German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said that the German authorities wanted to make a big boom in the hydrogen industry as part of the program to fight climate change.
However, such an innovation will be quite problematic to introduce into the inter-fuel sector due to the high cost and unexplored nature of the issue. This opinion was expressed by Vyacheslav Kulagin, Director of the Center for Global Energy Market Studies, to the Vechernyaya Moskva.
- Hydrogen is such a top topic of the last few years. For Europeans, it is a way to balance consumption in the abandonment of fossil fuels. Hydrogen can also serve for power plants, transport, and so on. Purely theoretically, it can replace oil, gas, and coal and be such a universal source of energy. The versatile appeal of hydrogen has led to such a “hydrogen boom” in recent years. But it has its own nuances,” he explained.
Thus, the expert stated that the cheapest hydrogen that could be made was created from natural gas before the situation of this year. In addition, the interlocutor of “VM” noted the problematic nature of the safety issue, because hydrogen is very explosive.
- All major accidents known to have occurred at nuclear power plants have mostly been caused by hydrogen explosions. At this stage, the use of hydrogen is experimental. At the same time, hydrogen itself and its use have been known for a long time. This is an interesting solution, but it is expensive in itself. In order to go in this direction in earnest, it is necessary to make quite a serious scientific and technological breakthrough. In this year’s situation, the question is: “What to make hydrogen from? If we take gas, it’s expensive. Hydrogen itself is not a primary resource, it must be produced from something. We need gas, coal, or electricity. Hydrogen-based solutions are being worked out now. But so far it’s expensive, experiments with it are going on, it’s not bad. Maybe hydrogen will win some segments, but in the highly competitive inter-fuel sector, it is very much a question of where it will be profitable. And those solutions which are currently used in this direction are particularly unprofitable,” said the expert.
Kulagin concluded by calling hydrogen “a trendy topic with a whole set of problems.
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