German utility RWE has received €108m ($117m) from the EU’s Innovation Fund to help build a waste-to-hydrogen project in an industrial cluster in the Netherlands, in what is hoped will be a blueprint for a future roll-out of the technology in Europe.

RWE’s FUREC (Fuse Reuse Recycle) project, at the giant Chemelot industrial complex in Limburg, close to both the Belgian and German borders, aims to convert non-recyclable municipal solid waste from approximately two million people to around 54,000 tonnes of hydrogen annually.

Producing this amount of green H₂ via electrolysis would require all the electricity output from a 700MW offshore wind farm, the company says.