Europe pushes ahead with hydrogen pipelines to meet energy demand

Cutting emissions from heavily polluting industries, such as chemicals and steel, is a conundrum that companies and governments the world over have long been trying to crack.

But in Austria, Germany and Italy, a group of gas companies believe they now have an answer — in a 3,300km hydrogen pipeline.

These companies, which include Italy’s Snam and Germany’s Bayernets, are working on a project to transport green hydrogen — made with renewable sources of energy — from the sunshine-rich north of Africa and southern Italy to regions further north, where there are few other ways to wean industries off fossil fuels.

The “SoutH2 Corridor” pipeline project connecting north Africa with Italy, Austria and Germany is intended to be part of a much wider hydrogen “backbone”, which infrastructure companies in Europe are promoting. The goal is to help the trading bloc meet its climate targets and to provide more secure energy supplies in future. Other projects include a proposed €2.5bn undersea pipeline — “H2Med” — to carry hydrogen from Spain to France.

Daryl Wilson, executive director of the Hydrogen Council, an industry body, says oil and gas are already shipped or piped from regions such as the Middle East, so it is natural to examine how hydrogen could also be transported long distances through similar methods.

“Long distance transport of energy is [already] part of our reality,” notes Wilson. “The sources of energy that we use today are often very distant from the places of high demand” — mostly densely populated urban areas.

In future, he says, sources will become “more diverse” as other parts of the world increase their capacity to produce renewable energy. But the same problem will persist: energy will still likely be produced far from the areas of greatest demand.

A report published last year by the Hydrogen Council, whose members include BP, Shell, BMW, and McKinsey, suggested that 400mn tonnes out of the predicted 660mn tonnes of hydrogen needed by 2050 to meet climate goals will be transported long-distance.

Infrastructure companies argue that green hydrogen can be produced easily in sunny and windy countries such as Morocco, Italy and Spain through the electrolysis of water using renewable power. Some existing natural gas pipelines could then be repurposed, and new infrastructure built, to transport the light, colourless gas further north to serve industries such as refining, power generation, fertiliser production and transport.

“Blue” hydrogen, produced from natural gas with the associated carbon dioxide captured and sequestered, is also being pursued by some countries, such as the UK.

Some hydrogen sources, such as ammonia, are already shipped long distances, Wilson points out. He says those operations could be stepped up so they are used as a fuel source, rather than purely for their current applications — in fertiliser production, for example.

Hydrogen is also under consideration in some countries to replace natural gas heating in homes.

In general, you produce hydrogen beside where you want to use it because it’s a pig of a thing of transport; it’s very leaky . . . and it’s corrosive

However, climate campaigners and some scientists warn that the potential of clean hydrogen is being overhyped by gas companies, which could be left with billions of euros worth of stranded assets if they do not identify a future use for their pipelines or production.

Hydrogen sceptics also question the economics of transporting hydrogen long distances and argue that renewable power should be used directly where possible — for example, to power heat pumps in homes and for electric vehicles. Green hydrogen production involves an immediate energy loss, to break the chemical bond between oxygen and hydrogen.

“What you’re doing is degrading that electricity down to hydrogen because of big inefficiencies,” says Tom Baxter, 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 the subject.

“If you look at hydrogen at the moment, in general, you produce hydrogen beside where you want to use it because it’s a pig of a thing of transport; it’s very leaky . . . and it’s corrosive,” Baxter explains.

Iberdrola is one of the biggest companies in Europe pursuing green hydrogen. Jorge Palomar, its global hydrogen development director, says a system of European hydrogen pipelines “may be a good idea for the future” but there needs to be a better understanding of what hydrogen may be used for, and where. Where electrification is possible, pan-European interconnectors — cables that export electricity across borders — should be improved, Palomar says.

In the meantime, Iberdrola is backing green hydrogen production near where it is already used in a dirtier form. Highly polluting “grey” hydrogen, produced from fossil fuels, is already widely used in the chemical and petrochemicals industries.

But some countries, such as Japan, do not have the luxury of electrifying large swaths of their economies, points out Wilson.

“Our decisions about energy infrastructure are complicated and always situated in the particularity of the location,” he says. “Japan and Korea [for example] do not have large endowments of renewable energy capability . . . so it’s not even a choice to be putting up a lot of wind and solar farms because the resource is simply not there [on the scale required].

“The energy-efficient approach, the cost-effective approach and the low-carbon approach is to ship hydrogen or ammonia long distances for Japan to import that energy,” Wilson insists.