From grand plans to distant atolls, your 'News-as-a-Service'

Never one to under promise or over deliver, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson wasn’t holding back this week, with the announcement of a “￡12bn 10-point plan for a green industrial revolution”.

As befits the laying out of plans for an entire industrial revolution, the statement was released at… 10.30pm on a Wednesday night.

When finally noticed over breakfast the next day, the announcement was indeed found to consist of ten sectoral priorities. Straight in at number two in this green-tinged pop chart was hydrogen, with a target of “5GW of low carbon hydrogen production capacity by 2030”.

A more in-depth UK hydrogen strategy is expected early in 2021, so there wasn’t much new detail this week. Nonetheless, there are a few new and interesting tasters. These include “the promise of a town heated entirely by hydrogen by the end of the decade”. Getting there will first involve “a hydrogen neighbourhood in 2023” and “a hydrogen village by 2025”.

Numerical arguments aside (one person’s town will certainly be another person’s village), this does give a definite pointer towards hydrogen, blended with natural gas, being an intended part of the UK heating mix.

Although the plan was widely welcomed in clean energy circles, it didn’t escape everyone’s attention that Boris isn’t necessarily a ‘details’ man. In particular, it was noted that “the widespread adoption of hydrogen needs be supported by sufficient government policy, which is not yet currently in place”.

By 2030, South Korea doesn’t just intend to be relying on hydrogen at home; it also plans “to commercialize its hydrogen import and export business”. That will include “building an overseas production base and a domestic terminal”. Various countries are vying, in an industrial version of ‘Pop Idol’, to win that former contract.

A demonstration phase leading to commercialization “will take place over 2022-2027” and include developing technologies including those for “storage, transportation and infrastructure such as pipelines and trailers”.

At home the plan is to have production capacities of “470,000 mt/year by 2022… and up to 1.94 million mt/year in 2030”. The latter represents a more than tenfold increase from today and is expected to come from “at least six hydrogen production plants across the country”.

Elsewhere in the supply chain, South Korea’s first hydrogen liquefaction plant is due online in 2023, “with a production capacity of 5,000 kg/day”. On the demand side, there will be “660 hydrogen refuelling stations, up from 52 stations as of June 2020”.

It wasn’t only countries positioning themselves strategically for the future this week; companies were too.

In what could probably become a regular column on its own, this week’s ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ roundup included one between Nel and Iberdrola. As well as “the ambition to collaborate in the development of a green hydrogen production plant with the capacity of more than 200 MW in Spain by 2023”, this MoU also includes plans to “jointly develop a green hydrogen technology value chain in Spain”.

Having already been announced as “the preferred partner for the delivery of a 20 MW PEM electrolyser facility in Puertollano” (for an ammonia plant), Nel hope the partnership with “one of the largest power utilities in the world” will help build “electrolyser projects in the 100-MW scale and beyond”.

Also with electrolysers in their sights are Snam, the Italian giant best known for having “the largest natural gas transmission network and storage capacity among European peers”.

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