Tunisia is one of the driest countries in Africa, and has just suffered three years of drought. Yet the EU sees the country as key to producing “green hydrogen” for export to Europe. The trouble is, this fuel is obtained by splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen with electricity generated by renewable sources. Tunisia has lots of sun but precious little fresh water.
The only way of producing the raw material needed for green hydrogen is sucking up Mediterranean water and desalinating it. But a report last year for the Heinrich Böll Foundation, affiliated to Germany’s green political movement, warns that this would be a dirty, energy-intensive, water-guzzling process – and put the high cost of decarbonising the rich world on to the shoulders of poorer nations.
Many sun-drenched countries, especially in the Maghreb, have been sold a future as export hubs for green hydrogen. The pitch is seductive. As 1kg of hydrogen contains about three times as much energy as 1kg of petrol, it is no wonder that hydrogen is being touted as a fuel of the future. Europe’s green deal, which aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 55% by the end of the decade, relies on green hydrogen production in north Africa and Ukraine.
Producing green hydrogen in Europe is not impossible. But it is expensive compared with fossil fuels, with even wind-based generation needing larger subsidies. Without big government support packages, it remains an open question whether European consumers would be prepared to foot the very significant price rises needed to go green in this way.
Last year, the EU proposed doubling green hydrogen imports by 2030 to 10m tonnes a year. The continent’s heavy industries cannot use electricity, however environmentally friendly, for all their requirements; they need fuels for high-intensity heat. So to make sure that these energy sources are less carbon-intensive, Brussels is pushing industries – such as steel or petrochemical manufacturers – to adopt green hydrogen.
The benefits of such a strategy – with the desirable goal of low carbon emissions in Europe – cannot come at the cost of environmental destruction abroad. Raoudha Gafrej, one of Tunisia’s top water experts, warned in the Heinrich Böll Foundation report that the degradation of marine ecosystems from the toxic sludge produced by desalination plants would be irreversible.
Hydrogen produced by renewable energy has a role to play in future energy systems. Its “green” version can be converted to ammonia, a key feedstock for fertilisers, with other uses in shipping fuel, power generation and steelmaking. There are also significant energy losses to consider: about a third of the energy used to produce the gas through electrolysis is lost. Transporting hydrogen requires additional energy, equivalent to 10% of the energy of the fuel itself. From the perspective of African nations, as the recent Just Transition report points out, that energy could be used locally to address immediate needs rather than being directed to produce hydrogen for use in Europe.
Less than 0.04% of total hydrogen production is “green”. This proportion is bound to grow as governments worldwide wager that it will play a key role in cutting carbon-heavy emissions in industries such as cement manufacturing. With the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere already at 422 parts per million (ppm) – much higher than the 350 ppm generally considered a relatively safe level – there is no scope for worsening the problem. Transitioning to net zero emissions globally should not mean the rich gain at the expense of the poor.
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