BotH2nia went to Netherlands and what did we learn?

Here are my top nine takeaways from a four-day visit to Rotterdam and Amsterdam during OEEC 2022 - Offshore Energy conference as part of the delegation invited by the Netherlands Enterprise Agency :

• Phasing out fossil fuels and materials in industry leads to a geopolitical redesign of energy flows. Ports and the countries in the solar belt play a crucial role in this.
• Ramp-up of offshore wind and hydrogen requires clear governance. In Netherlands, ”roadmap” stands for ”promise”. No need for the market actors to guess what’s to happen and when.
• Transport of hydrogen is going to require multiple storage solutions in logistic hotspots like ports. Retrofitting the existing capacity is a good place to start planning. It’s not automatically bad either, if neighboring ports have partly similar kinds of facilities. Rather, it can be good for the security of supply.
• Listening to the different speakers during the four-day visit, ammonia and LOHC (liquid organic hydrogen carriers like toluene) sounded as the most promising carriers for hydrogen, when the end use is hydrogen.
• Methanol again has an existing global market. It is needed as such for example in chemical industry. One counterargument for turning green hydrogen to methanol, to be used as fuel, was its carbon content.
• Some actors saw liquid hydrogen as a distant future at its best. Some others prepared themselves for that future already. E-methane was barely mentioned, even if it’s seen in Finland as one of the most promising e-fuels, as it can be used in existing vehicles.
• Hydrogen has been transported through local pipelines and stored at industrial sites for decades. It’s not a totally new research question. Commercial players like Koole Terminal and Zenith are already building storage capacity – a note for those who are looking for benchmarks and learnings. Strohm can provide an example of new kind of hydrogen pipelines – also tested and validated for years within oil & gas industry.
• Experiences of handling hydrogen have been cumulating for decades to certain businesses within chemical industry. Transferring their knowledge to new actors that are entering the hydrogen market is key when it comes to safety.
• Visitor centres like RDM in Rotterdam and ETCA Shell lab in Amsterdam do a great job in showing rather that telling how innovation smells and what an electrolyser or a hydrogen filling station looks like.

There are many kinds of players facilitating the growth of hydrogen economy. Ministeries, ports but even commercial industry site owners are in practise building business ecosystems: hand-picking actors, introducing them to each other and supporting them in building projects.

But who is selling the created value chains to potential new sites? Is it a task of trade promotion organisations? Businesses that lead these ecosystems? The new sites that wish to be found? And who is preparing these sites, making them aware of their opportunities, teaching them what to expect and what to prepare for?

Suddenly it looks like the goal of putting Northern Scandinavia on the European hydrogen maps is within reach. After that, * BotH2nia ’s raison d’etre might be to look for answers to the questions above.

* BotH2nia is a brand for cross-border, public-private cooperation in hydrogen related questions in the Baltic Sea area. It is being conceptualized and validated in a two-year project called "Kansallinen vetyverkosto" (National hydrogen network, 2022-2023). The project is funded by its 42 member organisations from the public sector and by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment of Finland, through the Council of Oulu Region. Project coordinator is Raahe Region Development.