In just a few years, the Gelsenkirchen city harbor will be used to test how medium-sized companies can produce in a climate-neutral manner. Green hydrogen should play a central role in this. On Thursday there were important visitors in the future “climate port”.
Gelsenkirchen (dpa / lnw) – North Rhine-Westphalia’s Economics Minister Mona Neubaur has praised the “Gelsenkirchen Climate Port” initiative as a “pioneering project”. With its focus on hydrogen and the circular economy, future-oriented solutions would be developed and implemented there, said the Green politician on Thursday after visiting a Zinq galvanizing plant.
The aim of the climate port initiative is for the medium-sized companies in the city port to become climate-neutral as quickly as possible. Hydrogen will play a key role in this. In addition to numerous medium-sized companies, large corporations such as Thyssenkrupp, Arcelormittal, Trimet, Uniper and BP are also represented in the initiative.
Neubaur was accompanied by her party colleague, Federal Economics Minister Robert Habeck. “Projects like these show how ambitious many actors are working to advance specific climate protection projects,” said Habeck. Investments in energy efficiency and hydrogen are necessary, “because they make a sustainable contribution to an independent energy supply”.
According to the will of the initiative, the port should become a model for the climate-friendly conversion of an entire commercial area. Among other things, the companies see the central location and the existing connections to several gas pipelines as advantages. From as early as 2024, hydrogen produced in a climate-neutral manner is to flow into the commercial area via a pipeline. However, hydrogen production on site using green electricity is also being tested.
The initiative’s pilot project is the conversion of process heat generation from natural gas in energy-intensive operations to hydrogen-rich energy gas. “In many areas of medium-sized industry, hydrogen is the logical replacement for natural gas, so that many applications could be implemented relatively quickly,” said the spokesman for the initiative, Lars Baumgurt. According to him, the proportion of process heat is almost two-thirds of the total energy requirement in industry.
