BP is investing in producing green hydrogen from wind to replace hydrogen generated from hydrocarbons at its Lingen refinery. The alternative would have been to bury the CO2 to turn grey hydrogen into blue hydrogen but that would have required geoscience skills and moderated the reduction in demand for oil and gas. The profits from oil and gas are being reinvested to reduce the cost of green hydrogen to displace hydrocarbons - no wonder Orsted is valued more highly than BP and NextEra Energy Inc is valued more highly than Exxon. No subsurface skills or oil and gas leadership. Perhaps Looney is hoping that Orsted will buy BP land save him the trouble of laying off all the former oil and gas workers?
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Perhaps Orsted will produce hydrogen from natural gas and store the CO2 as it is 3 times cheaper than producing it from wind and Orsted has a better reputation and higher market cap than BP. Then perhaps they would be hiring G&G?
G&G might have been required for CCUS and to produce natural gas to make hydrogen but BP has chosen to invest its profits in renewables so G&G and associated oil and gas personnel need to be replaced ASAP with wind and solar engineers.
This technology doesn't use the skillset that the company has.
The hydrogen is used to displace steam-reformed natural gas in the refinery, the energetics are fine but it would be several times more effective (on a societal CO2 basis) to use that green electricity to charge battery electric vehicles directly.
It's so juvenile. So, let me get this straight - they will use the wind mills to convert to electricity and then use that to do electrolysis of water to make hydrogen? I wonder if anyone has done the calculations of efficiency for this idea. How much capital must they plunk down to do this? They'll need to compress the hydrogen in order to store it. And the hydrogen will be used in a fuel cell? This technology doesn't use the skillset that the company has.
This isn't really new, BP and Uniper did a press release on this 18 months ago, it obviously didn't get enough publicity.
It's not a bad idea, but it's about as useful as a chocolate teapot from a GHG reduction perspective. Too little too late.
This is basically a proof of concept on steroids. Where is the market for all of this hydrogen? Sounds like the Field if Dreams to me.