik, a hybrid systems research engineer at NREL and lead author of the new paper. “Continued investment and research on system- and plant-level design and optimization could spur further technology progress and cost reductions for these systems.”

Hydrogen produced using an electrolyzer that splits water into its component parts, powered by a renewable source of energy is known a clean hydrogen. Through the Hydrogen Shot initiative, the DOE is leading efforts to reduce the cost of clean hydrogen generation to $1 a kilogram by 2031. Achieving $2 per kilogram could make it cost competitive to other carbon-intensive hydrogen production methods.