The crisis in Ukraine, the main consequence of which is a threat to energy security for the EU and the US, has forced an urgent revision of energy policy in Europe and America. First of all, we are talking about reducing dependence on hydrocarbon supplies from Russia.
At the same time, the EU and the USA have not stopped emphasizing that they will continue to move towards climate neutrality. The transition to hydrogen fuel could be a solution to both problems.
On Monday in Dubai (United Arab Emirates), the Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Forum discussed the challenges and opportunities facing the energy sector. EU representative Claudio Descalzi, CEO of Italian oil and gas company Eni, was categorical: “We have never found an energy source to replace everything. It’s crazy to think that there is something that can replace everything.
Descalzi concluded with this statement by saying that over the past 200 years, energy has absorbed everything from fossil fuels to nuclear to renewables, but there is no universal solution and it is unlikely to be found in the foreseeable future.
U.S. representative Anna Shpitsberg, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Energy Transformation at the U.S. Department of State, responded to Claudio Descalzi by saying that relying on one supply route (from Russia) is just as impossible as relying on one universal energy source. For this reason, the U.S. and the EU have invested and will continue to invest heavily in the development of hydrogen energy.
Spitsberg called hydrogen “a game-changing technology, which is connected to many other sources because it can be the basis of nuclear power, can be the basis of gas power, can be the basis of renewable energy sources, can “clean” a significant part of energy, and participate in the processes of carbon capture and storage.
Today, hydrogen is produced mainly from fossil fuels, but in the future it could be produced using renewable energy sources. The breadth of hydrogen production sources, along with a number of technological processes that reduce greenhouse gas emissions, gives hope that hydrogen energy will someday replace fossil energy. Much of the U.S. and EU energy security efforts will be focused on just that.
While the transition to hydrogen energy is planned, the use of fossil fuels is breaking all records or, more precisely, all anti-records. For example, the International Energy Agency reported that energy-related carbon dioxide emissions in 2021 rose to the highest level in history and reached 36.3 billion tons or 6% more than in 2020. The increase was mainly due to the burning of coal, which accounted for more than 40% of all emissions. Coal contributed 15.3 billion tons to the annual carbon footprint, natural gas 7.5 billion tons, and oil 10.7 billion tons. What will happen in 2022 is even hard to imagine.
