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The writer is the chief executive of Opportunity Green, a not-for-profit, and the director of the Sasha Coalition
Shipping and aviation have barely begun to decarbonise and, unlike other industries, they don’t have many easy options for doing so.
There are ways for us to reduce emissions in those two sectors in the short term: increase efficiency, use wind power on ships and fly less. We need to do all of that. Ultimately, though, these industries will require new fuels to replace oil — and those fuels are likely to be made from hydrogen.
But hydrogen doesn’t come easy. The green version of the fuel is made via the energy-intensive process of splitting water molecules with clean electricity — and if you are converting it to another fuel (such as methanol for shipping or synthetic kerosene for aviation), further energy is lost. Plus, hydrogen is tricky to store and can’t be transported without serious energy usage. You can imagine how much that is going to cost.
The hydrogen industry touts the fuel as a solution to almost all sectors of the economy that need to be decarbonised — it is cited as an option for heating homes and for filling up our cars with. But there are better alternatives. As long as heat pumps and electric cars exist, it makes little sense to turn electricity into hydrogen, rather than using it directly.
Building out a supply of hydrogen for use in sectors that don’t need it, rather than focusing on those that do, will delay the transition to a post-oil world by decades. We need regulation to ensure that the aviation and shipping industries can turn to hydrogen instead. And with recent increased investor confidence in the fuel, governments need to make sure that it is not wasted.
As things stand, the aviation sector has successfully created a new acronym: SAFs, or Sustainable Aviation Fuels. But, despite what the name suggests, SAFs include unsustainable components too. Yet when I speak to industry insiders, they cite these hybrid fuels as the reason why they are unwilling to push governments for policies which will hasten the roll out of hydrogen.
SAFs covers everything from carbon-intensive biofuels to green hydrogen-made synthetic kerosene. Biofuels, when made from crops, often emit more carbon than the fuels they replace once you consider indirect land use change (the shift that occurs when a field previously used for crops is given over to biofuel feedstock production). While they can also be made from truly sustainable feedstocks such as used cooking oil, there is a very limited supply of those inputs.
Meanwhile, in the shipping world, Maersk, the world’s second-largest shipping container company, has pledged to move to sustainable fuels. However, its chief executive has announced that even he doesn’t think there will be enough green methanol available for the company’s recently ordered ships.
The EU has brought in new legislation to decarbonise aviation and shipping. But the legislation encourages a move to lower carbon fuels (such as those dodgy biofuels), rather than the lowest carbon sustainable fuel (green hydrogen). Meanwhile, politicians are sending the limited hydrogen supply we have to sectors that don’t need it — in the UK, for example, there are plans to trial hydrogen heating and other alternative heating solutions by 2025.
There’s a woeful lack of policy supporting the production of green hydrogen for shipping and aviation. That, in turn, is slowing down demand and discouraging investment. There is a gap between the number of hydrogen projects planned and the number that go ahead, due to a lack of demand.
Regulation stimulates innovation and would guarantee that demand. If aviation and shipping companies are to have the hydrogen they need, they need to send clear signals to green hydrogen producers as soon as possible.
But without legislation, both industries will have to take on this cost voluntarily and, as we’ve seen, even Maersk doesn’t feel capable of doing that. It’s time to plug the hydrogen gap — for the sake of a greener, more efficient future.
