Why Europe’s hydrogen economy dreams remain just that – where are the buyers?

Credit: Scottish Power

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Net zero targets are one thing, results another. What is hydrogen other than an unnecessarily expensive, leaky and generally more difficult and complicated way of doing what gas does already? Making hydrogen ‘green’, as required by climate obsessives, by using renewables and/or carbon capture greatly increases the already high costs. It’s not even the global warming panacea some may imagine, as this study shows. Quote: ‘Hydrogen is not directly a greenhouse gas, but its chemical reactions change the abundances of the greenhouse gases methane, ozone, and stratospheric water vapor, as well as aerosols.’
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Four years ago, the European Commission unveiled the landmark European Green Deal wherein it laid out a series of policies aimed at making the region a “climate-neutral bloc” by 2050, says OilPrice.com.

Among the key policies, Europe set a target to consume 20 million tons/year (Mt/y) of renewable hydrogen and install 62 GW in electrolyzer capacity by 2030.

Unfortunately, the continent is quickly acknowledging a cold reality: hydrogen, really, is a hard sell.

In its latest annual report, the EU Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators (ACER) paints a bleak picture of the state of the continent’s hydrogen sector, saying those targets are unlikely to be realized without tackling serious challenges that include production cost and infrastructure.

“The current renewable hydrogen consumption remains minimal, and while EU renewable energy and decarbonization targets could drive the demand, uptake so far has been slow,” ACER researchers wrote.
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Hard Sell

Europe is not alone here. A few years ago, climate experts touted the outsized role that hydrogen could play in helping the planet limit catastrophic global warming [Talkshop comment – where’s the catastrophe?]. Indeed, net-zero models have forecast that hydrogen could provide as much as 20% of the world’s primary energy by 2050, nearly as much as all renewables currently contribute to the United States’ energy mix.

Not surprisingly, there’s been no shortage of big hydrogen ambitions.
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Overall, companies and governments across the globe have announced plans to build nearly 1,600 hydrogen plants. However, hydrogen producers are facing one small problem: Few customers are stepping up to buy their commodity.

According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), just 12% of hydrogen plants have customers with offtake agreements. Even among projects that have signed offtake deals, most have vague, nonbinding arrangements that can be quietly discarded if the potential buyers back out.

The big problem here is that many industries that could potentially run on hydrogen require expensive retooling to make this a reality, a leap that most are unwilling to make.

To complicate matters, green hydrogen made by electrolysing water using renewable energy costs nearly four times as [much as] gray hydrogen created from natural gas, or methane, using steam methane reformation but without capturing the greenhouse gasses emitted in the process.

Quite naturally, it’s hard to build hydrogen infrastructure when the demand may not materialize for years. [Talkshop comment – or never].

Full article here.
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Image credit: Scottish Power