Let’s start this week with a couple of pieces of offtake news. After all, without such deals any discussions of hydrogen technologies and innovations are heading nowhere.

Germany’s RWE will be delighted that, “six months after the investment decision for the construction of the 300 MW electrolysis plant in Lingen”, they have “acquired an important anchor customer in TotalEnergies”. The latter has signed up to buy “30,000 tons a year of green hydrogen to the German Leuna refinery for fifteen years, beginning in 2030”.

It shouldn’t come as any great surprise to discover that this is “the largest quantity of green hydrogen ever contracted from an electrolyser in Germany”.

It probably also won’t amaze you to learn that there could still be one or two hurdles to overcome, not least the fact that the hydrogen “will be delivered by a 600 km pipeline to the gates of the refinery”. So, this will depend on “the completion of the hydrogen backbone by German authorities”.

Looking at a similar, end-of-decade starting timeframe is Horisont Energi, which has signed a “non-binding offtake agreement with an unidentified customer for its Barents Blue ammonia facility”. The company hopes this will transmogrify “into a sales and purchase agreement next year”.

Barents Blue aims to take a final investment decision (FID) next year, and has already “been supported by a grant of NKr482m (about €41m) via the EU Important Projects of Common European Interest (IPCEI) programme”.

All being well, production should begin in “2029 or 2030” and lead to “one million tonnes of blue ammonia per year, with emissions captured and stored under the Barents sea off the far north of Norway”.

Horisont Energi claim the ammonia “will have a carbon intensity of 0.3 kilograms of CO2 per kilogram of hydrogen-equivalent, accounting for Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions”, which would be remarkably low. It’ll be keeping its eyes on the EU’s upcoming ‘low-carbon hydrogen’ definition, due soon, as well as carbon prices in Europe. The latter is important, since ‘grey’ producers “will see their free allocation of carbon credits under the EU Emissions Trading System gradually phased out by 2034”.

North Ammonia is another Norwegian company looking at ammonia production (‘green’ in its case), and one which this week decided to partner downstream of that production.