Rolls-Royce unveils green hydrogen production plans
April 25, 2023Rolls-Royce has revealed its plans to produce green hydrogen at its Friedrichschafen headquarters and also unveiled its plans for testing fuel cell systems and mtu hydrogen engines. The company has already successfully tested its 250kw fuel cell demonstrator system, which could offer uninterruptible power in the event of an outage. Rolls-Royce aims to start green hydrogen production and follow it through much of the value chain, and is working on developing its own standardized mtu electrolyzers with 4MW outputs with the capacity to scale to over 100MW.
The company also revealed that it is working on plans for H2 fuel cell systems.
Rolls-Royce has announced its new plans for the production of green hydrogen at its Friedrichschafen headquarters. At the same time, it unveiled its plans for testing its fuel cell systems and mtu hydrogen engines.
The company added that its 250kw fuel cell demonstrator has already been successfully tested.
The fuel cell demonstrator system could offer uninterruptible power in the case of an outage.
The company is working on the development of its own standardized mtu electrolyzers with 4MW outputs. This is only the stating capacity, as it intends to scale this figure to over 100MW. Recently, the automaker purchased stock in Hoeller Electrolyser, an electrolysis stack development company.
The H2Infrastructure funding project at Rolls-Royce is meant for the production of green hydrogen using PEM electrolysis. Moreover, it will have a production capacity that will grow to 10MW. In this way, it will generate enough renewable H2 for development processes in propulsion tech.
Rolls-Royce intends to start with green hydrogen production and follow it through much of the value chain.
“Our new facilities will cover a large part of the hydrogen value chain – from infrastructure to production, distribution and use,” said Rolls-Royce Power Systems H2Infrastructure project head Norbert Markert.
Duisport, one of the largest inland ports worldwide, will soon infuse a hydrogen-based supply network into their new terminal as part of the funded Enerport II project, ensuring CO2-neutral energy production through mtu fuel cell systems and mtu Series 4000 hydrogen engines.
“The common goal of Rolls-Royce and Hoeller Electrolyser is to develop a solution to produce hydrogen with green energy at low cost and on a large scale,” added Rolls-Royce Power Systems director of sustainability and regulatory affairs Daniel Chatterjee.
The fuel cell system
“The 25kw system we built at our headquarters in Friedrichshafen and tested for about a year absolutely met our expectations. During the blackout simulation, the system immediately and consistently provided the requested power,” said Dr. Philippe Gorse from Rolls-Royce when discussing the company’s first successful mtu fuel cell system test.
That system will be deployed in the port of Duisport as a component of the publicly funded enerPort II projects, which is one of the largest island ports in the world. It will commission a new terminal with a green hydrogen-based supply network next year.
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What will be the approximate area required for fuel cell with output of say 4MW ? How much quantity of green Hydrogen is required for a fuel cell with 4MW output?
Green hydrogen produced in large volumes via high tech such as RR may reduce costs to the point where input energy and output value makes sense.
The alternative is to produce at community level but use a mix of low and high tech to make green hydrogen viable. Companies such as Green Growth Technology are working on powering hybrid electrolysers using accelerated growth
biomass in low cost vertical farms. Low cost compression systems are also key to this approach.
The theoretical numbers make sense because hydrogen packs so much power particularly for transport, domestic heating and industrial heat. GGT are raising funds for their first unit and if it performs at the same level as the theory suggests will be a major breakthrough.
We met yesterday with Messrs. Tony Lee and Joshua Hall of Cummins Power Systems, at the Offshore Technology Conference in Houston Texas, and passed along details of our proprietary large scale TITAN ‘Jack Up’ offshore wind turbine platform, for onboard offshore green desalination/deionization of sea water for the production onboard of large volumes of the clean deionized water providing the feedstock for then green electrolysis application with production nearby, ( preferably onshore ) of large volumes of green hydrogen.
This ‘low cost’, large scale, practical system, deploying mature platform, offshore turbine, reverse osmosis equipment and technology, designed and integrated by Texas offshore ‘pros’, with decades of offshore energy experience and expertise promises to offer big trucking and bus fleets the volume green, hydrogen, hydrogen blends and ‘efuels’ etc they need for future decarbonization success of this vital sector of the economy !
This plan for the production of hydrogen by electrolysis for the port of Duisberg will need expensive grid electricity to power it, making the hydrogen very expensive, or could it be powered directly by local wind turbines or PV arrays? The alternative would be to speed up the supply of low cost hydrogen from the Middle East and North Africa for which 5 German ports have been readied to receive it. Perhaps both sources of hydrogen are needed?