Over the past decade and a half, Abu Dhabi’s Masdar has built itself into one of the world’s biggest developers of renewable energy projects. Now, as the United Arab Emirates prepares to host the next UN climate summit, COP28 at the end of the year, it is branching out into an entirely new business area – green hydrogen.
Hydrogen is seen as crucial to reaching global net zero targets. It can be used for a wide range of applications, including power generation, energy storage, transportation (particularly heavy transportation such as shipping and trucking). It can also be used to make sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), and, most crucially, it offers a way to decarbonize “hard-to-abate” industries such as steel, aluminium and cement, where using renewable energy alone is not possible, as well as other high-carbon industries such as fertilizer.
“Certain industries require ‘green molecules’ to decarbonise (rather than green electricity)” said Dr Faye Al Hersh, strategy technology specialist at Masdar, speaking during Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week, which the company hosted. For steel and cement, CO2 is part of the production process rather than just a product of the energy used but it is possible to decarbonise production by using hydrogen instead.
While current methods of production (known as grey hydrogen), which remove the hydrogen from methane gas, are hugely carbon-intensive, it is possible to produce low-carbon hydrogen, either by capturing the carbon and storing it (blue hydrogen) or by using renewable electricity and an electrolyser to produce the gas, which is known as green hydrogen.
