Speaking in the Hydrogen Transition Summit at COP27, Lord Adair Turner, Chair of the Energy Transitions Commission, said while the buzz around hydrogen passenger mobility goes back 15 years, he is “pretty confident” that almost none of us will drive a hydrogen passenger vehicle – but he does see hydrogen demand escalating eight-fold, if not more.

That’s largely because the scale of electrolyser production will rise considerably, prompting the kind of cost reductions we have seen in batteries, solar and wind. 

“When that occurs, you then don’t need to run the electrolysers for 8,760 hours a year – you can run them just for a couple of thousand hours, the depreciation of the OPEX of the electroylsers becomes a trivial part of the hydrogen production cost,” he said.

Turning to the power and maritime sector, he held up a 100g bar of zero carbon steel produced in SSAP’s pilot plant in Sweden.

“If you talked to someone in a steel or chemicals company even five years ago, and said ‘what can you do to reduce emissions?’, there would have been a long face and they’d say ‘we have a really ambitious aim to get them down by 50% by 2050 – and if you want to get to zero you’ll have to buy all those offsets’.

“But in every one of these hard-to-abate sectors we can do it – we realise that shipping could and should move to ammonia and methanol, and steel can be produced in a zero carbon fashion.”

Rapid changes in renewables continue to change dynamics and present new opportunities.

“It raises questions of whether you should be doing the iron making in Sweden, or whether you should do it in Africa where the green hydrogen will be cheapest and where the iron ore supplies are available,” he said.