Germany's Wintershall Dea Makes Case for Gas
Germany's Wintershall Dea has teamed up other gas companies as well as the German Chemical Industry Association (VCI) and the German Federation of Industrial Energy Consumers (VIK) to outline the benefits of gas use in a new position paper.
"To achieve the ambitious climate targets without putting Germany as an industrial location at risk, we need natural gas," Wintershall Dea CEO Mario Mehren said in a company statement announcing the paper. "We can maintain industrial production in Germany with clean and affordable energy that is reliably available. Gas and the energy transition both belong together!"
"The above-average value creation" in Germany's industrial production sector, which accounts for 27.5% of the country's GDP versus only 20% in France and the US, "is made possible to a large extent by natural gas," Mehren said.
Industrial companies used just under 40% of the total gas consumed in Germany in 2016, which came to 926mn MWh.
Production in Germany is also more energy efficient than in many other industrialised nations, the company said. Just 4.7 GJ of primary energy were used to produce goods and services worth €1,000 in Germany in 2016, making the country 4% more efficient than Japan and 32% more efficient than the US.
Overall German energy efficiency has improved by 23% since 2000, Wintershall Dea said, while greenhouse gas emissions from industrial processes have fallen by over 20%.
Germany's chemical industry accounts for 15% of national gas consumption, with the methane that the gas contains serving as a feedstock for producing ammonia and methanol.
The role of gas in the steel sector will also continue to grow, Wintershall Dea said. The industry is looking to replace carbon-based resources almost completely in order to achieve climate targets, and hydrogen produced from gas, known as blue hydrogen, can play a key role in this transition.
Wintershall Dea said in October it had partnered up with the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology to research how blue hydrogen could be produced via methane pyrolysis, involving the separation of methane in gas into hydrogen and solid carbon.
The full position paper can be read here.