ITM Power's Gigastack project gets £7.5m in funding
ITM Power
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16:14 19/04/24
ITM Power announced on Tuesday that £7.5m in funding has been awarded for the next phase of its new renewable hydrogen project Gigastack, as part of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) Hydrogen Supply Competition.
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The AIM-traded firm said the Gigastack project, which it was leading alongside Ørsted, Phillips 66 and Element Energy, would show how renewable hydrogen derived from offshore wind could support the UK's 2050 net-zero greenhouse gas emission target.
It explained that the production of hydrogen had traditionally been associated with high carbon emissions, but by using renewable electricity, such as from an offshore wind farm, the process of producing hydrogen from water, or electrolysis, could be completely decarbonised.
Energy-intensive industries and the transportation sector would have the opportunity to reduce the carbon intensity of their fuels by using renewable hydrogen, ITM Power claimed.
As part of the initial feasibility phase of the Gigastack project, which finished in 2019, ITM Power developed designs for a low-cost modular five megawatt electrolyser 'stack', collaborating with Ørsted to understand the potential synergies with offshore wind farms and with Element Energy to undertake a market analysis and explore business models for the first industrial-scale 100MW electrolysers.
For the second phase of the project, which had now received funding from BEIS, the consortium would conduct a front-end engineering design (FEED) study on a 100MW electrolyser system using staged installations with a nominal capacity of 20MW.
The FEED study would detail the actual design of a hydrogen production system connected to a wind farm and industrial off-taker using ITM Power's new generation of electrolyser stack technology, renewable energy directly from Ørsted's Hornsea Two offshore wind farm, and with the resulting renewable hydrogen supplied to an industrial off-taker; Phillips 66’s Humber Refinery.
It explained that a key objective of the Gigastack project would be to identify and highlight regulatory, commercial and technical challenges for real applications of industrial-scale renewable hydrogen systems.
As part of the second phase, ITM Power said it would also install and trial both their next-generation electrolyser stack and the semi-automated manufacturing machines required for large-scale and high-volume manufacture of the new large low-cost stacks.
That, it said, would help validate a complete production system capable of delivering hundreds of megawatts of electrolysers per year.
“The second phase of Gigastack includes stack scale-up, volume manufacturing and a FEED study for a refinery deployment,” said chief executive officer Dr Graham Cooley.
“The project will result in a scalable world-class product for the production of low-cost renewable hydrogen.”
At 1143 GMT, shares in ITM Power were down 1.89% at 155.5p.