Jorgo Chatzimarkakis - Europe's Hydrogen Pusher

My guest on Episode 115 of Cleaning Up was Jorgo Chatzimarkakis , CEO of Hydrogen Europe . The first half of our discussion was on policy, the second was on use cases for hydrogen. It was what diplomats call a "full and frank" discussion.

Prior to Hydrogen Europe, Chatzimarkakis was a political scientist and a politician – first as a member of the national executive committee of the German FDP, then as a Member of European Parliament from 2004 to 2014.

Note: Those not familiar with my work on hydrogen might want to refer to the following before or after watching:

• Separating Hype from Hydrogen: The Supply Side (October 2020)
• Separating Hype from Hydrogen: The Demand Side (October 2020)
• The Clean Hydrogen Ladder (August 2021)
• My keynote at the World Hydrogen Congress (October 2022)
• Hydrogen in heating: How Many Grifter Does It Take to Sell a Hydrogen Boiler (October 2022)
• Hydrogen imports/exports and global trade: The Unbearable Lightness of Hydrogen (December 2022)

For the first 35 minutes, Chatzimarkakis and I discussed Europe’s hydrogen policy environment. We did a bit of history, covering the various bodies (Clean Hydrogen Joint Undertaking, the European Clean Hydrogen Alliance, the Clean Hydrogen Partnership and the Hydrogen Bank) and regulatory frameworks – the Hydrogen Strategy, FitFor55, RepowerEU, Important Projects of Common European Interest (IPCEIS) and so on. My key takeaways from this segment were as follows:

• The amounts of money being talked about to spur Europe’s hydrogen sector are astronomical – growing from €500m over seven years under the first Joint Undertaking, to €430 billion by 2030 under the EU Hydrogen strategy, of which Chatzimarkakis has previously said he thinks one third should be public money. And that’s just for supply and distribution – not including the demand side.
• Transparency is very low on what funds are actually being disbursed. New money still appears to be relatively modest, many of the sums announced appear not to be additional to other mechanisms such as Coronavirus recovery funds. The proposed European Hydrogen Bank is intended to spur the creation of 10 million tonnes of hydrogen per year – but even if the cost disadvantage for clean hydrogen can be reduced to €1 per kg, its €3 billion proposed budget would cover just 3 million tonnes of clean hydrogen. Chatzimarkakis is pushing for a figure of €3 billion per year, but even that won’t deliver the 10 million tonnes per year of the Hydrogen Strategy.
• Also striking is the complexity of the policy environment. Funds are split between the EU, member states and regions, with complex qualification requirements like waivers of State Aid rules. This looks extremely unwieldy by comparison with the simplicity the US’s Inflation Reduction Act even if, as Chatzimarkakis hopes, the EU is about to include hydrogen in a much-expanded “industrial sovereignty” strategy.
• Finally, this section of the episode provides a fascinating insight into the world of hydrogen lobbying. When I raised the figure of €58.6 million which Corporate Europe Observatory said was spent in Europe in 2020 by what it calls “the hydrogen lobby”, Chatzimarkakis claims he threatened to sue them, but does not appear to have done so. In any case, what is clear is that EU policy makers have let themselves be led to an extraordinary extent by the Hydrogen Council. For instance, the EU’s goal of 40GW of electrolysis by 2030 was lifted straight from the Hydrogen Council’s 2x40GW proposal.

In the second part of the episode, we dived into the potential use cases for hydrogen. I am not going to rehearse all the arguments made by both of us in relation to the various sectors we covered - for that you will have to listen to or watch the episode. However, I will highlight a few areas where our positions diverge the most:

• We started by agreeing that the top priority should be to clean up Europe’s existing fossil-based hydrogen, which is responsible for around 2% of emissions. Chatzimarkakis claimed that Hydrogen Europe devotes “over 50% of its time” to this, but a cursory look at its website reveals a different picture: of twenty position papers published since 2020, no fewer than half are on mobility, aviation, shipping and buildings. The other half – themselves replete with references to transport and buildings – relate to policy and standards. Not one position paper focuses specifically on the displacement of existing fossil-based hydrogen use in the European fertiliser or petrochemicals industries.
• Chatzimarkakis claims that electrical infrastructure to charge 100% battery cars in Europe would cost €3-5 trillion, and that adding a hydrogen fuelling network brings down the cost to €1.2 trillion. Even at the level of fuelling infrastructure it sounds highly implausible that two systems would be cheaper than one; once you include the need for 2.5x as much upstream investment because of the inherently lower efficiency of hydrogen vehicles over BEVs (losses in hydrogen production, transport and use), the claim surely falls apart.
• On imports, Chatzimarkakis cites US DOE figures to claim that hydrogen pipelines would be 8 times cheaper than electricity. He appears to be confusing the transport of energy and the transport of electricity. We know that transporting electricity by cable is cheaper than hydrogen because we do it all the time – in the form of transmission grids, interconnections, offshore wind connections and HVDC cables. He believes that importing electricity from Doha as hydrogen will make sense because the solar radiation is so much better there. The reality is that while green hydrogen will indeed be cheaper in Doha, so will the green power from which it is made. The relative costs of the transport technologies to deliver electricity to Europe are unchanged. My simple rule of thumb is that if you need hydrogen (or ammonia or methanol), transport hydrogen (or ammonia or methanol); if you need electricity, transport electricity.
• There is no doubt that we'll have very cheap green hydrogen, once scale and the experience curve have wrought their magic - I have been talking for years about how electrolysers and fuel cells will have similar learning rates to solar, wind and battery technologies. What Chatzimarkakis appears to miss is that some costs are driven by physics and thermodynamics, and will not yield to learning effects in the same way. We can improve the efficiency of processes like liquefaction and gasification, but costs will never approach near-zero. It is the physical properties of hydrogen that make it so much harder to handle than methane, just as it is the physical properties of water that make a steam engine heavier than a petrol engine.
• On Critical materials, Chatzimarkakis makes a throwaway claim that the “hydrogen world” would use 20 to 40 times less critical raw materials than one in which transport and heating are electrified. First, the figure will depend heavily on advances and changes in battery technology. But also, any figures depend on whether you consider lithium a critical raw material (there are an estimated 200 billion tonnes of it in the oceans). They also depend on whether you include the copper and other materials needed to build the additional renewable energy required – 2.5 times as much to power hydrogen vehicles and 4-6 times as much to meet heating demand – unless of course your goal is just to use blue hydrogen. The “hydrogen world”, of course, has its own critical materials bottlenecks, particularly the platinum group materials needed for electrolysers and fuel cells, which we did not discuss.
• When it comes to space heating, Chatzimarkakis claims to accept that hydrogen might play only a marginal role, but he nevertheless invests enormous energy arguing for it. He rails against the “heat pump dictatorship” he claims is being established by Patrick Graichen (German Secretary of State for the Economy and Climate Action, guest on episode 88 of Cleaning Up), and says “the only thing we are saying is, don't exclude [hydrogen]… you will have several ways of heating your home”. What he does not say is that even if hydrogen space heating were to make sense (something 32 independent studies reviewed by Jan Rosenow conclude is not the case) it can never be an individual choice, since it involves switching over entire sections of gas distribution grid at a time.
• Chatzimarkakis extolled the virtues of turquoise hydrogen – hydrogen made from municipal waste. According to him, municipalities will make clean hydrogen locally, producing useful biochar as a by-product, and this justifies the use of hydrogen for heating and transportation. Four problems with this approach: municipal waste volumes are limited and dwindling; it contains toxins which have to be separated from the biochar and dealt with; the process and resulting hydrogen are expensive; and - perhaps most significantly - the resulting hydrogen would heat more homes and fuel more vehicles if you simply used it to generate power centrally and fed it into the grid, rather than distribute via pipelines to homes and fueling stations.
• Near the end of the episode Chatzimarkakis makes the point that electrons are harder to store than molecules. This is not a controversial point - hence long-duration storage is high on my Hydrogen Ladder. Where Chatzimarkakis goes wrong is in believing that this “killer fact” justifies the creation and maintenance of a hydrogen distribution networks to homes and high streets. My response to Chatzimarkakis on the topic is worth reproducing here in full:

"If you gave me free hydrogen, and asked me to keep the lights on, and the cars charged, and the buildings heated – it's very clear what I would do. I would store it centrally, in a salt cavern or a depleted gas field; I would then generate electricity centrally, and put it into a grid which has received all of the investment that you are begging for from the EU. Because when you say “we have to give people choice, and people are fed up,” what's actually happening is you are demanding large amounts of money – we said it, tens of billions, hundreds of billions, even trillions – for a solution which is appropriate for your members, for obvious reasons. But if you took a fraction of that and put it into the grid, we would have solved problems long ago.”

At that point, we ran out of time. There were many other topics of relevance which we were not able to touch on:

• We did not have time to discuss the potential role of hydrogen in aviation – it is hard to see how you get liquid hydrogen to airports in anything like the volume required, given the energy load required for liquefaction, or the extraordinary numbers of liquid hydrogen deliveries if using trucks.
• I would like to hear how the hydrogen sector intends to mitigate the risk it poses to the climate – given that it has a 20-year global warming potential 33 times that of CO2 and that Columbia SIPA Centre on Global Energy Policy has estimated that 5.6% of it could leak.
• We did not get a chance to talk about the likely retail costs of hydrogen. Chatzimarkakis and others are arguing for hydrogen to be distributed to homes and high streets, so consumers should surely be informed as to what they expect retail prices of hydrogen to be over coming decades. It is all very well to point to hydrogen costs below €2/kg at the wholesale level in places with abundant low-cost renewables; meanwhile on forecourts it is being sold today for $24.99/kg in the U.S. and for €27.90/kg in Austria. If we delay the roll-out of electric vehicles and heat pumps, waiting for the hydrogen alternatives, how much will those alternatives cost to run?
• There also needs to be a discussion of the safety implications of hydrogen in the home environment, since Chatzimarkakis and some of his members mentioned on the show are promoting hydrogen heating. The Arup report for BEIS suggests 2 excess flow valves, a 10cm x 10cm non-closable vent to the outside in each room with a hydrogen appliance, and all pipework needing to meet current safety standards. Likewise, there needs to be a discussion of the public health implications of hydrogen combustion in any form – in boilers, turbines or engines - given that such combustion inevitably produces nitrous oxides, powerful greenhouse gases that also cause asthma.

Finally, I want to thank Chatzimarkakis for coming on Cleaning Up. I honestly respect him for doing so. My views on the topic of hydrogen are no secret, so it was a brave thing to do.

Also, if Chatzimarkakis wants to provide data on any of the topics discussed in the episode, I will happily include links here and in the show notes. And I hereby extend an open invitation to him to appear on the show again. I am sure he would agree that discussions like this can play an important role in accelerating the process of winnowing out low-value use cases for clean hydrogen and focusing on high-value use cases.

You can listen to Episode 115 of Cleaning Up with Jorgo Chatzimarkakis on your favourite podcast platform, or watch it on YouTube.