Pink glasses for green hydrogen

You will never see an SAQ adviser recommend that you accompany your next dinner with a basil lemonade or a glass of tomato juice.

The brave employee will offer you an alcoholic product, for the simple reason that it is the government corporation’s mandate to sell it.

This is exactly why we must be wary of Dominique Anglade’s idea of ​​creating Hydrogène Québec, a new state corporation entirely dedicated to hydrogen.

Like all nations in the world, Quebec must negotiate its energy transition. Our clean electricity will obviously be at the heart of the shift. We want to use it to electrify our cars, our trains and our buses. It should be used to replace fossil fuels which, in the realm of hydroelectricity, still heat too many of our buildings.

Our clean electricity can also power businesses that want to green their operations. At Hydro-Québec, the requests currently on the table already total 15,000 megawatts – that’s ten times the power of the future Romaine complex. We will not be able to say yes to everyone and we will have to make choices.

Our electricity can also be exported to the United States with attractive environmental and financial gains. The contract with New York State, signed a year ago, illustrates this well.

We can finally transform electricity into green hydrogen. The process leads to colossal losses reaching 30 to 40%. But for some sectors that cannot be electrified directly, such as steel production, this is the only option to reduce greenhouse gases (GHGs).

In short, our electricity can and should be used in several ways to reduce our GHG emissions.

But Hydrogène Québec would only take up the cause for one of them: green hydrogen. In the same way that Loto-Québec sells us scratch cards without worrying about whether it is the best use of our discretionary budget.

This is a limiting and problematic view.

Dominique Anglade is right to say that we must encourage the production of green hydrogen in Quebec. We will need it. But to go from there to making it “the biggest economic project since James Bay”, to dangle export revenues, to want to invest 100 billion and create 170 TWh of new solar and wind energy (that’s equivalent to 16 times the supply contract signed with New York)…

There is a swelling that arouses a healthy skepticism.

How can we use our electricity to maximize its environmental, economic and social benefits? What proportions should be devoted to direct electrification, export, business attraction and the production of green hydrogen?

These are the real questions that Quebec must ask itself. They are likely to be increasingly debated, the demand for electricity seeming destined to grow faster than our capacity to produce it.

The answers will be complex and constantly evolving as technologies, markets and regulations change. Quebec will also have to work with its partners and follow world trends. It is not the province, alone in its corner, which will decide that the ships of tomorrow will run on hydrogen.

Building expertise to study these issues within a Crown corporation is far from being a bad idea. But let’s avoid giving it too narrow a mandate and imposing a one-size-fits-all solution from the start.

In fact, such a state-owned company devoted to energy transition more broadly has already existed. Energy Transition Quebec was created under the Liberal government of Philippe Couillard, before being abolished by that of François Legault.

Before launching his “Eco project”, Dominique Anglade would have had an interest in drawing inspiration from old documents… from his own party.