Impact investors back renewable hydrogen producer

Impact investors back renewable hydrogen producer

Hy2gen has raised €47m from existing shareholders in a funding round led by Hy24, through its Clean Hydrogen Infrastructure Fund.

German renewable hydrogen producer Hy2gen has raised €47m in a funding round led by French low-carbon hydrogen asset manager Hy24, which has invested through the €2bn Clean Hydrogen Infrastructure fund. Other investors include engineering and technology company Technip Energies and BenDa, a family fund owned by Hy2gen’s chairwoman Dana Kallasch.

Hy2gen said the investment would be used to accelerate the development of several projects which use renewable electricity to produce renewable hydrogen and other renewable fuels based on hydrogen, in order to reach final investment decision. The company’s aim is to support clients to decarbonise in energy-intensive sectors such as shipping, aviation, chemicals and fertilisers.

A spokesperson for Hy24, which previously invested in the company in a €200m funding round in 2022, confirmed it had taken the largest share in Hy2gen, but declined to disclose the exact sum. The spokesperson told Impact Investor that the funding would support the deployment of Hy2gen’s most advanced projects.

They said,

We are confident that these projects are addressing the decarbonisation needs of critical markets in strategic regions,

Hy2gen has raised €260m since launch in 2017. Previous investors also include Canada’s second-largest pension fund CDPQ and impact investor Mirova, who invested through the €1.6bn Energy Transition 5 fund.

Hy2gen, which is based in the town of Wiesbaden, near Frankfurt, was set up in 2017 to generate a targeted 10MW of renewable hydrogen for use as fuel in shipping vessels operating in the Norwegian fjords. It has since extended its scope to the design, construction and operation of renewable hydrogen, renewable ammonia, e-SAF (a type of sustainable aviation fuel), e-methane and e-methanol production plants for a range of industries with plants located in Canada, South America, France, Germany and Norway, and plans to extend to other countries in the future.

Speaking to Impact Investor, Bernd Hübner, co-founder and CFO of Hy2gen, said:

Today we target a broad variety of use cases.

“This includes shipping using e-methanol or green ammonia and renewable hydrogen as a niche for the smaller ferries. We are also targeting the production of sustainable aviation fuel for passenger and cargo flights and ammonia in pure industrial sectors such as mining.”

Hübner explained the mining sector uses green ammonia as a key component in explosives.

Current projects

Current projects include the 300 MW ‘Courant’ project in Canada, which aims to produce renewable ammonia at a plant in Quebec for use in mining explosives, the ‘Atlantis’ project in Germany, which will extend the production capacity at a renewable hydrogen plant which has been operating under the Hy2gen banner since 2023, and the ‘Iverson’ project in Norway, which is targeting production of 200,000 tonnes of renewable ammonia annually using green hydropower to supply the shipping industry. The company is also collaborating with H2V on a 390MW project to produce 75,000 tonnes of e-SAF at a plant in the Fos-Marseille port area in France to support the decarbonisation of Europe’s aviation sector.

The construction of all four projects is expected to start by 2027.  Hy2gen said these projects would represent a total installed electrolysis capacity of approximately 2GW of energy, and that an estimated capex of more than €5bn would be needed to start the construction phase.

Hübner, said:

Hy2gen will hold further funding rounds with its existing and potentially new investors to finance the construction phase.

“For now, the goal is to reach FID for the most advanced projects such as Courant, Iverson and the project in Fos-Marseille, which is covered by Hy2gen’s €47 million raise,”

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