How Innovative Engineers and Companies Are Jump-Starting the Green Hydrogen Revolution

When global leaders meet at COP28 in Dubai in late November, a key focus will be on goals to triple renewable capacity and double hydrogen production by 2030.

The world is on its way toward a lower-carbon economy, with renewables projected to comprise 35% of global power generation by 2025, according to the International Energy Agency. However, industries such as aviation, shipping, steel and residential and commercial real estate are proving difficult to electrify.

Green hydrogen is created by electrolysis, a process that sends an electric current through water in a device known as an electrolyzer to separate hydrogen from oxygen. Since this process doesn’t create carbon emissions if renewable energy is used, green hydrogen is a potential solution to provide carbon-free fuel for these hard-to-abate sectors. That’s why Bloomberg New Energy Finance predicts hydrogen could meet up to 24% of the world’s energy needs by 2050.

However, green hydrogen presents challenges, especially in transportation and storage, that need to be overcome for this carbon-free fuel to achieve its potential in a net-zero future, says Mohammad Abdelqader El Ramahi, Chief Green Hydrogen Officer at Masdar, a UAE-based company at the forefront of green hydrogen development.

“We call hydrogen the fuel of the future,” El Ramahi says. “That is why we are keen and excited as engineers to help develop energy-efficient technologies that produce hydrogen more cost-effectively, helping us to scale these technologies.”

El Ramahi is confident that Masdar will be successful in developing green hydrogen at the scale required to meet net-zero goals. The company solved similar problems around the storage, transportation and cost of renewable energy 17 years ago.

Masdar was founded in 2006 to establish a renewable energy sector in the UAE and globally, at a time of great skepticism over whether renewables like solar and wind power would be too expensive to achieve scale. Today—when wind and solar installations are expected to exceed 440 gigawatts globally in 2023, according to BloombergNEF—Masdar is active in more than 40 countries across six continents, and it has invested or committed to invest in projects with a combined value of more than $30 billion.

“We adopted a very bold yet smart, very direct first-mover approach to renewables, and we are adopting the same strategy in green hydrogen, based on always being a pioneer and positioning Abu Dhabi at the forefront of the energy transition sector,” says El Ramahi.

One of the most impactful green hydrogen projects is taking shape on Spain’s southern coast, where energy company Cepsa is constructing the Andalusian Green Hydrogen Valley—two new generation plants that will produce up to 300,000 tons of green hydrogen per year for use across Europe in aviation and heavy land and sea transport.

The essential ingredients to producing green hydrogen are water and renewable energy. With sufficient sun, wind and available land, Spain is able to produce renewable energy at the cheapest cost in Europe, and Cepsa is creating a maritime corridor to transport green hydrogen to Rotterdam for export to northern Europe.

“Starting with scale is important,” says Cepsa CEO Maarten Wetselaar. “With such a big project, we can immediately get economies of scale into our production base.”

One advantage that Cepsa shares with Masdar is a partnership with Mubadala, the sovereign investment company based in Abu Dhabi. Mubadala’s support helps Cepsa act with the speed needed to get large-scale renewable and green hydrogen projects off the ground.

“Mubadala wants to go fast, and we want to go fast,” says Wetselaar.

The promise of green hydrogen and the nascent success of innovative companies like Masdar and Cepsa are optimistic signs for the future, but widespread adoption of the clean fuel faces significant hurdles to reach the level needed to make a significant impact on net-zero goals.

“We’d need around 30 projects the size of our Andalusian Green Hydrogen Valley to cover the green hydrogen needs of Europe by 2030,” says Carlos Barrasa, Executive Vice President, Commercial and Clean Energies at Cepsa. “To me, the most important thing is the need to start as soon as possible.”

COP28 in Dubai is an important milestone for green hydrogen because development of the technology requires the financial and regulatory support of the international community.

“This COP is more important than any other COP because it is the COP of action,” El Ramahi says. “This is where the UAE is demonstrating to the international community at large that we are here to support reaching these objectives through action, by working side by side with our partners to cultivate and accelerate the implementation and scalability of technologies.”