Uruguay unveils offshore wind-to-hydrogen plan

Uruguay’s state-owned oil and gas company ANCAP, together with the country’s ministries of industry and environment, has presented a plan for green hydrogen production powered by offshore wind, which could see a tender launched in a couple of years.

Under the new H2U Offshore programme, ANCAP has called for interested parties to submit offers comprising a work plan, outlining the benefits for the country, and detailing on the possible participation of ANCAP.

“We hope to have a round of consultations with companies to understand their expectations, so that they could access our information and complement their basic information”, said the president of ANCAP, Alejandro Stipanicic.

According to Stipanicic, this could take between eight months and two years, after which ANCAP and the state plan to launch a competitive tender.

At a press conference on 5 October, when the H2U Offshore programme was revealed, ANCAP’s engineers Jorge Ferreiro and Juan Tomasini, who are leading the company’s Hydrogen team, spoke about the importance of hydrogen, experiences from other countries, and about the role of ANCAP in this project.

They pointed out that Uruguay had great potential to produce green hydrogen and that the company itself had unique strengths such as technical capacity in complex installation processes, experience in geology and offshore projects, as well as in contracting and negotiations with oil majors.

According to an analysis from the World Bank, published in 2020, Uruguay holds a technical offshore wind potential of 275 GW, of which 190 GW could be harnessed by using fixed-bottom technology while floating wind turbines could access 85 GW of the total potential.