Aussie hydrogen exports to Europe could be a pipedream, report warns

afr.com:

London | Europe is more likely to meet its potentially burgeoning demand for hydrogen via pipelines from nearby countries, not shipping from far-flung sources like Australia, a leading energy think tank has warned.

The Clean Air Task Force said any long-distance shipping of hydrogen would be “expensive and relatively energy-inefficient” compared with pipelines linking the continent to producers like Norway or Algeria.

Hopes are high about the potential for Australian hydrogen exports to Europe. But are they realistic? Bloomberg

And since Europe is now rapidly building a network of ports to import liquefied natural gas, it would also be cheaper for Europe to just ship in LNG and use it to make hydrogen at those ports.

“Most of the hydrogen needed to meet future European demand will likely be either produced near the point of end-use or imported by pipeline,” CATF said in a detailed technical study released on Tuesday.

The CATF report’s findings would appear to dent Australia’s hopes of becoming a major hydrogen exporter to Europe, despite an initiative between the Australian and German governments to build a green-hydrogen supply chain between the two countries.

But Magnolia Tovar, CATF’s Amsterdam-based global director of zero-carbon fuels, said Australia might still be able to supply hydrogen to Europe by converting it into ammonia.

“If we’re talking about ammonia, that shouldn’t exclude Australia,” she told The Australian Financial Review.

“The transport cost for ammonia is not that big. The lion’s share of the levelised cost of hydrogen is going to be how much it costs you to produce that hydrogen, and then the export infrastructure that you have to build to make that export viable, and then the import infrastructure