All colours of hydrogen are needed to develop a liquid market for trade in the fuel, according to panellists at the World Hydrogen Summit in Rotterdam.

One of the best ways to encourage the development of the sector is to ensure a strong traded market develops as quickly as possible—as is now starting to happen with the LNG market. But the hydrogen market needs to develop more rapidly because of the pressure to decarbonise hard-to-abate sectors and reach net-zero emissions by the middle of the century.

The intermittency of green hydrogen production means other forms—certainly blue and potentially also grey—will be needed to develop a market in the short term, according to Bert den Ouden, project director of hydrogen exchange initiative Hyxchange.

“Green hydrogen is produced intermittently, which is new for a gas market. The old [natural] gas market had consistent production,” he says. “So you need something dispatchable—that could be blue, or a chemicals byproduct, or hydrogen from imports kept in storage.”

Various ports are vying to becoming hubs for hydrogen trade, but to achieve this goal they must develop their own production, sign import deals and ensure they have adequate on-site storage.

20mn t – Rotterdam’s potential hydrogen imports

The Port of Rotterdam is doing all these things, according to Boudewijn Siemons, chief operating officer of the Port of Rotterdam Authority

“A port connects supply and demand. That is what we have been doing for 800 years. We want to be one of these main hydrogen hubs that will distribute the fuel,” he says. “But liquid markets need volume.”

As well as producing this volume on-site through the NorthH2 hydrogen facility, the port expects to begin imports of hydrogen around 2025, ramping up rapidly after 2030.

“By 2050 it might accumulate to 20mn t of hydrogen imports,” says Siemons. “Space is going to be one of the challenges—20mn t hydrogen compares to 56mn t of oil in terms of weight.”

Atlantic trade flows

One of the import deals signed by the Port of Rotterdam is for volumes from Corpus Christi in the US, which port aims to be a net exporter of hydrogen and will also develop its own production. A reliable hub needs high volumes, and for this reason—coupled with advantageous geological conditions—the port is developing green as well as blue hydrogen production. This will enable it to become a trade hub, according to Jeffrey Pollack, chief strategy officer at the Port of Corpus Christi Authority.

“We, as a production centre, can play matchmaker between the demand and the supply side,” he says, adding that government support should target ports because they will rarely risk having a stranded supply of hydrogen .

“The best use of federal infrastructure dollars is to dress and accelerate that which was already viable on its own—projects that would have reached FID on their own,” he says.

Blue hydrogen will be needed in the short term to get markets up and running rapidly, agrees Dimitrios Dimitriou, hydrogen business development manager at the UAE’s state-owned Adnoc.

“From an Adnoc perspective we see the end state being a green economy,” he says. “In order to overcome the challenges we need to leverage what we have available and what we can produce at short notice, so we see a role for blue hydrogen. We need to develop facilities to get out of this chicken-and-egg situation.”

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Author: Tom Young