China – Green hydrogen to decarbonize shipping – great green hope or great green hype?
Shipping is one of the most difficult industries to decarbonize due to its use of traditional bunker fuels made of heavy oils but one potential solution lies in the scaling up of biofuels and green hydrogen.
Spain is betting big on this clean energy and aiming to become a European hub for its production with billions of dollars of investment already pouring in.
International shipping carries around 90 percent of the world’s trade.
No surprise then that it accounts for a billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions per year, including three percent of the world’s global CO2 emissions.
That’s more than Spain, France, Portugal and Greece combined.
The International Monetary Fund has set a net zero shipping target by 2050, but how will this be achieved?
In the short term, biofuels, industry insiders say, and in the long-term: green hydrogen.
What is green hydrogen?
Green hydrogen is hydrogen fuel made with renewable resources like wind or solar.
Hydrogen is the lightest and one of the most commonly found elements in the universe but isolating and storing it isn’t easy.
When you use renewable energy like wind or solar to separate hydrogen from oxygen in water using an electrolyser you get green hydrogen.
Think of it as electricity stored in liquid or gas form, and when burned, the only waste product is water.
Spain’s abundant sun, wind, and key global shipping routes make it a prime candidate for green hydrogen production. Spanish petrol company Moeve – formerly Cepsa – is the country’s leading supplier of marine fuels.
Samir Fernandez, Moeve’s Director of Marine Fuels, says:
Green hydrogen forms the base fuel in order to create more manageable fuels like green ammonia, green methanol, which can be used to decarbonize shipping,
“Regulatory mandates will force ship owners to go down the path of decarbonization, with the Emissions Trading Scheme and fuel EU maritime.We’re currently building up the largest bio second generation biofuel plant in the south of Spain, with an investment of about €1.2 billion. As due for completion in 2026. Apart from that, we’re investing another billion to €2 billion in our green hydrogen value project in the south of Spain.”
He says,
The energy transition is unstoppable,
“and we see it in line with our strategy to invest somewhere in the region of €8 billion to become the leading supplier of low carbon energy by 2030.”
Chinese green hydrogen companies invest in Spain
Chinese companies are on board too: Hygreen Energy, a global industrial-scale electrolyser maker, recently signed off on a $2.2 billion investment in the Andalusia region.
And Envision announced another billion-dollar deal to develop the first green hydrogen net zero industrial park in Europe, an agreement signed while Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez was in China in September 2024.
Sanchez said at the time,
Spain is in a privileged place to take advantage of all the opportunities offered by green energy and the decarbonization of the economy,
“Together, we are laying the foundation for Spain to become a European leader, as Lei (Zhang – Envision CEO) has said before and a global player in the green hydrogen revolution.”
Sanchez has overseen a renewables revolution in Spain. It’s already Europe’s solar-energy leader ahead of Germany and clean generation accounts for 66 percent of electricity capacity with many more solar and wind power plants in the works.
Experts predict that the global hydrogen market could be worth as much as $2.5 trillion a year by 2050, and Spain wants to be a key player.
Green hope or green hype?
Southern European production piped for northern European consumption – that’s the dream, but not everyone is convinced.
Detractors say that hydrogen takes more energy to produce, store and transport than it actually provides in useful energy and is highly flammable and corrosive.
Hydrogen is losing the race to zero to improving battery technology in electric cars and is not as efficient as heat pumps in keeping our homes warm.
One of the world’s leading climate scientists Robert Howarth, professor of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell University, has pooh-poohed its use.
He said,
There may be some small role in truly green hydrogen in a decarbonized future,
“but this is largely a marketing creation by the oil and gas industry that has been hugely overhyped.”
It’s going to be very expensive to scale up green infrastructure too, admits Moeve’s Fernandez, saying: “low carbon industry will require about $1.2 trillion in investment.”
Skeptical experts do say, though, that there are places where green hydrogen makes sense – like replacing current fossil-fuel hydrogen plants with true green hydrogen.
The industry also thinks it could be useful in shipping and long-haul aviation. Despite the doubts, green hydrogen is already scaling up to try and help those heavy industries in the race to zero.
READ the latest news shaping the hydrogen market at Hydrogen Central
China – Green hydrogen to decarbonize shipping – great green hope or great green hype?, source
