Green hydrogen will make a significant contribution to the world’s energy transition in the future, providing governments cooperate. It will play a key role in replacing fossil fuels in non-energy processes, according to an academic paper published by the Abu Dhabi-based International Renewable Energy Agency [IRENA].
IRENA’s Coalition for Action 2022 suggests moves to decarbonising end-use. The Coalition assembles the world’s leading renewable energy entities to advance renewable energy use. The Coalition helps global discussions between public and private entities to develop actions to increase the share of renewables in the global energy mix and speed up the energy transition. This gives the GCC an opportunity to set the pace in the transition to green hydrogen.
The Coalition’s action comes at the right time when government’s pass laws and policies for sustainable development riding on renewable energy initiatives. Indeed, lawmakers and an increasing number of industrialists back the transition from fossil fuels to clean hydrogen.
The International Energy Agency [IEA], in its 2019 report on ‘The Future of Hydrogen’ said, “Now is the time to scale up technologies and bring down costs to allow hydrogen to become widely used. The pragmatic and actionable recommendations to governments and industry will make it possible to take full advantage of this increasing momentum.”
The IEA and IRENA are optimistic on the world’s transition to clean energy. The IRENA Coalition’s Working Group paper, co-authored by several experts, on decarbonising end-use, says green hydrogen could replace use of fossil fuels in producing steel, fertilisers, and plastics among others. Green hydrogen comes from renewable energy. This transition will spur global governments to become climate neutral.
In a future scene, 30 years later, presented in the World Energy Transition Outlook, the paper says green hydrogen and its derivatives will account for 12 per cent of final energy use by 2050, and with electricity, will represent 63 per cent of final energy consumption. Achieving decarbonisation globally will need 5,000 gigawatts (GW) of hydrogen electrolyser capacity by 2050, compared to only 0.3 GW of installed capacity in 2020.
The paper highlights the benefits and challenges of green hydrogen certification to support the development of green hydrogen to reach decarbonisation by 2050. It provides examples of green hydrogen certification schemes carried out and planned so far, as well as includes key recommendations for the successful implementation of green hydrogen certificate systems.
Currently, fossil fuels produce 98 per cent of hydrogen produced in the world. The use of green hydrogen needs creating national, regional, and international hydrogen markets. It will depend on the widespread acceptance of tracking instruments certifying green hydrogen’s origin.
What are tracking certificates? Renewable energy tracking certificates help consumers identify the renewable attributes of the energy bought and prove its origin. “Registries listing renewable energy installations issue these certificates, according to the needs of the tracking system. Independently and credibly certifying the origin enables consumers to make claims on a certain volume of produced energy,” says the Coalition paper.
Tracking systems are necessary to track attributes across the entire value chain, create transparency, boost demand, and encourage transferability, the paper says. Creating a cost-effective green hydrogen tracking system based on internationally agreed hydrogen principles will, however, need joint efforts by governments, industries, civil society organisations and science-based technical bodies.
Among others, this includes addressing potential traceability and trackability flaws emanating from the separation of certificates and the physical flow of renewable electricity. “While certificates can contribute to promoting the use and production of green hydrogen, unless there are solid framing conditions and rules, these may not necessarily lead to the scaling-up of supply chains and increased renewable energy industry capacity.”
Although the current hostilities going on in Europe and the doubt over energy transmission and supplies do not augur well for the world, the growth and success of a market for green hydrogen will depend on cooperation between key governments globally.
[Sudeep Sonawane, an India-based journalist, has worked in five countries in the Middle East and Asia. Email: sudeep.sonawane@gmail.com]
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