Insights from European Hydrogen Week  

At the end of last year, I took a trip across to Brussels to visit European Hydrogen Week to meet with our peers and share insights and innovations across the industry. The week takes place annually and is organised by the Hydrogen Europe Industry Association, of which Smiths Group and John Crane are proud members of.  

As someone who has lived and breathed a career in the hydrogen eco-system for many years now, I’m always on the lookout for fresh news and developments which I can learn more about, and European Hydrogen Week is a seedbed for these. 

To make the most of the week, I attended a variety of panel sessions each dissecting the intricate workings of the hydrogen industry. One which stood out to me was “Implementing the Green Deal targets for sustainable demand”, where panellist, Mohammad El-Ramahi, Chief Green Hydrogen Officer at MASDAR – the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company - raised a poignant fact.  

He told the audience that Europe spends an incredible c.€200 billion per year on the damages cause by climate change, such as fires and floods. However, if we spent just 10% of this per year on mitigation instead, including renewable energy and green hydrogen we would already have funded the majority of the required developments. 

But why aren’t we focusing our funding on mitigation instead of reparation? At the moment, the public and private funding in Europe committed to green hydrogen and other energy transition initiatives is nowhere near enough to meet the ambitious targets. Some argue that the way we should solve this problem is by lowering the ambition – but in my opinion, we should aim for the opposite. 

We have witnessed a tremendous learning curve and a lot of ongoing innovation in new, critical technologies for hydrogen production and handling. As an example, many EPC’s and operators undertook internal studies reviewing the various available electrolyser and compressor technologies for hydrogen production, transport and conversion (e.g. into ammonia or methanol). And while this work is still ongoing especially in areas like hydrogen pipeline transport or more efficient hydrogen liquefaction (LH2) and LH2 storage, we see more conclusive results in some areas like green hydrogen production.

What we have learned from industry and public partners shows that projects are designed in a different (better) way now than only a couple of years ago. A very clear feedback is that no one size (or type) fits all. The selection of electrolyser and compressor types (and other critical equipment, too) is largely depending on factors such as plant output capacity, electricity and hydrogen buffer storage concepts (in case of intermittent power supply from renewables), project location, off-takers for by-products or waste streams, just to name a few. 

The other main observation for me was that non-European partner countries/regions were featured more prominently than ever before. The 3 main regions were India, UAE and North Africa, namely Morocco and Algeria.  

My view is that Europe is as ambitious as ever to get the hydrogen economy to scale but it remains challenging to get larger scale hydrogen production projects off the ground, especially in time to meet the ambitious European targets. Seeing a (at least short term) policy shift away from renewable projects in the US I foresee an increased flow of green/ESG investments into Europe and other regions committed to continuing the build-out of renewable hydrogen.  

My final take away from the week is that for lowest cost of green hydrogen at the point of demand it is not only about ideal renewable energy conditions for lowest cost green hydrogen production, proximity to the hydrogen consumer like heavy industry in Europe is another important factor in a true end-to-end evaluation. This could favour regions like Northern Africa but also the UK as a non-EU country due to much shorter transportation routes, potentially even allowing for pipeline over marine transport. It stays exciting and whenever we perceive a slowdown in one region we typically see things accelerating in another region.  

From a global perspective the growth direction is clear and as a global organisation, here at John Crane we are ready to support the industry on this exciting journey. 

René Leven is Segment Leader for Hydrogen and CCUS at John Crane, a Smiths business.