Port of Oostende to Build Green Hydrogen Plant

The Port of Oostende in Belgium, DEME Concessions and PMV have formed a partnership to build a green hydrogen plant in the port area of Ostend by 2025. The hydrogen will serve as an energy source for electricity, transport, heat and fuel purposes and as a raw material for industrial purposes.

Hydrogen produced by electrolysis does not involve the release of CO2, but it can only be called green if the electricity used in the process is renewable energy. The companies note that by the end of 2020, 399 wind turbines will be operating off the coast of Belgium with a combined installed capacity of 2.26GW. The new marine spatial plan leaves space for several hundred more wind turbines, which will generate around an extra 1.75GW. That makes a total green energy generating capacity of 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 to produce hydrogen.

In the first phase of the project, a demonstration project with mobile shore-based power will be undertaken to run an electrolyser of around 50MW. By 2022, the roll-out of a large-scale shore-based power project, running on green hydrogen, is anticipated to start. A commercial plant is expected to be operational by 2025 in the context of the planned new offshore wind concessions.

Port of Oostende is expanding its activities in the Blue Economy with this development. The planned location is in the Plassendale 1 port area.

The green hydrogen plant in Ostend will ultimately deliver a CO2 reduction of around 500,000 to 1,000,000 tons per year.