Last week at Flame, the European gas industry’s leading annual conference, the impacts of climate change and the need to transition to a decarbonised energy system were the focus of the debate.
It is now near universally accepted that the role of natural gas infrastructure in the energy transition is an existential issue for the industry.
This leant a new sense of urgency to the discussion around hydrogen, as well as other climate neutral gaseous energy carriers.
Instead of talking up the hydrogen economy’s merits, speakers instead focused on how best to overcome the various hurdles - regulatory, technological, financial and otherwise - that stand in its way.
According to the Hydrogen Envoy to the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy, Noe van Hulst, solving these problems will require a new spirit of cooperation between European countries.
“This is going to be a big transformation, and Europe needs to step up to the plate,” van Hulst told the conference. “We’re talking about common standards, we’re talking about common approaches to market regulation. It will be a new market, so who is going to be doing what?”
The Netherlands has already entered into collaboration with its neighbouring countries to develop the hydrogen economy. This cooperation must be extended to encompass the European market as a whole, van Hulst believes.
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There are obvious drawbacks to inconsistent hydrogen regulations. The European pipeline system sprawls across national borders, but member states currently have different rules governing how much hydrogen can be blended in with natural gas.
The difficulty is partly political and partly safety related, as the technical limits to blending have yet to be established. These limits need to be standardised across the transmission and distribution systems to allow blending at scale.
Agreeing on a fixed blend rate could very quickly create a mass market for hydrogen, accelerating development of the fuel. Even at levels as low as 2%, blending hydrogen into “European gas grids would already be a huge trigger for hydrogen in volume terms,” van Hulst said.
An alternative route to market is pipelines transporting pure hydrogen. The Netherlands may find itself well positioned as an early mover in this respect due to a quirk in the way that declining domestic production has affected the composition of its gas supplies.
Dutch low-cal gas from the Groningen gas field is being gradually supplanted by high-cal gas imported from abroad, meaning that some gas network infrastructure is in need of replacement. If these elements are retained, there is a unique opportunity to use low-cal pipelines as a separate distribution system for unblended hydrogen, van Hulst observed.
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Another challenge for regulators is developing consistent criteria for guarantees of origin. Green hydrogen produced through electrolysis has a very different emissions profile to grey hydrogen produced from natural gas, or blue hydrogen produced from natural gas with carbon capture and storage.
To ensure that hydrogen delivers quantifiable emissions savings, regulators will need to accurately assess the emissions profile of different forms of hydrogen, and ensure that end-users really know what they’re getting. The European Commission is currently debating how these definitions ought to be formulated.
Outside of the United Kingdom, the majority of hydrogen projects underway in Europe have focused on green hydrogen produced with electricity from renewable sources. These projects are important, but are unlikely to be able to meet all the demand on their own.
A significant expansion in renewable generation is necessary just to decarbonise Europe’s power generation mix, van Hulst pointed out, which leaves limited room for large scale hydrogen production from renewables in the near term.
“In the next 10 – 15 years, in terms of volume, we definitely need large amounts of blue hydrogen,” van Hulst told the conference.
The use of blue hydrogen may also serve an important narrative function. Carbon capture and storage has encountered some resistance from renewable energy supporters because it could prolong the role of fossil fuels in the energy system.
But combining CCS with hydrogen production places the carbon capture "story in a much more positive framing, because it helps build the infrastructure for green hydrogen to come later in bigger volumes,” Van Hulst said.
The development of the hydrogen economy has been encouraged by the current European Commission, who have emphasised the importance of climate neutral gaseous energy carriers for decarbonising industry and transport.
As a new European Commission is due to be selected later this year, it is not yet certain whether this support will be continued. But van Hulst told Flame attendees that he is not overly concerned.
“The new EU Commission will come in with the same ambitions is my prediction,” he said. “I think the new EU discussion is going to be this: after greening the electrons, how are we going to green the molecules?”
