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Small molecule, great potential
Green hydrogen is poised to play a key role in the energy transition. GF Piping Systems is preparing for a rapidly growing business. You can check out Our Markets to see how.
There are times – on particularly sunny or windy days – when some countries in Europe, such as Germany and Spain, produce more power from renewable sources than they consume.
This excess often goes to waste, because efficient solutions to store it for later are still lacking. “Renewable energy is great, but it is not always available when and where we need it,” says Rachel Bros de Puechredon, GF Piping Systems Senior Business Development Manager for hydrogen. “We want to be able to use clean energy even when there is no wind or sun.”
© privateRachel Bros de Puechredon
Position: Senior Business Development Manager
Division: GF Piping Systems
Location: Schaffhausen (Switzerland)
Joined GF in: 2022
Multi-talented green hydrogen
There is no doubt that the urgently needed and much-discussed green energy transition requires storage options for renewable energy. So-called “green hydrogen,” produced using renewable electricity, has proven to be one of the most flexible and powerful options for decarbonizing energy-intensive sectors, such as the steel industry, transportation, and heat generation, as well as many other applications. “There can be no energy transition without hydrogen,” Rachel says. “We need hydrogen as a new energy vector.“
Governments around the world are pumping billions into projects to generate, transport and use green hydrogen. According to the Hydrogen Council, an international industry trade group, an estimated $700 billion will need to be spent in the next eight years to reach the hydrogen generation goals that countries have set for 2030. For 2022 alone, investments of $240 billion have already been committed to hydrogen ventures. This represents nearly 700 large-scale project proposals worldwide.
Massive demand
There will be a growing demand for GF polymer piping systems, because they are needed across the entire hydrogen value chain to safely and reliably transport a variety of different fluids and gases. The same is true for water treatment plants. The water used to generate green hydrogen must be ultra-pure. Since fresh water is a scarce resource, proposals often foresee extracting it from seawater. For this purpose, the corrosive water must initially be desalinated before it is further treated – a process for which GF Piping Systems already offers solutions.
That’s the beauty of it – in many ways, this business is already part of GF Piping Systems’ DNA.”
Rachel Bros de Puechredon, Senior Business Development Manager at GF Piping Systems
Hundreds of such plants are needed globally: a huge potential market for GF Piping Systems, and a huge innovation challenge. “Every hydrogen device needs a system around it, and not just pipes – they need a variety of different valves and actuators, measurement and control sensors, to make it safe,” Rachel says. “That’s the beauty of it – in many ways, this business is already part of GF Piping Systems’ DNA.”
At 33 kWh/kg, the energy density of hydrogen is particularly high.
75 percent of the mass in the universe is in the form of hydrogen.
Hydrogen has an atomic mass of 1.008 (u), making it the lightest element in the periodic table.
New market, new challenges
The opportunity is massive, but so is the challenge. Standards for some of the necessary solutions haven’t even been written yet, and some of the technical hurdles – corrosion-resistant polymers, pipes, and containers capable of transporting hydrogen at high pressures – are still to be solved. “It’s a huge new market,” Rachel says, “so we, as a company, need to be able to scale up.“
Just as green hydrogen is a new business for GF, Rachel is a new addition to the company, tasked with orchestrating a vision for how GF will work with green hydrogen in the future. “It’s a whole new customer landscape and a new industry for GF. We need to move quickly and prepare for what‘s coming. The learning curve might be steep, but we have a huge opportunity to grasp,” she says.
The hydrogen revolution
Experts around the world are working to make green hydrogen the clean energy carrier of the future. Here’s where the research is now, in three figures.
By 2030, it is expected that projects worth $700 billion, will be completed and implemented. Europe and North and South America are the top three regions for this.
The daily amount of water needed by 2030 to produce green hydrogen, according to Global Water Intelligence, a publisher and events organizer for the water industry. Many of the planned projects rely on solar energy for the necessary electricity, and seawater could be an important source of water, which translates into an increased demand for desalination plants, in addition to industrial- scale electrolyzers.
All hydrogen-powered vehicles use high-pressure tanks. More than 60 million of them will be needed in Europe by 2030, estimates the Clean Hydrogen Partnership, a public-private partnership supported by the EU. All tanks will have an internal barrier coating of polymer to mitigate hydrogen permeation.
© Imago Images/Joerg BoethlingThere are many ways to use green hydrogen. It can be used to power vehicles such as buses, in industrial processes, or to generate heat in buildings.