Canada’s grand plan to sell “green” hydrogen to Germany are beginning to flounder, hydrogen experts from the two countries argue in a recent Globe and Mail op ed.
“The physics of the situation makes plain an inconvenient reality: The birth of a global hydrogen export market, where made-in-Canada hydrogen is loaded onto ships destined for distant European ports, is simply not coming,” write Toronto-based chemical engineer Paul Martin and energy systems and technology specialist Jochen Bard of Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute, both of them co-founders of the Hydrogen Science Coalition.
In 2022, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Chancellor Olaf Scholz signed a deal that would have seen Canadian green hydrogen produced from renewable electricity shipped from Canada to Germany beginning in 2025. At the time, Europe was in the midst of an energy supply and price crisis brought on by Russia’s war in Ukraine, while Canada had “latched onto hydrogen as a clean energy solution,” Martin and Bard write.
But less than two years later, “as this inaugural shipment date looms, it has become increasingly clear that plans to develop a trans-Atlantic hydrogen supply chain between Canada and the European Union are destined to flounder, then sink—dragging Canadian climate ambitions and the economy with it.”
Hydrogen will have its purposes, the two authors say, accounting for about 2% of global energy consumption by 2050, two authors say. That’s a far more modest target than the over-hyped ambitions that see the fuel used to heat homes and power transport—but it’s the best hydrogen will do when it’s up against cheaper, less risky, more efficient, and less emissions-intensive alternatives like electrification. Ultimately, the wind- and solar-generated electricity that developers are earmarking for hydrogen “could be better used to provide local homes and businesses with clean and affordable energy.”
The root of the problem is that “green hydrogen, the only near-zero-emission form of hydrogen and the one that is sought by countries such as Germany, takes vast amounts of renewable electricity in the form of wind or solar power to produce,” Martin and Bard explain. “As a result, it costs four to six times the price of natural gas.”
But “Europe isn’t interested in the majority of Canada’s current higher-emission hydrogen production, made from fossil fuels with partial carbon capture.”
The other issue is the “huge energy losses” that come from shipping hydrogen over long distances—30% when it’s liquefied for transport, more than 75% if it’s converted to ammonia.
So “any negligible benefit to the climate does not make up for the inherent wastefulness of trans-Atlantic shipping,” the two authors write. “Hydrogen is a small molecule, and it leaks. Hydrogen amplifies the effects of other greenhouse gases, with a global warming potential as much as 35 times that of carbon dioxide in the first 20 years. Exporting it in alternative forms, such ammonia, risks other environmental challenges, such as highly toxic leaks.”
While Martin and Bard warn Canada against encouraging and subsidizing a green hydrogen export industry, Germany may be having second thoughts, as well. Last month, Clean Energy Wire reported analysis by another Fraunhofer Institute researcher, Benjamin Pfluger, that showed the capacity of the country’s “core” hydrogen network far exceeding demand for some time after it goes into service in 2032—with the result that the infrastructure will cost more than it should.
The €20-billion network “is meant to connect industrial regions, coastal entry points, future storage facilities, and hydrogen power plants,” Clean Energy Wire wrote. “A large part of the network will consist of repurposed natural gas pipelines, and will also allow the import of hydrogen from other parts of the world.”
