EU faith in hydrogen is grossly misplaced: interview [Global Gas Perspectives]

The European Commission published its EU hydrogen strategy in 2020, precipitating widespread faith that the fuel would serve as a critical pathway towards net zero. Even back then, it was understood that the strategy’s aims were very ambitious. It set the goal of ramping up green hydrogen production from virtually nothing to 10mn tonnes/year by 2030, allowing some room for blue hydrogen in the meantime.

Two years later, under pressure to come up with a tangible plan to eliminate Russian gas imports within the space of a few years, the Commission published its REPowerEU strategy, calling for a further 10mn t/yr of green hydrogen to be imported by the end of the decade.

With only six years to go until these deadlines, however, the amount of green hydrogen that the EU produces is still minimal. According to the Energy Institute’s Statistical Review of World Energy, Europe as a whole turned out only 31,600 t last year. 

Misplaced faith

Not only were Brussels’ targets very unrealistic, but the faith it has placed in hydrogen as a low-carbon fuel is grossly misplaced, Samuel Furfari, a professor of energy geopolitics at the Free University of Brussels, tells NGW. As explained in depth in his 2020 book, The Hydrogen Illusion, Furfari views hydrogen as a dead end, which for simple economic reasons is neither fit to serve as a means of storing and then producing electricity, nor as a fuel. He cites a great many reasons, from storage difficulties and safety concerns to vast infrastructure requirements and inherent inefficiencies that cannot easily be overcome through innovation.

Furfari spent 36 years up until 2018 as a senior energy official at the Commission, and is “ashamed” at his former employer’s embrace of hydrogen, which he sees as politics prevailing over science. And it will prove to be a costly mistake. Indeed, he says, this is just one more example of the EU setting unrealistic climate targets with no basis in science that are subsequently not met.

“They continue inventing numbers without any scientific basis,” he says. “Worse still, they use public money to ask consulting companies to make assessment reports to justify these political targets.”

Even the basic mathematics used in the strategy was wrong, he adds, as the 40 GW of electrolyser capacity that it states should be built by 2030 would not be nearly enough to produce the desired 10mn t/yr of hydrogen.

“It will be a total failure, because there is no way to produce that much hydrogen,” Furfari says. “And there is no realistic way to use hydrogen as an energy source. It’s a dream.”

Perhaps an even bigger pipe dream than the EU’s production goals is its import targets, he says.

The EU has notably signed a number of preliminary agreements with African nations on developing future clean hydrogen supply to Europe, even though these same countries can struggle to cover their own energy needs, and lack enough renewables to decarbonise their own power systems.

“How can you expect Africa, where there is fuel poverty, where in many countries less than half of people have access to electricity, and where there is water scarcity, to produce this hydrogen for Europe. It’s really ridiculous.”

Green hydrogen is “uneconomic”

While against hydrogen’s use for energy in general, Furfari takes aim in particular at the EU’s preferred production method of using renewable power to split water molecules into so-called green hydrogen.

“Breaking the water molecule into hydrogen takes seven times more energy than breaking the methane molecule. That’s why no one has ever done it at scale,” he says, drawing attention to how this contradicts efforts towards greater energy efficiency.

Green hydrogen is simply uneconomic, and its development will further undermine EU competitiveness. “Financing green hydrogen with public money will only accelerate this destruction of competitiveness,” Furfari says.

Furthermore, it does not make sense to turn renewable power into hydrogen when there is still not enough renewable power to make the electricity system 100% green, he says.

Using hydrogen in fuel cells to power vehicles is a particularly bad idea, he says. There is simply too much energy loss during the process of turning electricity into hydrogen and then back into electricity. Electrolysers have an efficiency of 65-66% in practice, he says. A few more percent are lost in storage, and then the fuel cell has an efficiency of around 50%. Overall, this leaves an energy efficiency of 28%. He estimates that hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are about five times less efficient than battery electric vehicles.

If hydrogen is such a poor choice, then, the next question is why there is not substantial pushback against the idea. First, there are the policymakers that simply ignore the science, according to Furfari. Second, there is the energy industry, which is willing to praise hydrogen in order, on the one hand, to secure subsidies, and on the other hand, to avoid accusations of preventing action on climate change from environmentalists.

“Behind closed doors it’s a different story. The industry knows that hydrogen is a joke,” Furfari says. He recalls how a CEO of one European company, after retiring, admitted that he found pursuing hydrogen as an energy source ridiculous, but that he was obliged to go along with it anyway.

Ultimately, whatever clean hydrogen that is produced has much better applications than as an energy source, like using more of it as a feedstock for fertilisers and petrochemicals. Indeed, some 130mn t/yr of hydrogen is already produced, mainly in the chemicals industry and from natural gas, and to a lesser extent coal. 

“It is nonsense to burn such a precious molecule,” he says. “Burning hydrogen is like burning a Louis Vutton handbag. It’s a luxury product.”

In need of a “reality check”

The view that the EU’s hydrogen strategy needs a rethink is hardly fringe. The European Court of Auditors (ECA) released a report in July stressing that the 2030 targets needed a “reality check.”

“Based on the available information from member states and industry, the EU is unlikely to meet [the targets] by 2030,” Stef Bloc, a member of the court that was involved in preparing the report, said in a briefing. These goals were “driven by political will rather than being based on robust analysis,” the report concluded. They are “overly ambitious” and “achieving them has had a bumpy start.”

“Firstly, member states’ differing ambitions were not always aligned with the targets,” the report said. “Secondly, in coordinating with the member states and industry, the Commission failed to ensure that all parties were pulling in the same direction.”

The ECA did credit the European Commission with proposing most legal acts to support the hydrogen plan within a short period of time.

“The legal framework is almost complete, and has provided certainty that is key to establishing a new market,” the report noted. “However, agreeing on the rules that define renewable hydrogen took time, and many investment decisions were deferred. Project developers also defer investment decisions because supply depends on demand, and vice versa.”

The auditors added that scaling up a hydrogen market “requires massive public and private investment, but the Commission does not have a full overview of needs or of the public funding available.”

So far, though, it seems that Brussels is refusing to budge. 

“The Commission stands by the ambition to produce 10mn t of renewable hydrogen within the EU and import 10mn t of renewable hydrogen by 2030, but recognises the challenges in scaling up the hydrogen value chain,” a spokesperson for the EU executive told Euronews in July.

The next Commission, due to take office on November 1, may well make a change in course. Though like the last one, it will be led by President Ursula von der Leyen, one of the chief architects of current EU climate strategy, its policies could shift in light of the new reality Europe finds itself in – one of stagnating economic growth, rising living costs and a trend of deindustrialisation induced by high energy costs. This may mean a more pragmatic approach to energy and climate.

Yet Furfari doubts that Brussels can reverse its hydrogen policy, as doing so would demonstrate the poor thinking that conceived it in the first place. “This is impossible with the current president. We will continue to waste money,” he says.