Green Hydrogen Could Make Texas Offshore Wind Happen, Finally

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Like a bolt out of the blue, the US firm Hecate Energy reached out and tapped the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management last week, requesting the right to develop two federal offshore wind energy areas assigned to Texas. The surprise move was, well, surprising. BOEM has been trying, and failing, to solicit interest in other Texas-based offshore lease areas for the past two years. However, the state’s emerging green hydrogen industry may have something to do with the sudden spurt of interest.

No Takers For Texas Offshore Wind Leases…

Before getting to the green hydrogen angle, let’s take a look at the big picture of offshore wind resources in the Gulf of Mexico.

Despite relatively slow wind speeds among the five Gulf Coast states — Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida — the Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory issued a pair of reports back in 2020 that drew an optimistic picture for developing wind resources in the Gulf of Mexico.

The BOEM-funded reports were aimed at determining the outlook for various kinds of offshore renewable energy development among the five states.

“NREL lists the Gulf’s shallow water, lower average wave heights, and existing oil and gas infrastructure on the positive side for developing all sorts of ocean energy, including tides and currents, thermal conversion, wave power, and hydrogen conversion in addition to wind turbines,” CleanTechnica noted at the time.

Offshore wind came out far ahead of other resources, weighing in with the potential for 508 gigawatts — fully twice the electricity demand of all five Gulf states combined.

Unfortunately, when it came time to put up or shut up, nobody wanted to get their feet wet. Last year, BOEM put the first two Texas-based federal offshore lease areas up for bid, and nobody bit. The two designated areas, Galveston 1 and 2, were part of the I, J, and K federal offshore areas with nearby access to the important Port of Houston.

BOEM tried to auction two parts of the same offshore areas in the Galveston-Houston in March of last year, though an official statement of opposition from Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham put a damper on the effort. After receiving just one qualified expression of interest, BOEM canceled the auction on July 26.

For the record, Buckingham stated that “I will never allow the federal government to endanger the people of Texas and our state’s beautiful wildlife with untested, unproven, and ineffective technology when reliable, clean, and safe energy is already available,” having apparently forgotten all about the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the 2014 oil barge spill in Galveston Bay, and the new oil slick currently lurking about eight miles off the coast of Texas, to name a few.

…Until The Goddess Of Witchcraft Steps In

Hecate (pronounced HEK-uh-tee) can be translated as “worker from afar,” which is a fairly poetic way of describing wind energy or, for that matter, witchcraft. Putting the witchcraft angle aside for the time being, the US firm Hecate explains that the crossroads of earth, sea, and sky are the domain of the Greek goddess Hecate. “Our name reflects our mission of developing power generation resources at the crossroads of traditional and emerging technologies,” the company states.

Apparently Hecate sees something in the Texas offshore areas that others have not seen. Instead of focusing on the Houston-Galveston market, last week Hecate requested a federal lease for wind areas C and D, which are located farther to the south, off the coast of Corpus Christi. That triggered a couple of responses from BOEM, including cancellation of the March offshore lease auction.

BOEM announced the cancellation in a press release dated July 26. In the same release, the office noted that it can’t just simply hand over the Corpus Christi lease areas to to Hecate. First, BOEM has to reach out and see if anyone else is interested.

“If BOEM receives one or more indications of interest in acquiring a commercial wind lease from qualified entities, BOEM may decide to move forward with a competitive lease sale. If BOEM does not receive competing indications of interest from qualified companies, BOEM may move forward with a noncompetitive lease issuance to Hecate Energy,” BOEM explained.

Something Is Brewing Between Offshore Wind & Green Hydrogen

The big question is, why Corpus Christi? I’ll reach out to Hecate for an answer, and in the meantime it’s fun to guess why Corpus Christi.

The Port of Houston likes to remind everyone that it is the nation’s leading seaport in terms of tonnage, but the Port of Corpus Christi lays claim to the biggest energy export gateway in the US, as well as the third-biggest port for oil export in the world, so there’s that.

More to the point, last year the Port of Corpus Christi threw its hat into the $7 billion Regional Clean Hydrogen Hub ring, a hydrogen-promoting program of the US Department of Energy funded through the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The main focus is on extracting hydrogen from renewable resources, but the BIL stipulated a carve-out for fossil energy resources. That was reflected in the Corpus Christi proposal, which emphasized diverse hydrogen feedstocks as well as the Port’s status as the “most efficient ship channel on the U.S. Gulf Coast.”

Corpus Christi eventually lost out to another hydrogen hub proposal centered in Houston, but Hecate’s offshore wind request indicates that hydrogen stakeholders around Corpus Christi are still active, perhaps with an eye on extracting green hydrogen from water with an electrical current. Wind energy has a particular advantage in that regard, since it can be deployed for water electrolysis during off-peak hours at night.

Hydrogen hub or not, the Texas green hydrogen industry is continuing to attract substantial interest. One example is the massive Hydrogen City project under the wind of the Texas startup Green Hydrogen International. The firm is counting on both wind and solar energy, locally sourced in southeast Texas, to power its electrolyzers.

As of this writing, GHI’s renewable energy wishlist specifies onshore wind, but another Texas startup, Offshore Wind Power Systems of Texas, is positioning itself to level up the whole offshore wind / green hydrogen connection.

The company has leveraged offshore oil and gas know-how to come up with a hurricane-resistant offshore wind turbine platform it calls TITAN. Initially scaled to 12 megawatts, the platform will eventually support 15-30 megawatts of offshore wind.