Blue hydrogen, produced by reforming natural gas with carbon capture, would be a more cost-effective solution for the EU than so-called green hydrogen, made from water electrolysis using renewable electricity, the environmental group Clean Air Task Force (CATF) said in a new report on Tuesday.
The European Union’s renewable energy strategy includes a target to produce 10 million tons of renewable hydrogen in the EU and import 10 million tons by the end of this decade.
The EU’s target remains challenging and should be re-evaluated, CATF said in the report.
“Europe should re-examine its hydrogen demand forecasts to develop realistic estimates,” the organization said, commenting on the policy implications of the study’s findings.
CATF commissioned Houston-based consulting firm KBR Inc. to model the costs of different ways to deliver low-carbon hydrogen from likely production regions to Europe’s largest seaport, the Port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands.
“The analysis focuses on blue hydrogen because the greater technological maturity and lower cost of this production method means it has the potential to scale more quickly than ‘green hydrogen’ produced via electrolysis,” wrote Magnolia Tovar, CATF’s global director of zero-carbon fuels.
The cost analysis concluded that transporting low-carbon hydrogen by sea presents significant hurdles due to hydrogen’s inherent physical properties.
In addition, CATF suggests that transporting LNG to Europe and using it to produce hydrogen at the point of import – with low-carbon energy inputs, stringent methane emissions controls, and CCS – “is likely to be more feasible and cost-effective than importing low-carbon hydrogen from distant suppliers”.