Roland Kupers, climate adviser to the United Nations, says in an interview with the FD that the Dutch plans for large hydrogen projects are premature and that transporting hydrogen over long distances is not wise, partly because of the expected leakages.
In a interview with Het Financieele Dagblad says Kupers that he is in favor of a faster transition to sustainable energy and more electrification through green electricity, but that in Europe this should not necessarily take place via hydrogen. He therefore calls the hundreds of millions of euros in subsidies that the Dutch government awards to a major hydrogen project ‘premature’. He says this partly because leaks of hydrogen gas will pose a problem for the climate due to its chemical properties: “Hydrogen is a heavy indirect greenhouse gas, many times stronger than CO2, because it also inhibits the breakdown of methane. a heavy greenhouse gas, slows down in the atmosphere. Hydrogen molecules are so small that they can even escape through steel pipes.”
Previous research by the scientific bureau of the European Commission has already shown that the current leaks in the hydrogen chain cannot be properly restrained. “Funnily enough, we have no idea how much hydrogen is escaping,” says Kupers. “There are no empirical measurements, only assumptions. The EU study estimates that up to 20 percent escapes during long-distance transport of hydrogen.” The Dutch government is strongly committed to the latter, in the form of signed declarations of intent with a large number of countries to transport hydrogen to the Netherlands by ship. This concerns, for example, transport from Oman and Namibia to the Netherlands, but projects such as a hydrogen connection between Norway and Germany or the Dutch Gasunie hydrogen network are also unwise, according to Kupers, due to the indirect impact of leaks on the climate.
According to Gasunie will make hydrogen an important contribution to the CO2 reduction, but Kupers is less enthusiastic about the hydrogen plans. “It has been known for several years that two to four percent of methane, another heavy greenhouse gas, escapes, but it is still not clear where exactly. Far more methane is still being released into the atmosphere than leaks are found. Before a new industry is being rigged with a gas that escapes even more easily, leakage must be under control Only after independent measurements by NGOs has part of the oil and gas industry recognized that methane leakage is a huge problem With hydrogen we have to do that for are.”
Kupers is also not pleased with the plan to produce hydrogen using green electricity. This means that this green electricity is no longer available to replace the existing coal and gas-fired power stations, something that, according to Kupers, can provide much more climate benefit. He believes that a wind farm in the North Sea intended to produce hydrogen means that a lot of power is used for an ‘inefficient conversion to hydrogen’.
Roland Kupers is currently UN climate adviser and previously served ten years working for Shell as a manager in the branch responsible for liquefied gas. After he left Shell in 2009, his activities include conducting research into limiting methane emissions. Among other things, he was an initiator of the International Methane Emissions Observatory, a UN institute set up to reduce methane emissions.
