The trend is clear: refineries also need to become greener – recently also to limit the use of Russian oil and gas. In Germany, refineries are responsible for about a fifth of the CO2 emissions by the sector. Green hydrogen can be integrated into existing production processes. Several refineries are currently making this transition.
Rotterdam is not only the largest port in Europe, it is playing a key role in the German hydrogen strategy. Stijn van Els has been working since January 2020 as director of commercial delivery at the port, which belongs 70 percent to the municipality of Rotterdam and 30 percent to the Netherlands. After studying at a German Hochschule, van Els studied physics in Delft and then started as an engineer at Shell. He’s been working around the world for 30 -years and in Hamburg as head of Shell Germany. H2-international spoke with him about the role of the port for the European hydrogen economy.
Aware of the changing framework conditions in the energy sector, the hitherto dominant players are attempting to adapt to the new situation. At the beginning of November 2021, the German national mineral oil industry association (Mineralölwirtschaftsverband, MWV) and the national institute for heating and mobility (Institut für Wärme und Mobilität, IWO) announced that they wanted to work together from now on as the association en2x, officially Wirtschaftsverband Fuels und Energie eV, in order to, as they say, “accelerate the clean energy transition.” The name en2x derives from energy-to-X, that is, the conversion of a primary energy source into any other energy carrier for application or storage of that energy.
In Wesseling, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s coal heartland, a new transportation era is dawning – at least if oil giant Shell has a say in it. “Petroleum products will continue to play an important role in the decades to come.
ITM Power (London: ITM) based in the UK was able to increase bookings by GBP 4.87 million to GBP 23.54 million. Projects for which contracts should be awarded soon have a combined value of GBP 16.67 million, so that the expected backlog is at around GBP 40 million. An intriguing product development is ITM’s recent showcase of a 50-megawatt electrolyzer design at the Las Vegas trade show SPI. It reportedly made it possible to produce 20 tons of hydrogen per day.
This March, Shell presented a new study carried out in collaboration with the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy. Focusing on transportation, the authors compared several different production pathways for hydrogen and took a closer look at the three regions spearheading global development: Germany, Japan and the United States. Jörg Adolf, who headed the project at Shell, said that hydrogen technology had made big advances over the past years, “not just in car use.”
After one hydrogen filling station had each been installed in Wuppertal and Ulm in summer 2016, another three went into operation last fall. As reported previously (see Three New Hydrogen Filling Stations), the H2 pump at the Metzingen gas station south of Stuttgart came online on Sept. 23. Five days later, however, it had to be shut down again when a truck hit it. Its trailer had been caught in the pump, resulting in at least EUR 60,000 in damage.
Since this summer, Germany has been able to offer eco-conscious drivers two more opportunities to fill up their hydrogen tanks. The first new station went online in Wuppertal on June 19 and is viewed as the prototype for the planned nationwide H2 infrastructure, according to the Clean Energy Partnership. The project supported by EUR 670,000 consisted of the addition of a hydrogen fuel pump to the Shell gas station
On May 1, 2016, Nikolas Iwan became the new CEO of H2 MOBILITY Germany. Iwan had previously worked for eight years in different management positions at Shell. His predecessor, Frank Sreball, who has had his own consultancy for management and interim management since 2005, had been the one originally setting up H2 MOBILITY on his own.
Change in personnel at the beginning of the year at Clean Energy Partnership (CEP): Patrick Schnell, who had worked at the organization since it started out as a demonstration project (which succeeded the Verkehrswirtschaftliche Energiestrategie or VES in 2002), handed over his chairmanship of CEP to Thomas Bystry. Schnell, whose primary employment is managing the Sustainable Development department