Alongside the battery, sustainable hydrogen is seen as the main enabler in reducing carbon dioxide emissions from road traffic and other transport. Vattenfall is already working on several fuel projects with sustainable hydrogen as an important ingredient. But the possibilities are many; below we present the most important ones.
Global transport consumes almost 10 billion liters of oil per day. In a year, this results in approximately 7 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions. Gasoline and other petroleum-based fuels need to be replaced with something better to reduce the impact on our climate, and it needs to happen soon. Using batteries works well for passenger cars and shorter road transport, in many other cases hydrogen-based fuels are more suitable, and the solutions are already there.
“Hydrogen is a good alternative when direct electrification is difficult, for example when excessively large and heavy batteries are required. Hydrogen can be used directly as a fuel or to produce other fossil-free fuels,” says Mikael Nordlander, Vattenfall’s director of industry decarbonisation. For several years he has been working on the development of the use of hydrogen, especially to drive climate change in industry processes One project that has received a lot of attention is HYBRIT in northern Sweden, created to produce fossil-free steel.
Offshore wind becomes sustainable aviation fuel
Sustainable fuel production currently occupies most of Mikael Nordlander’s time. On the Swedish west coast, two fuel companies, St1 and Preem, plan to start manufacturing so-called sustainable electrofuels using hydrogen from offshore wind power and non-fossil carbon dioxide captured from emissions from the forestry or similar industry .
The plans are for a total annual production of more than one million cubic meters of electrofuel, mainly for the aeronautical industry where the requirements for a sustainable fuel mix every year will be more stringent. HySkies is another sustainable aviation fuel project that Vattenfall is running together with Shell and SAS, among others.
The most obvious trend
But there are many ways hydrogen can power vehicles. For example, it can be used directly as fuel in an engine or to produce electricity in a fuel cell. The question is which technology will be dominant in the future in the different transport sectors?
“All variants have their uses,” says Mikael Nordlander. “The most obvious trend we see is probably sustainable e-fuel for aviation. There, the blending requirements will gradually increase over the next few years and at the moment it is difficult to see a good alternative to hydrocarbons for long flights, although I know there are projects looking at hydrogen itself as a fuel. For long, heavy sea transport, it’s more like a guess. Right now, it looks like methanol, which can be produced by the method of ‘electrofuel, is the strongest competitor, or possibly ammonia. Fuel cells and pure hydrogen can probably compete to a greater extent in terms of heavy road transport, especially if industry starts using hydrogen in its processes , as hydrogen will be widely available also for the transport sector.”
