Safety concerns could threaten the growth of the hydrogen economy unless the industry and governments act decisively to reassure the wider public, a senior executive from Germany utility Uniper told a Reuters panel discussion this week.

“We as an industry, and the associations and also governments, need to do to make certain that people realise that [hydrogen] is something that we can manage safely,” David Bryson, Uniper’s COO and chief sustainability officer, said at the Energy Transition Europe 2021 event.

“Because if we do not do that, at the point that we are gaining momentum in moving this whole topic forward, there is the risk that we get challenged so hard on it, from a misperception, that it slows things down.”

Bryson urges the industry to initiate a “fact-based discussion” and to clearly communicate why people should not be concerned about the safety of hydrogen.

“From my perspective, we could underestimate this if we are not careful,” he says.

Frank Wouters, director of the EU-GCC Clean Energy Technology Network, agrees that the public perception of hydrogen “is probably not as rosy as we would like it to be.”

Support mechanisms

Bryson and other panellists urge governments to support green hydrogen with mechanisms such as contracts-for-difference (CfDs) over the lifetime of projects, in addition to support on capital costs. 

“The support needed is not just capex, but opex” Burns, Linde

“With power prices where they are [in Europe]…it becomes quite a challenge to actually produce green hydrogen at a competitive level,” Bryson says. “And that is, I think, where regulators need to step in and recognise the need to support…over the whole life of a project.”

David Burns, vice-president of clean hydrogen at industrial gases company Linde, also backs the use of CfDs.

“Green is more expensive than blue, which is more expensive than grey, so you really need some coherent policies around the cost of CO₂ and the value of removing CO₂,” he says. “The support needed is not just capex, but opex.”

---

Author: Stuart Penson