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It looks like Europe really is serious about cutting its dependence on Russian gas. A giant LNG loophole still lurks within the continent’s sanctions against Russia, but a new offshore wind farm planned for the Baltic Sea with a built-in green hydrogen angle will help sink LNG from Russia, sanctions or not. If all goes according to plan, the beleaguered waters of the Baltic will get an assist, too.
Neptunus: Yet Another Giant Offshore Wind Farm In The Baltic Sea
CleanTechnica is among those taking note of the sudden burst of offshore wind and green hydrogen activity in the Baltic Sea following Russia’s murderous rampage through Ukraine, which is now closing in on two years (see our full Baltic wind coverage here).
Called Neptunus, this particular renewable energy project is particularly interesting because it puts the high profile brand IKEA front and center in effort to cut Europe free from Russian fossil energy imports. Neptunus pairs the Swedish renewable energy developer OX2 with the leading IKEA retail franchisee, Ingka Group, through its Ingka Investments branch.
Earlier this week OX2 announced that the partners have just filed their paperwork to build Neptunus within Sweden’s Exclusive Economic Zone, about 50 kilometers off the southern coast of Sweden, at Blekinge.
Another point of interest is the project’s size. If all goes according to plan, Neptunus will sport up to 207 turbines with a total capacity of up to 3.1 gigawatts.
“The production is estimated to about 13-15 TWh annually, which corresponds to the current total electricity consumption of the Blekinge and Skåne region,” OX2 explained in a press statement.
Green Hydrogen And Dead Bottoms
Green hydrogen was not pre-planned into earlier offshore wind developments, but nowadays it is becoming a standard feature. That is also reflected in the plans for Neptunus, with an additional twist.
Green hydrogen refers to hydrogen jolted loose from water, with an electrical current provided by renewable energy. That leaves some leftover oxygen to deal with. OX2 and Ingka propose to put the leftovers to work, to help re-oxygenate the troubled waters of the Baltic Sea.
“The extent of so-called dead bottoms in the Baltic Sea is one of the largest in the world, with an area almost twice that of Denmark,” reported the University of Stockholm, which recently issued a study of the water body’s health.
“Virtually all water below the halocline, i.e. deeper than 60–80 meters, is now deficient in oxygen and hard or impossible for animals to live in,” they added.
As described by lead researcher Carl Rolff, until the 1980’s the main drivers of the problem were the usual suspects, consisting of excess nutrients from agriculture and sewage. New anti-pollution measures after the 1980’s achieved sharp cuts in phosphorus and nitrogen, but researchers still have not found any real signs of improvement in the waters.
The complex hydrology of the Baltic Sea is further complicated by inflows from the North Sea, and it remains to be seen if excess oxygen from offshore green hydrogen operations can help reduce the Baltic Sea “oxygen debt.”
OX2 has already spent two years surveying the area with an eye on starting construction around 2030, so there is plenty of time to make a determination about piggybacking an oxygenation system onto the new wind farm.
More Offshore Wind For Eastern Europe
In the meantime, OX2 has been rather busy. In 2022 the company noted that it had a total project portfolio of about 23,864 meawatts in the pipeline, including two new offshore wind projects in the Åland area, called Noatun South and Noatun North.
The numbers are impressive, but in terms of releasing Europe from the Russian fossil energy net there is more to the story.
“In addition to offshore wind farms in the Åland maritime zone, the Noatun projects also include a grid solution for the distribution of electricity to Åland, Sweden, Finland and Estonia,” OX2 noted.
Estonia shares a border with Russia, and it is scrambling to level up both its border security and its renewable energy profile.
Last December, the powerful firm Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners and the Ignitus Renewables branch of the leading European firm Ignitus Group won the rights to develop the very first offshore wind farm in Estonia. Earlier this week they added a second project, and they announced plans to combine the two into one projects.
The two partners aim to harvest 1-1.5 gigawatts from the combined site when the turbines start spinning, sometime around 2035.
“Having now secured both the Liivi 1 and Liivi 2 sea areas, CIP and Ignitis Renewables have a strategic position to optimize the scale and potential of the sites, representing a key investment in Estonia’s and the region’s transformation into a sustainable, long-term green energy hub in Europe.”
They’ll have plenty of company. Aside from Neptunus, another massive green hydrogen hub in Europe is planned for the Netherlands, with the electrolyzers to be powered by both wind and solar energy.
Russia’s LNG loophole is also threatened by Ukraine, which is already planning to deploy its considerable renewable energy assets to supply Europe with green hydrogen and zero emission electricity.
Water, Water Everywhere
That still leaves some questions about offshore wind power in the Baltic Sea, and security is one of them.
Russia has a slim fingerhold on the Baltic Sea through Kaliningrad Oblast, so in theory it, too, could get some offshore wind projects up and running. That’s not likely, considering that Kaliningrad is the headquarters of Russia’s Baltic Fleet.
Wind stakeholders have already raised concerns over signs that Russia has been scouting the location of offshore wind turbines in the North Sea. It’s a safe bet the same concerns are at work in the Baltic Sea.
Putting that aside for the moment, the other question that comes to mind is water for the electrolysis systems. Earlier iterations of electrolysis technology required pure water in order to not gum up the equipment, which means that seawater poses something of a challenge.
The US Department of Energy has been putting its energy into developing low-cost pre-treatment systems that enable the use of seawater, as a near-term solution.
Over the long term, researchers are also working on next-generation electrolyzers that can handle as seawater. Wastewater-to-hydrogen solutions are also beginning to emerge.
In an interesting twist, scientists at Heriot-Watt University in the UK have been working on a system for producing green hydrogen from distillery wastewater.
“Globally, the distilling industry is thought to produce around 1 billion litres a year of wastewater,” the school notes, with Scotland alone contributing about 1 million liters to the total.
“It takes 9kg of water to produce every 1kg of green hydrogen. Meanwhile, every 1 litre of malt whisky production creates about 10 litres of residue,” adds Heriot-Watt materials scientist Dr. Sudhagar Pitchaimuthu.
So far the results look promising. In a newly published study, the new process “produced similar or slightly higher quantities of green hydrogen from the wastewater, compared to the results from fresh water,” the school reported.
You can check out the study under the title, “From brew to clean fuel: harnessing distillery wastewater for electrolysis H2 generation using nano scale nickle selenide water oxidation catalysts” in the journal Sustainable Energy & Fuels.
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Image (screenshot): New offshore wind farm with green hydrogen production in Baltic Sea, courtesy of OX2.
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