Green hydrogen: framing your regional project
The hydrogen sector is on the menu of the France 2030 plan, which the President of the Republic has detailed for autumn 2021 as part of the economic stimulus package. Hydrogen is an energy carrier: once extracted from a local resource, it can be burned or used in a fuel cell to power an electric motor. Advantage: virtually zero carbon footprint in use. But this advantage only applies under three conditions: the compound containing it must be carbon-free (like water) or not of fossil origin; the energy required for its extraction must itself emit little or no carbon; and the uses must be close to the production sites, to limit transport. Otherwise, the ecological balance sheet will become even heavier, disqualifying hydrogen from replacing the centralized, globalized energy models of the oil economy.
A hydrogen economy can therefore only be envisaged on the scale of a small territory. What was needed was to set these postulates in stone in a reference document, and this is what AFNOR ‘s newly published SPEC M58-007 does. A sort of standard before the standard, this guide proposes an ecosystem and territorial approach. ” We needed a methodological framework that would cover the entire life cycle, from production to use, and that would set out the scales and emphasize the notion of a regenerative ecosystem, with local distribution of added value ,” sums up Loïc Perrin, Scientific Director of H2X Ecosystems, an industrial development company based in Brittany that actively contributed to the drafting of the document under the aegis of AFNOR, through the voice of its CEO Stéphane Paul.
Water electrolysis production is recommended
The aim is to present project developers, manufacturers and the local authorities that host them with a set of best practices designed to preserve the ecological advantage of hydrogen throughout the chain. For example, the production of hydrogen by electrolysis of water is favored (using decarbonized electricity, such as surplus wind power), as opposed to production by hydrocarbon reforming. This production will have to take place where the electricity source is, in the countryside or by the sea in the case of surplus wind-generated electricity. In other words, in sparsely populated areas with low energy requirements, which rules out mass production. ” Rural areas are just as concerned by hydrogen as major cities,” Loïc Perrin concludes.
In the same spirit, the best practices listed exclude the injection of hydrogen obtained into international gas pipelines for heating purposes, to preserve the local character of the system. And of course, no hydrogen project can succeed without valorizing co-products: oxygen, at the electrolyzer outlet (for medical use or in wastewater treatment plants, for example) and water, at the fuel cell outlet. ” The value created must be returned to the region where the resources are located ,” stresses Loïc Perrin.
