The report “Hydrogen Insights 2021: A Perspective on Hydrogen Investment, Deployment and Cost Competitiveness” released by Hydrogen Council in collaboration with McKinsey & Company shows over 30 countries have released hydrogen roadmaps and governments have committed public funding for hydrogen technologies. Globally, 228 large-scale projects have been announced with 85 per cent located in Europe, Asia, and Australia. Deployment of Hydrogen projects through three cluster types is already gaining traction: Industrial centres that support refining, power generation, and fertiliser and steel production; export hubs in resource-rich countries; and port areas for fuel bunkering, port logistics, and transportation. The reduced costs from clusters will enable global trade in hydrogen, connecting future major demand centres such as Japan, South Korea, and the European Union to regions of abundant low-cost hydrogen production means like the Middle East, North Africa, South America, or Australia, according to the report. (300 Bn H2 invest, 2021)
The EU wants to achieve between 12 and 14 percent hydrogen in its energy mix by 2050, up from two percent today. The bloc estimates the required funding at between 180 billion euros ($218 billion) and 470 billion. (Green Hydrogen fuel, 2020)
The Netherlands, Portugal, Germany, and France have all published hydrogen strategies over the past year. Germany has earmarked 9 billion euros for green hydrogen. The Netherlands is planning a “Hydrogen Valley”. (Green Hydrogen fuel, 2020)
China is already a world leader in hydrogen technology, with Australia, Japan, South Korea and the United States also pushing for a slice of the hydrogen revolution. (Green Hydrogen fuel, 2020)
The United States has a hydrogen road map. Germany plans to invest nine billion euros ($10.6 billion) while for France and Portugal the figure is seven billion euros each. Britain plans to spend £12 billion ($16.6 billion), Japan $3 billion, and China $16 billion by 2020 to green up their industries. China is working on a hydrogen production model that relies on electricity from its growing number of nuclear reactors, although its current supply is produced using coal, which releases lots of CO2 into the atmosphere. Its hydrogen is being bought up by fuel cell and filling station builders from all over the world, from Canadian firm Ballard to French companies Symbio and Air Liquide. Rystad Energy’s Farruggio said China’s desire to decarbonise its economy and its ability to lower costs means it could come to dominate the manufacturing of electrolysers — devices that use electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. (Global Race Green H2, 2021)
Charlotte de Lorgeril, of management consultancy Sia Partners, described Germany as being ahead in using hydrogen in transportation, France in production, while the Netherlands already has strong gas infrastructure thanks to its natural gas fields. Energy industry actors meanwhile are trying to gain a foothold by acquiring startups or developing consortiums. (Global Race Green H2, 2021)
French petrol giant Total and electricity provider Engie have come together to develop the country’s largest green hydrogen production site. Germany is approaching Morocco to use solar power to make hydrogen. The Green Spider and Green Flamingo projects are developing maritime highways for hydrogen and gas pipelines to link Spain and Portugal to northern Europe. “It is the creation of those new logistics chains that will allow imports from the Chilean or Saharan deserts where there is a lot of solar power,” said Sia Partners’s Lorgeril. Mikaa Mered said the “question of the decade” is whether the development of hydrogen will result in a decentralisation or a new set of dependencies like with oil exporting and consuming nations. (Global Race Green H2, 2021)
Orsted said its ‘SeaH2Land’ vision includes a 1GW electrolyser to produce green hydrogen from a new 2GW wind farm in the Dutch part of the North Sea. Industrial demand could grow to about 1 million tonnes by 2050, equivalent to roughly 10GW of electrolysis if the gas were to be produced from renewables. ArcelorMittal, Yara, Dow Benelux, and Zeeland Refinery said they will support the development of the required regional infrastructure to use the green H2 for the sustainable production of steel, ammonia, ethylene, and fuels in the future. (SeaH2Land, 2021)
The waste-to-hydrogen facility, located at the Sunamachi Water Reclamation Center near Tokyo Bay, will process one tonne of dried sewage sludge per day, to generate 40-50kg of hydrogen per day, enough to fuel 10 passenger vehicles or 25 fuel-cell e-bikes. (WastetoH2, 2021)
China’s Longi Green Energy Technology Co., the world’s biggest solar company, is entering the hydrogen market. Longi’s billionaire founder and president Li Zhenguo in an interview last year, said a combination of solar and storage would be the cheapest form of energy in most nations globally by the end of the decade. He also said his company plans for the long term. “We don’t only look at today, but also three, five years later or even eight or 10 years later,” he said. “After finding the direction, we don’t begrudge money on research and development.” (LongiH2, 2021)
Led by domestic energy giant Reliance Industries, many global energy and industrial players on 6 April’21 came together to form a new energy transition coalition, called the India H2 Alliance (IH2A), to help commercialise hydrogen technologies in their bid to build net-zero carbon energy pathways in the country. The alliance will focus on industrial clusters, specifically steel, refineries, fertilisers, cement, ports and logistics as well as heavy-duty transport use-cases and help establish standards for storing and transporting hydrogen in pressurized and liquefied form, the statement added. To achieve the objectives, the alliance will work with the government on five areas: to develop a national hydrogen policy and roadmap 2021-30; to create a national H2 taskforce and mission in a public-private partnership format; to identify nationally large H2 demonstration-stage projects; too help create a national India H2 fund; and to create hydrogen-linked capacity covering hydrogen production, storage and distribution, industrial use-cases, transport use-cases and standards, the alliance said. (IH2A, 2021)
Iron ore billionaire Andrew Forrest said Musk had “every reason to fear them, and his description is perhaps better suited, in my view, to someone who peddles a battery technology as green when it runs on fossil fuel.” Musk had said that hydrogen cars are “mind-bogglingly stupid.” Hydrogen has a long way to go before it matches the scale of Musk’s operation. More than half a million vehicles came off the Tesla production line last year, while hydrogen cars are still more a concept than a commercial reality. On a broader level, industries would only switch to hydrogen if there was a sound business case. (Musk Forrest H2, 2021)
Hydrogen is perhaps our best chance to attain carbon neutrality by 2050, was the conclusion of a brainstorming on carbon neutrality held at UNECE this week. Mr Francisco de la Flor, the Chair of UNECE Group of Experts on Gas: “Our Group recommends to UNECE member States to use the gas infrastructure as a cost-effective entry point for developing low-carbon alternatives, such as hydrogen. We agreed today that all options for hydrogen production should be discussed from a level playing field perspective. We believe that retrofitting (blending) and repurposing existing natural gas infrastructure would accelerate the transition to a future hydrogen economy in a cost-effective way.” (Hydrogen Pipe Dream UNECE, 2021)
Israeli startup H2Pro joined the race to make cheap green hydrogen after securing investments from funds backed by Microsoft Corp. founder Bill Gates and Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing. Talmon Marco, H2Pro’s chief executive officer earlier co-founded the messaging and calling app Viber, which was acquired by Rakuten Inc. for $900 million in 2014. He then co-founded and led the ride-hailing app Juno until it was bought by Gett Inc. for $200 million in 2017. H2Pro reduces that energy use by splitting the step in two. By tweaking the current methodology, H2Pro says it will be able to make green hydrogen for $1 per kilogram by the second half of this decade. A kilo of green hydrogen cost $2.50 to $6.80 in 2019. The rush from companies in Europe is expected to bring as much as 470 billion euros ($560 billion) by 2050 in government funding and private investment, according to estimates from the European Union. (Gates backed startup H2, 2021)
