A small UK startup is building the first electrolyser designed to split seawater directly, bypassing the need for desalination plants on offshore wind farms. Green hydrogen production currently requires purified water, forcing developers to install and maintain complex water-treatment equipment on offshore platforms. This added cost and complexity undermines the goal of making hydrogen cheap enough to compete with fossil fuels without subsidies. Latent Drive’s SeaStack technology eliminates that burden by using the surrounding seawater as-is, drawing on the abundant renewable energy from distant turbines. If the SeaStack trials at the Marine Energy Test Area in Pembrokeshire succeed, the company plans to scale up to multi-megawatt electrolysers for the Celtic Sea floating offshore wind farms. That could help the UK become a major producer and exporter of green hydrogen, decarbonising heavy industries in South Wales and providing grid-scale energy storage. The project is a hardware-development step—taking prototype stacks from the lab into real marine conditions—rather than fundamental science, but it addresses a practical bottleneck that currently limits offshore hydrogen production.
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Green Hydrogen production is moving far offshore -- out to the source of energy! To halt global warming, we need abundant supplies of Green Hydrogen, and this needs to compete fairly on cost with fossil fuels, without subsidy or carbon credits. To achieve this we need to move the hydrogen production off the mainland and out to the distant wind turbines -- where the maximum amount of renewable energy can be harvested and used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, free of the limitations of grid connections, subsea cables and high electricity costs. This concept has been successfully trialled by ERM-Dolphyn in the UK, SeaLhyfe in France, and Dutch project PosHYdon, amongst others. But they are all constrained by the current available technology -- all commercial electrolysers are designed for use on land and require large amounts of desalinated and purified water. This creates a huge burden to install and maintain all this extra plant when working offshore. Latent Drive are developing innovative **SeaStack** technology to overcome this - the first electrolyser designed from the ground-up for maritime and offshore use. SeaStack directly splits seawater hence eliminating the complex and costly plant needed for water treatment, instead using the abundant and free seawater surrounding the wind farm. Latent Drive are a small start-up company developing new electrolyser technology to replace fossil fuels, our mission is to make Green Hydrogen abundant and affordable. This is essential to decarbonise the industries of South Wales, provide energy storage and secure our energy supplies. To achieve these ambitions, we are working with Pembrokeshire Coastal Forum (Marine Energy Wales) and ORE Catapult to test SeaStack at the Marine Energy Test Area (META) in Pembrokeshire. This funded project prepares us for future testing at META, going beyond desktop studies and building hardware to package and marinise prototype SeaStacks ready for testing. This is a vital step forward in the development programme of SeaStack, and a stepping stone towards the multi-megawatt scale electrolysers needed for the coming Celtic Sea Floating Offshore Windfarm (FLOW) and the UK's broader plans to become a major producer and exporter of Green Hydrogen.
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