Green hydrogen and ammonia producer EverWind Fuels’ stated mission to “decarbonize the world” now involves teaming up with a gas utility in Nova Scotia, a plan that one industry critic warns will only “greenwash” continued use of fossil fuels.
EverWind has signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Eastward Energy—formerly Heritage Gas—with plans to “develop and scale up the hydrogen value chain in Nova Scotia including building demand by blending hydrogen with natural gas to reduce emissions,” states an EverWind news release dated March 18. “Eastward Energy and EverWind will also collaborate to explore opportunities for the storage, transportation, and distribution of green hydrogen.”
“We are excited to partner with Eastward Energy in our mission to accelerate the adoption of green hydrogen in Nova Scotia,” founder and CEO Trent Vichie said in the release, issued the same day he was in Hamburg, Germany, as part of a Canadian delegation to a hydrogen and ammonia trade conference.
The conference brought together German Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck, who serves as the country’s minister of economic affairs and climate action, Canadian Energy and Natural Resources Jonathan Wilkinson, and Canadian hydrogen and ammonia producers, who networked [pdf] with potential German buyers (offtakers).
Vichie was in attendance, though as of 2022, EverWind had already signed MOUs with two German utilities—E.On and Uniper—to provide them one million tonnes of green ammonia per year by 2026. The company’s plan is to produce green hydrogen and convert it into green ammonia at a plant it will build in Point Tupper, Nova Scotia, powering the process with wind energy from large onshore wind projects it is proposing nearby. It will be “a best-in-class green energy platform,” the company says on its website. “At EverWind, we’re producing green hydrogen to decarbonize the world.”
But to date, the company has not signed firm contracts with the German utilities.
Still, last November Export Development Canada loaned EverWind C$166 million, a financing contribution that is a far cry from the billions that EverWind’s proposed projects in Atlantic Canada will cost.
In Hamburg, ministers Habeck and Wilkinson demonstrated their seriousness by signing an MOU “to implement a transatlantic hydrogen corridor” that would “accelerate commercial-scale hydrogen trade between Germany and Canada.”
Habeck told German journalist Karin Finkenzeller that Canada and Germany each plan to commit to €200 million (roughly C$294 million) to make up the difference between the high world price for green hydrogen and the lower price that companies are willing to pay for it. The MOU presses both countries to finalize terms of an early-access trade window before June 30, but no binding offtake contracts for Canadian green hydrogen or ammonia were signed in Hamburg.
Finkenzeller asked Vichie whether the discussions with politicians and entrepreneurs at the conference had been to his satisfaction.
“No comment,” he replied.
Now, as EverWind pivots to explore Nova Scotia as a market, critics are raising questions about the role of green hydrogen in the province’s climate goals.
“My objection is that gas blending isn’t about decarbonization, but rather, about exactly the opposite,” said Hydrogen Science Coalition member Paul Martin, a chemical engineer and consultant with Toronto-based Spitfire Research who has a 30-year history of working with, producing, and using hydrogen. “It’s a greenwashing scheme, intended to make us feel better about continuing to burn fossil gas for longer.”
“And that’s why the gas industry is so interested in doing it.”
Last year, Martin argued a similar scheme in the UK that had drawn financing from the B.C. Investment Management Corporation (BCI), which manages the retirement savings of 715,000 British Columbians, was similarly flawed.
The root of the problem, he told The Energy Mix at the time, is that hydrogen is too small and volatile a molecule to be safely or effectively transmitted, distributed, or used in high volume with existing gas pipelines, turbines, boilers, cooktops, or burner jets. Even if the product is green hydrogen from solar panels or wind turbines—as opposed to the “blue” variety that depends on carbon capture and storage technology to reduce emissions—it will still be more expensive and deliver less energy value than using the electricity directly.
“If you deploy those energy production assets efficiently by means of heat pumps and the electrical distribution grid, you get a multiplier, because you’re using electricity to pump heat from a cold place to a warm place and getting three units of energy for every unit you put in,” he explained. “If you go with hydrogen, a fractional energy return for every unit of energy invested is the best you’re ever going to get.”
So “every time you involve hydrogen,” he added, “you get not small losses, but large, substantial losses.”
Martin, who describes himself as a “tireless advocate for a fossil fuel-free future,” recently analyzed the efficiencies and emissions from blending hydrogen into gas networks. He concluded it was “bollocks,” and that the maximum percentage of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) abatement with the technology “is small.”
“The generally agreed maximum of 20% H2 [hydrogen] into the gas network is the most it can handle without major changes to the network and replacement of all end use equipment connected to it,” he said. That works out to 7% by energy content.
Which means a “7% GHG emission reduction at absolutely maximum, even with hydrogen as pure and free of GHG emissions as the driven snow.”
