Everyone involved agrees: green hydrogen is the fuel of the future. But no one can say how it will get there and where it will be needed – different interest groups advocate very different strategies, including in the “Financial Times”. Aspiring hydrogen nations like Spain want to produce clean hydrogen cheaply for countries like Germany with their solar power and then deliver it – but there are no trans-European pipelines for this. Some German companies would like to produce hydrogen themselves, but there is no renewable energy. And then there are the expensive liquefied gas terminals that are currently being built to obtain hydrogen from Chile or Africa, but: “It is not at all clear whether they are really suitable for hydrogen,” explains Lisa Fischer from the think tank E3G im “Climate Laboratory” by ntv. And even if it were, sea transport would probably be the most expensive of all the ideas, because hydrogen burns well but cannot be transported.
ntv.de: Everyone agrees that hydrogen is the industrial fuel of the future. But surprisingly, no one can say how it should actually be received by German companies – is that the current situation?
Lisa Fischer: That is correct. Everyone knows that hydrogen is incredibly important for the energy transition. But there are many unanswered questions, because it is not particularly easy to transport. The pipelines that we currently use for natural gas cannot be transferred one-to-one. So where is he supposed to come from? From Europe? From overseas? Where is he going? These questions are open.
Would you have to build a whole new infrastructure?
Partially. However, there are also considerations to convert older natural gas pipelines. At the moment, however, there is no data to be able to say: How fast will that happen? How much is it? What makes more sense? Where is the hydrogen ultimately used?
What speaks against simply continuing to use old pipelines? Why do they have to be converted?
Hydrogen can potentially be made from natural gas, but that’s where the similarities end. The hydrogen molecule is much smaller than natural gas molecules and extremely dangerous. You can’t just send it through pipelines, they have to be lined from the inside first. The entire network has to be converted so that hydrogen can be transported safely.
Extremely dangerous?
The hydrogen molecule is even more flammable than natural gas. And because it’s so small, it can quickly slip through holes and leaks that can occur in pipelines.
The existing pipelines most likely also run on routes that we actually no longer want to use in the future.
That’s right. The advantage of hydrogen is that it can be produced from electricity and water. In contrast to natural gas, this combination can be found almost everywhere. Inexpensive electricity will primarily be available where we have a lot of renewable energy. This applies to southern countries such as Spain and Portugal with a lot of solar energy, but also to wind power from the North Sea. If you manage to produce hydrogen cheaply there, you have a big advantage: the transport is much shorter than if you bring green hydrogen by ship from countries like Chile. That would be extremely expensive.
What makes it so expensive when you buy hydrogen abroad and then ship it to Europe? Ultimately, several LNG terminals will be built for this purpose.
Countries like Chile have much better opportunities than Europe when it comes to renewables because the solar radiation is particularly great there. The hydrogen itself would theoretically be much cheaper, but the journey would be extremely expensive. Because hydrogen is not particularly easy to transport. It has a very low density, so you need a lot of space and large ships. For transport, hydrogen would also have to be liquefied at temperatures of minus 250 degrees. They have to be created first. Hydrogen can also be converted into ammonia for transport. However, this is also an enormous energy expenditure with high costs. Actually, it then no longer makes sense to convert ammonia in Germany. However, this would eliminate a core business of the German chemical industry. And with the LNG terminals it is not at all clear whether they are really suitable for hydrogen, even if it is always said that they are “hydrogen ready”.
But why are Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Economics Minister Robert Habeck traveling around the world and signing hydrogen agreements at practically every station? You mentioned Chile. But that also applies to Australia, the Near and Middle East and Namibia.
It is important for Germany to exhaust all options. There is a very energy-intensive industry and part of it needs to switch to hydrogen. Where this hydrogen ultimately comes from is another question. It looks more like the federal government is making sure that the market develops at all: we need hydrogen. We’ll review all options and see what works. Because the fear is, of course, that it won’t work fast enough and the industry will then look for another home like Spain, where it can produce hydrogen cheaply on site. That is why all strategies are currently running in parallel. But of course that costs money. And as I said, with these terminals we don’t know if that’s a good option in the long term.
You don’t want to repeat the mistakes of the gas supply, but rather position yourself as diverse as possible?
That’s right, but one mustn’t forget that countries like Algeria still have very high emissions themselves. From a climate technology point of view, it would make more sense to use the renewable energy and hydrogen there to decarbonize the local economy. There you can get a lot more out of it in the next ten, 20 years than in Germany, where you could produce hydrogen locally. However, two things sometimes fall by the wayside: Precisely because hydrogen is so expensive, Germany must ensure that it is used as efficiently as possible. It must be used in industry, not for heating houses. And for local hydrogen production, of course, the renewables must be expanded, otherwise not much will come of it.
However, hydrogen imports would at least be one way of using this clean energy at all. After all, green electricity cannot be transported from Chile to Germany. But what roles do Spain and Portugal play? Would it make more sense if they bought the hydrogen from Algeria? In any case, the transport would be significantly shorter, even if new pipelines would have to be built for it.
That’s the exciting question. It would probably be best if Spain and Portugal produced the hydrogen themselves cheaply on site and then forwarded it. With this option, however, the interests of the pipeline operators are decisive: we know that the demand for gas in Europe will fall extremely in the coming years. This puts your business at risk. Therefore, these companies must maintain the image that hydrogen will eventually flow through their infrastructure. But as already mentioned: It is not certain that old pipelines can be used to transport hydrogen.
Where’s the problem? Why is this not known or not exactly?
The big problem with the pipelines is that the data is basically produced by the pipeline operators themselves. There is a conflict of interest. The second problem is that when planning infrastructure at European level, we do not look at power lines and natural gas pipelines together, but separately. We can’t even decide whether it would be better to transport cheap electricity from Spain to Germany and produce hydrogen locally because the models are not linked.
The third problem is the lack of data on possible consumption. The federal government has said it doesn’t want to use the hydrogen in buildings because it’s too valuable for that. That’s positive. But it is also unclear in industry what exactly it is to be used for. Even in the steel and chemical industries, a lot is happening at the moment. Heat pumps or other solutions are used.
You should actually put three cards on top of each other? The pipeline map, the power line map and the consumption map?
Exactly. But that would also have to happen independently. At the moment this process is dominated by the companies whose economic interests are tied to it. This has been the case in Britain for a long time, but it has now been decided that infrastructure must be planned by an independent authority and not by the people who own it. We can certainly be inspired by that.
Is that anyone’s business?
The federal government has proposed setting up a hydrogen society. But this plan is only worth something if the dimensions “electricity” and “demand” are taken into account. This is also not clear at the EU level at the moment.
It sounds like on-site hydrogen production is the best solution for now.
Local manufacturing is the most likely option over the next few years, at least in the German North Sea where wind energy is plentiful. It would also minimize the risk that we produce too much or too little hydrogen, because if the production is paid for by the companies that end up buying it, that’s the most efficient way. This is fundamentally the most important thing: in the end, as little energy as possible should be wasted. We need energy efficiency, energy efficiency, energy efficiency.
Would you have to import additional green electricity from Spain? And build new power lines for it? That, too, has been anything but easy in recent years.
Network expansion is difficult, yes. One could consider laying the power cables in the natural gas pipelines, because some of the routes are already there. But we can’t check that either because of the lack of planning.
Could old natural gas pipelines be used to transport electricity? That would be a worthwhile business for the natural gas industry, wouldn’t it?
Probably. Ultimately, the industry has to say whether that would be possible and would pay off. My technical expertise is not sufficient for this. But the fact that the idea is not even considered speaks volumes. This is symbolic of the structural problems in Europe: the natural gas people, the electricity people and the hydrogen people each see for themselves what they want.
Clara Pfeffer and Christian Herrmann spoke to Lisa Fischer. The conversation has been shortened and smoothed for better understanding.
