Ørsted has opened a new office in Houston, Texas, US, adding to its existing presence in the state. The clean energy producer has an office in Austin with 115 employees, and it owns and operates eight energy projects in Texas that collectively produce 2.4GW of electricity, with an additional 1.2GW of solar projects under construction.

Melissa Peterson, vice-president and head of Onshore and P2X Americas at Ørsted, said in a press statement: “We’re excited to bolster Ørsted’s presence in the Lone Star State, which is already home to nearly a dozen of our clean energy projects. Houston is the ideal location to base our growing Power-to-X operations, especially due to the existing energy workforce that will be needed for the engineering, construction, and operations of Ørsted’s future facilities.

“Expanding our footprint in Houston is a testament to our commitment to decarbonizing the most hard-to-electrify sectors and our continued growth in Texas and throughout the Gulf region.”

The Houston office will be dedicated to organising both onshore and offshore wind projects. Many of the employees based in this office will support Ørsted’s growing P2X business, which will be concentrated along the Gulf Coast of Texas. The P2X projects involve using renewable energy to power the production of green hydrogen to create e-fuels including e-methanol and e-ammonia.

Ørsted is a member of the Houston-based HyVelocity Hub, one of the seven hubs selected by the US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations to receive funding for the development of new hydrogen projects.

Ørsted is developing a P2X facility of up to 675MW on the Texas Gulf Coast with the capacity to produce up to 300,000 tonnes of e-methanol annually, which can be used directly as a marine shipping fuel or as an input in sustainable aviation fuel or chemical production. The e-methanol will be produced using energy sourced from approximately 1.2GW of new onshore wind and solar generation.