This text is taken from the Courrier de l’économie of October 3, 2022. To subscribe, click here.
The hydrogen industry must be unable to stop smiling. Commitments have been pouring in for a few weeks for greater production, export and even consumption of this gas, which is presented as doubly liberating. Here it will free us from fossil fuels. In Europe, it will lessen the dependence of many countries on Russian oil.
If only it were that simple…
One of the most decisive elements relating to the development of hydrogen in Quebec and Canada is this Hydrogen Charging and Refueling Infrastructure Initiative that the Canada Infrastructure Bank (CIB) announced last Wednesday: $500 million to triple the number of public terminals to recharge electric vehicles, then to create a hydrogen retail network. “The availability of public infrastructure is a recognized barrier to the adoption of zero-emission vehicles across Canada,” writes the BIC, clearly drawing inspiration from California, where electrification is increasingly associated with…hydrogenization. (for lack of a better term).
Building hydrogen refueling stations is crucial. Freightliner (Daimler), Toyota and Volvo all have plans to market fuel cell trucks well before 2030 in North America. In the United States, federal support of US$40,000 for the purchase of zero-emission heavy-duty vehicles makes these vehicles more affordable than diesel-powered vehicles. All that is missing is a similar Canadian program to launch the machine.
This launch will also have to be done at top speed: during the visit to the country of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau signed a Canada-Germany agreement which aims for hydrogen “at very low-carbon” be shipped across the Atlantic as early as 2025.
Shades of green…
The activation of the huge Air Liquide catalyst in Bécancour, then the imminent commissioning of the Enerkem plant in Varennes will benefit from this sudden demand. They will not be alone: some fifteen hydrogen and ammonia production projects are under construction elsewhere in Canada at this very moment. Ammonia is essentially hydrogen to which nitrogen is added to keep it in a liquid state, which makes it easier to transport.
For all of this to materialize, we feel that we will have to play on words and accept that the hydrogen produced in Canada is not the gas that is as green or wonderful as we sometimes imagine. First, its production and its conversion into ammonia lead to enormous energy losses, in the order of more than 50%. Second, its production from natural gas, even though the energy used to do so is from a renewable source, generates more than its fair share of greenhouse gas emissions.
Finally, almost all the hydrogen that will be produced in Canada over the next decade will almost certainly go to local consumption. In Quebec, we want green hydrogen to replace diesel and fuel oil in the province’s heavy industries as soon as possible. Elsewhere in Canada, people mainly want ammonia to make fertilizer.
And overall, experts continue to doubt industry forecasts. The Canadian hydrogen sector hopes that its gas will represent 11% of the decarbonization effort of the energy sector by 2050. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts that it will only count that year than 2% of the global energy balance.
At this point, hydrogen may become the gas of the future, even if it sometimes looks like a huge smokescreen.