The EU plans for transition to hydrogen

Alexey Belogoryev, Deputy Principal Director on Energy Studies of the Institute for Energy and Finance, commented to Rambler News on the prospects for creating a hydrogen fuel market and replacing Russian gas with hydrogen in the EU countries.

Alexey Belogoriev, in a conversation with Rambler, commented on the decision of the European Commission (EC) to allocate 3 billion euros to create a hydrogen fuel market in the European Union and assessed the prospects for the use of hydrogen by Europeans. According to the specialist, there are currently many unresolved issues regarding the use of hydrogen in energy, and serious progress in this direction can be expected closer to 2030.

In the near future, hydrogen fuel will definitely not be able to replace conventional gas in Europe. And in the plans of the European Commission, hydrogen, precisely as a substitute product that replaces Russian gas, does not play a big role. Everyone is aware that the energy industry is not yet ready for either large-scale use or transportation and storage of hydrogen. In addition, hydrogen still competes with industrial energy storage in terms of choice of future technologies. They, too, have not yet been able to develop in the form in which they are needed - cheap, with low losses and relatively small-sized. The EU has not yet made a choice on how to accumulate excess energy from wind and solar generation, which is generated either at night or during the daytime periods of the day and year, when this electricity is not required by the market. Here, either accumulation is possible with the help of large modern batteries, or you need to turn this energy into something that can then be converted back into electricity. It could be hydrogen, it could be ammonia. Ammonia, perhaps, has even more prospects in this direction. But significant attention to hydrogen is due precisely to the fact that it can potentially be a mechanism for accumulating this excess electricity, which can then be used at the right time. But then again - all this after 2030, basically.

If we talk about replacing gas in the next three winters - until the beginning of 2025, then during this period hydrogen will not play any role. By 2030, perhaps, it will be able to replace several billion cubic meters of gas, but these are not the volumes to influence anything.