Nucera said in a statement on Monday that it has won a contract to provide a basic engineering design package for the 400-MW project at Cepsa’s La Rabida Energy Park in Palos de la Fronter, Huelva. The German firm is tasked with assisting in the design and engineering of the facility through to the Final Investment Decision (FID). However, it will only supply technology for a 300 MW portion of the project, with 15 units of its 20-MW alkaline Scalum electrolysers to form a plant with the capacity to produce up to 47,000 tonnes of green hydrogen per year.
For the remaining 100 MW, Cepsa has chosen the Proton Exchange Membrane (PEM) technology of Siemens Energy. By relying on two different technologies, the Spanish company demonstrates “a multi-supplier approach to creating a European value chain for green hydrogen.”
“The industry is ready, production capacity of electrolyzers is no longer the bottleneck in ramping up the hydrogen economy. Our Berlin multi-gigawatt electrolyzer factory is a good example of this. But we need a faster pace of funding approvals and fewer technocratic hurdles to ensure that such projects can make their decisive contribution to decarbonization across Europe,” said Alexey Ustinov, Head of Sustainable Energy Systems at Siemens Energy.
Cepsa’s wider plan is to develop 2 GW of green hydrogen production capacity in southern Spain by 2030. The initial 400-MW plant is being developed in partnership with Fertiberia and will use solar and wind energy to produce green hydrogen.