(Credit: Iberdrola)Iberdrola plans to build a green hydrogen plant at the largest freight port in the United Kingdom; will supply the clean fuel to vehicles and machinery used at the port.
The Spanish multinational electric utility company will invest nearly $174 million in the facility at the Port of Felixstowe. The project will be developed by ScottishPower, Iberdrola’s UK subsidiary, and when the first phase is completed in 2026 the plant will have a capacity of 14,000 metric tons of green hydrogen per year.
The plant will be capable of fueling up to 1,300 trucks, and the green hydrogen produced will also provide green hydrogen for trains transporting goods to the port. The Guardian reported that 6,000 heavy transport vehicles per year use the port.
The facility will have the potential to double its capacity in the future and could be used for the production of green ammonia or ethanol, according to Iberdrola.
The green hydrogen will be produced with an electrolyzer that uses energy from renewable sources. The port is located near offshore wind farms that Iberdrola is developing. The company has commissioned a 714-megawatt wind farm in the area and plans to build a bigger complex with two more facilities to bring the total energy capacity to 2.9 gigawatts.
The Port of Felixstowe project is one of several Iberdrola is taking on in the UK. A project with Storegga in Cromarty will help with the decarbonization of distillery heating processes, with an initial capacity of 4,000 metric tons and the ability to expand to 20,000 metric tons.
Iberdrola is also building a green hydrogen plant at its Whitelee wind farm outside of Glasgow. That project is set to be completed next year and will be capable of generating 3,000 metric tons of hydrogen a year. The UK government has committed more than $11 million to that project, which will be able to fuel 550 buses a day from Glasgow to Edinburgh.
The UK has a goal of developing 10 GW of low-carbon hydrogen capacity by 2030. Across the rest of Europe, hydrogen accounts for less than 2% of the continent's energy consumption, according to the European Commission. As part of the commission’s REPowerEU plan, the European Union has a goal of producing 10 million metric tons of renewable hydrogen as well as importing 10 million metric tons by 2030.
Multiple big projects to help with that goal are underway.
Shell is building what is said to be the largest green hydrogen plant in Europe at the port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands with a capacity of producing 66 tons of the fuel per day. Plug Power is building a facility at Port of Antwerp-Bruges with a capacity of 35 tons of green hydrogen per day. Additionally, FuelCell Energy is partnering with TuNur to increase the production of renewable hydrogen in northern Africa with plans to import it to Europe through a pipeline into Italy.
Overall, Iberdrola is investing $9.18 billion through 2030 in green hydrogen projects and currently has more than 60 facilities in development in eight countries, including the United States, Brazil, and Spain. Iberdrola has a goal of developing 400,000 metric tons of green hydrogen a year.
