Lhyfe completes a first step in its work on re-oxygenating the oceans through offshore hydrogen production.
Right from 2017, when Lhyfe was still in early development, the founding team led by Matthieu Guesné had a clear ambition: to massively decarbonise transport and industry by producing and supplying renewable hydrogen, while at the same time helping to re-oxygenate the oceans. But how?
The team imagined a completely climate-friendly process with a double impact:
- On the one hand, it would produce hydrogen at sea (using seawater and wind energy) to decarbonise uses that emit high levels of CO2, such as heavy vehicles (e.g. trucks, buses, waste collection vehicles, etc.) and industry (e.g. chemicals, metals, glass, steel, etc.).
- On the other, it would re-inject the oxygen by-product from the electrolysis of water into aquatic environments – which due to global warming and polluting industrial activities are increasingly depleted of oxygen – in order to re-oxygenate them.
Lhyfe’s production of offshore hydrogen is progressing step by step. It launched the production of renewable green hydrogen with Sealhyfe (a pilot plant capable of producing up to 400 kilos of hydrogen a day off the Atlantic coast, installed at sea in the second half of 2022), and announced the HOPE project (HOPE stands for Hydrogen Offshore Production for Europe), which will produce up to four tonnes of offshore hydrogen a day, off Ostend in Belgium, by 2026.
In parallel, the company is conducting research into ocean re-oxygenation and hopes to one day realise this project, in conjunction with the deployment of future offshore production platforms.
Lhyfe began working, back in June 2020, with a number of research organisations, such as the Institute of Research for Development (IRD) in Brest. Lhyfe financed all the work involved in this project, and commissioned some of its experts, including offshore project manager Stéphane Le Berre, to help move this research forward. The Physical Oceanographer Dr. Patricia Handmann has been in charge of this work since June 2022.
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Lhyfe completes a first step in its work on re-oxygenating the oceans through offshore hydrogen production, July 20, 2023
