Hydrogen the Groningen way. Nr 5

💦⚡️💚 Green hydrogen is ‘booming’. As the missing link in the energy transition and in the transition to sustainable industry. But how do we make hydrogen ‘big’ and make sure that everyone benefits? Read my voyage of discovery here👇 💚🌍

💦⚡️💚 Hydrogen and the Sustainable Development Goals 🌍

An international green-hydrogen economy requires the sustainable generation of large amounts of energy. It would be logical for this to happen in places with strong sunshine and strong winds. We use electrolysis to convert this sustainable electricity into hydrogen. This hydrogen can then be transported to other parts of the world, largely by using existing transport networks. 

Developing countries

The sun's rays are strongest around the equator. Hot air rises, cools and comes down as rain. This air circulation means that just to the north or the south, at a latitude around 30 degrees, you find the large deserts. Due to the drought, the countries in those regions are faced with shortages of raw materials and consequently with poverty and hunger. Most countries in South America, Asia and Africa – and in the Sahara in particular – are developing countries. 

19^th century

Many of these developing countries were colonised in the 19th and the 20th centuries. At times it looks like we do not learn from the past at all. Due to their climatological location, these countries are extremely attractive for being filled with large wind and solar parks with the purpose of generating electricity for Europe or other developed countries. In other words, we are extracting energy from those countries to better ourselves. That feels like something from the 19th century, unless we manage to make sure that it is better for us and for the countries where we generate the electricity. 

Poor poorer, rich richer

Even in the recent past, the rich West gained experience of extracting oil and gas in other countries. It only increased the gap between rich and poor, between those who receive the revenue and those who carry the burden. At the time gas was found in my province of Groningen, we failed to reach good agreements on earthquake damage caused by gas extraction. In other parts of the world, the consequences of oil or gas extraction were even more dramatic. 

Honest hydrogen

There has to be another way! At a meeting about hydrogen, I met Gokce Mete, Head of the Knowledge Centre of the International Energy Charter in Brussels.  She published various articles and wrote the book ‘Energy Transitions and The Future of Gas in the EU: Subsidise or Decarbonise?’ (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). On the stage, she talked about the international future of hydrogen. I asked her if she could help me with my search for agreements about honest hydrogen. Via Skype - we are living in Corona times - she gave me many  tips and pointed me to the database of the World Bank and the website of Engineers without borders. 

Profit margins

In reports on both websites I came across many lessons learned from oil and gas. For example: in order to extract energy properly you need a transparent process, with clear decision making in the project phase, and with a clear complaints procedure in the construction and production phase. You may not extract in world heritage sites. You must have good guidelines for projects, sustainable account management, water management, and local purchasing of products and services. Valuable lessons, but it was largely about: how do you deal properly with the surrounding area within your profit margins? I still could not find what I was looking for: that the immediate environment also benefits from electrolysers and large solar and wind parks. 

Step forward

I continued my search and ended up with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): seventeen goals to make the world a better place by 2030. In 2015 the United Nations adopted these goals as a global compass for challenges, such as poverty, education and the climate crisis. Can these goals really help us to design an honest green-hydrogen economy? If yes, how? That question brought me to Eco Matser, programme manager of Hivos, a Dutch organisation for development cooperation in Africa, Latin America and Asia. He pointed out a number of general problems concerning energy in developing countries. For example, there is a great need for sustainable energy in poor countries. ‘Cooking food is the first of the basic needs and if this could be achieved with sustainable energy or green gas, that would be a major step forward’, he said. However, Eco emphasised that the availability of sustainable energy could have more positive effects in developing countries: it could promote economic progress and reduce poverty. The problem is that the construction of energy infrastructure is often more expensive than the production of sustainable or other energy itself. If you really want to help those who live around solar and wind parks, you need to offer them storage and transport options so they always have energy too.  Even when the sun doesn't shine or the wind doesn't blow. 

Prerequisites

Making the environment energy independent appealed to me. We have experience of that in the Netherlands: we are working on sustainable villages, energy-neutral neighbourhoods, returning surplus sustainable energy from home solar power to the grid and offsetting this against your consumption, solar panels at home, etc. It could be a first step on the road to the prerequisites within the meaning of the SDGs. Yet how do we ensure that European developers of solar and wind parks abroad will deal with these and other prerequisites? Can we gain experience of that in our own environment? 

Read more in my next blog. 👩‍💻