Reducing emissions from heavy-polluting industries such as the chemical and steel industries is a conundrum that companies and governments around the world have long struggled to crack.
But in Austria, Germany and Italy, a group of gas companies believe they now have the answer – va Water pipeline with a length of 3300 km.
The companies, which include Italy’s Snam and Germany’s Bayernets, are working on a project to transport green hydrogen – produced from renewable energy sources – from sunshine-rich northern Africa and southern Italy to regions further north where there are few other ways. to wean industry off fossil fuels.
The “SoutH2 Corridor” pipeline project linking North Africa with Italy, Austria and Germany is to be part of a much wider hydrogen “backbone” being promoted by infrastructure companies in Europe. The aim is to help the trading bloc meet its climate goals and ensure more secure energy supplies in the future. Other projects include the proposed one 2.5 billion euros an undersea gas pipeline — “H2Med” — to transport hydrogen from Spain to France.
Daryl Wilson, chief executive of the Hydrogen Council, an industry body, says oil and gas are already being shipped or pipelined from regions such as the Middle East, so it is natural to explore how hydrogen could be transported long distances by similar methods.
“Transmission of energy over long distances is [already] part of our reality,” notes Wilson. “The energy sources we use today are often very far from places of high demand” — mostly densely populated urban areas.
In the future, he said, sources will become “more diverse” as other parts of the world increase their capacity to produce renewable energy. But the same problem will persist: power will likely still be produced far from areas of greatest demand.
A report published last year by the Hydrogen Council, which includes BP, Shell, BMW and McKinsey, suggests that 400 million tons out of the expected 660 million tons the hydrogen needed by 2050 to meet climate targets will be transported over long distances.
Infrastructure companies argue that green hydrogen can be easily produced in sunny and windy countries such as Morocco, Italy and Spain through the electrolysis of water using renewable energy. Some existing pipelines could then be redesigned and new infrastructure built to transport the light, colorless gas further north to serve industries such as refining, power generation, fertilizer production and transportation.
“Blue” hydrogen, produced from natural gas with associated captured and sequestered carbon dioxide, is also being pursued by some countries such as the UK.
Some hydrogen sources, such as ammonia, are already transported long distances, Wilson points out. He says these operations could be scaled up to be used as a fuel source, rather than purely for their current applications – such as making fertiliser.
In some countries, hydrogen is also being considered to replace natural gas home heating.
But climate activists and some scientists warn that the potential for clean hydrogen is on the rise exaggerated by gas companieswhich could be left with stranded assets worth billions of euros if they do not identify future uses for their pipelines or production.
Hydrogen skeptics also question the economics of transporting hydrogen over long distances, arguing that renewable energy should be used directly where possible—for example, to power heat pumps in homes and electric vehicles. The production of green hydrogen involves an immediate loss of energy to break the chemical bond between oxygen and hydrogen.
“What you’re doing is degrading that electricity into hydrogen because of a lot of inefficiency,” says Tom Baxter, a visiting professor at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland and a founding member of the Hydrogen Science Coalition of academics and engineers who seek to provide independent advice on this topic.
“When you look at hydrogen at the moment, you generally produce hydrogen where you want to use it because it’s a traffic hog; it is very leaky. . . and it’s corrosive,” Baxter explains.
Iberdrola is one of the largest green hydrogen companies in Europe. Jorge Palomar, its global director of hydrogen development, says the European hydrogen pipeline system “could be a good idea for the future”, but there needs to be a better understanding of what and where hydrogen can be used. Where electrification is possible, pan-European interconnectors – the cables that export electricity across borders – should be improved, says Palomar.
Meanwhile, Iberdrola is promoting the production of green hydrogen near places where it is already being used in a dirtier form. Highly polluting “grey” hydrogen, produced from fossil fuels, is already widely used in the chemical and petrochemical industries.
But some countries, such as Japan, don’t have the luxury of electrifying large parts of their economies, Wilson points out.
“Our decisions about energy infrastructure are complicated and always site-specific,” he says. “Japan and Korea [for example] they do not have large possibilities of renewable energy sources. . . so it’s not even an option to build a lot of wind and solar farms because the resource just isn’t there [on the scale required].
“The energy-efficient approach, the cost-effective approach, the low-carbon approach is to ship hydrogen or ammonia long distances to Japan to import that energy,” insists Wilson.