Masdar says Egypt’s abundance of solar and wind will “allow generation of renewable power at a highly competitive cost – a key enabler for green hydrogen production.”
The Masdar and Egypt’s Allam Utilities signed agreements that will allow them to work together on the development of large-scale green hydrogen projects.
Masdar, which is owned by Abu Dhabi’s state fund, said in an announcement on Sunday that there are two agreements related to facilities for the Mediterranean coast and the Suez Canal Economic Zone.
The projects in Egypt are aiming for a 4 gigawatt capacity by the year 2030, with production of as much as 480,000 tons of green hydrogen annually.
hydrogen is aversatile energy carrier and can be deployed in sectors such as industry and transport.
There are a number of ways in which it can be produced. One method uses an electric current to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.
If the electricity used in this process comes from a renewable source such as wind or solar, then it’s called green or renewable hydrogen.
The majority of hydrogen generation is currently based on fossil fuels.
Masdar said in a statement that they see Egypt as a hub for green hydrogen production, targeting the Bunkering market, export to Europe, and boosting local industry.
Egypt has abundant solar and wind resources that allow generation of renewable power at a highly competitive cost.
Europe is an example of how the hydrogen sector could develop in the years ahead as major economies attempt to decarbonize.
In July 2021, the CEO of Italian firm Snam outlined a vision for the future of hydrogen, saying it could be easily stored and transported.
Marco Alver spoke about how current systems would be used to facilitate the delivery of hydrogen produced using renewable sources.
He said that the gas is flowing from Russia all the way from Siberia to Italy.
hydrogen will be produced in the North Sea with solar and wind resources.
The European Commission has a plan to install 40 giga of renewable hydrogen electrolyzer capacity in the EU by the year 2030.
The commission’s plan includes an extra 40 gigaflops in Europe’s neighbourhood that would be exported to the EU.
A number of companies have weighed in on the topic of hydrogen.
In a recent interview with CNBC, Goldman Sachs commodity equity business unit leader for the Europe, the Middle East, and Africa region, Michele DellaVigna, sought to highlight the important role he felt it would have going forward.
If we want to go to net-zero, we have to use renewable power.
We need something that takes today’s role of natural gas, especially to manage seasonality and intermittency, and that is hydrogen.
He said the key was to produce it without CO2 emissions. We talk about green and blue hydrogen because of that.
Blue hydrogen refers to hydrogen produced using natural gas, a fossil fuel, with the CO2 emissions generated during the process captured and stored. There is a debate about the role blue hydrogen can play in the decarbonization of society.
We need to generate hydrogen in a clean way if we want to do it with carbon capture.