A steel worker walks in front of the blast furnace at the steel works of Thyssenkrupp Steel Europe AG in Duisburg, western Germany, on July 26, 2023.INA FASSBENDER/Getty Images
A long string of rail cars lumbers across the grounds of the Thyssenkrupp AG steel plant in Duisburg, Germany, blocking traffic. The train’s wagons are caked in red dust from transporting iron ore between the plant’s private port and its gigantic blast furnaces – 140-metre-tall towers that transform the ore into molten iron so that it can be processed into steel.
The plant occupies an enormous area along a bend in the Rhine River. At three times the size of New York’s Central Park, it is one of Germany’s largest industrial sites, with a rail network that stretches 470 kilometres. Each year it brings in 27 million tonnes of ore, coal, coke and other raw materials to produce about 11 million tonnes of steel. It is Germany’s single largest source of greenhouse gases.
According to the conservation organization WWF Germany, the Duisburg steel plant emitted nearly eight million tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2022, slightly more than Canada’s entire steel and iron industry that same year.
Germany plans to cut its carbon emissions by 65 per cent by 2030, compared with 1990 levels, and to be carbon neutral by 2045. But recent reports say it will miss the 2045 target because some sectors are failing to close the emissions gap.
One thing that could help close that gap is hydrogen fuel, which produces no greenhouse gas emissions when burned. The German government has said hydrogen will play a major role in decarbonizing its industries, including steel, chemicals and cement.
But to take advantage of hydrogen’s potential, Germany will need to secure a low-carbon supply of hydrogen – a daunting task in which Canada may soon play a role.
Almost all of the hydrogen produced today is made from fossil fuels using methods that emit carbon, cancelling out some of the fuel’s climate benefits. But it can also be made by electrolysis, a process that uses electricity to split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. When this is done using electricity from a non-emitting source, such as a wind or solar energy plant, the hydrogen is considered “green.”
Germany aims to have 10 gigawatts of green hydrogen production capacity in place domestically by 2030. But it will need far more.
“Nobody knows where those huge amounts are supposed to come from,” said Florian Widdel, a hydrogen expert at the German Renewable Energy Federation. “It is a huge problem for an industrial nation like Germany.”
The federation would like to see emphasis put on domestic hydrogen production, he added. But Germany’s national hydrogen strategy, released in July, was frank: “Germany will not be capable of producing green hydrogen on its own in the quantities needed,” it said.
Instead, Germany is looking abroad to meet its hydrogen needs. As much as 50 per cent to 70 per cent of the country’s supply will be imported, mostly by ship in the form of ammonia, a hydrogen-rich molecule that is easier to store and transport than liquid hydrogen.
In summer 2022, Canada and Germany signed a deal to establish a hydrogen supply corridor, under which Canada would begin exporting hydrogen to Germany by 2025. But Mr. Widdel said most of Germany’s imported hydrogen would likely come from nearby countries, such as Norway and Denmark, or through a pipeline that would connect North Africa to Germany, via Italy and Austria.
Germany is already setting up hydrogen ports and storage facilities, and investing €20-billion in repurposed and newly constructed pipelines, which will extend nearly 10,000 kilometres across all 16 of the country’s states.
Along the pedestrian shopping area in the North Sea town of Wilhelmshaven, billboards sketch out a plan to transform the community into a green energy hub that will feed imported hydrogen into Germany’s economy. Wilhelmshaven, the country’s only deep-water port, has long been a major hub for oil and coal.
Under the plan, imported ammonia made from green hydrogen would be unloaded from ships at floating terminals. Then it would be “cracked” – converted back into green hydrogen – and piped to industrial facilities, such as steel plants and chemical manufacturers.
A major issue with importing green hydrogen is its low efficiency. Energy is lost at each step of the conversion process. “Although it might be possible to improve the efficiency of each stage, the tyranny of multiple process steps means your end-to-end efficiency is hard to budge,” Michael Liebreich, an energy analyst and investor, wrote for Bloomberg New Energy Finance in December, 2022. He estimates that as much as 80 per cent of the original energy input is lost in the production, shipping and cracking of green hydrogen.
As it phases in its hydrogen economy, Germany will allow other forms of hydrogen to be used, including blue hydrogen, made from natural gas, and turquoise hydrogen, made from methane combustion. This flexibility could speed up the energy transition, but it also risks extending the life of fossil fuels, environmentalists warn.
Wilhelmshaven has its eye on importing more than just green hydrogen. Companies here also want to import synthetic methane, a fuel they’ve dubbed electric natural gas, or eNG. It is made by combining captured carbon dioxide with green hydrogen.
The Belgium-based company Tree Energy Solutions has partnered with two other energy companies, E.ON and Engie, to construct a floating liquefied natural gas terminal in Wilhelmshaven that is expected to begin operations in early 2024. The terminal is designed to be capable of shifting to handling hydrogen or synthetic methane in the future.
The natural gas aspect of the project has always been seen as temporary, said Jana Verberg, a consultant at Tree Energy Solutions. “By 2030, it will be used for green energy, eNG,” she said. “The advantage is that you don’t need to demolish and start building new infrastructure.”
The company plans to capture carbon dioxide from factories, pipe it to Wilhelmshaven and ship it on tankers to countries where renewable energy is abundant. There, the carbon dioxide would be mixed with green hydrogen to form synthetic methane, chilled until it became liquid and then shipped back to Germany, where it would be piped to industrial plants to burn.
The approach would require little change in industries that already use natural gas. But, for the process to be considered carbon neutral, the carbon dioxide produced when the fuel is burned would have to be collected and recycled.
Critics are skeptical that any form of methane fuel can be used without emissions. Methane, a greenhouse gas, could leak into the atmosphere at various points in the supply chain, and the use of captured carbon dioxide to produce the fuel could also have unwelcome side effects. “If you use carbon dioxide from those kinds of plants, you give them new value, which you don’t want,” Mr. Widdel said.
In November, Tree Energy Solutions announced that it would build a green hydrogen project in Quebec that would produce 70,000 tonnes of the fuel a year by 2028, two-thirds of which would be used to produce synthetic methane.
For Germany to become energy independent and avoid supply disruptions as it transitions to hydrogen, it must also find ways to store massive volumes of hydrogen fuel.
Twenty-five kilometres south of Wilhelmshaven, the town of Etzel is surrounded by bright green agricultural fields and grazing cows. The region sits atop a massive underground salt dome that has been used to contain large quantities of oil and gas for more than 50 years.
In the 1970s, the West German government, worried about a looming oil shortage, began drilling caverns into the salt to store emergency oil supplies. Today, the site, owned and operated by Storag Etzel, is made up of 24 caverns for oil and 51 for natural gas. The company has the right to build 24 more.
Each cavern is 300 to 600 metres deep and up to 70 metres wide. On average, one of them can supply natural gas to 80,000 people for a year.
“It’s not very exciting to look at, because everything is subsurface, but that’s important for acceptance from the neighbours,” said Boris Richter, the company’s managing director. Among the few surface signs of the town’s industrial purpose are concrete pads and wide pipes.
In November, the company finished converting two gas caverns for hydrogen storage. It aims to test their tightness and run through injection and withdrawal scenarios over 2024, and be ready to store hydrogen on an industrial scale by 2026.
Among the potential beneficiaries is Thyssenkrupp. Access to green hydrogen is critical to the company’s plans to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions and produce low-carbon steel.
Globally, steel production accounts for about 7 per cent of all the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. If steelmaking were a country, it would rank third in the world for carbon dioxide emissions, sandwiched between the United States and India.
Blast furnaces burn coke, a processed form of coal, to melt iron ore and remove oxygen. “Ninety per cent of our carbon dioxide emissions come from the blast furnaces,” said Roswitha Becker, a spokesperson for Thyssenkrupp.
Thyssenkrupp plans to replace all four of its blast furnaces with direct-reduction plants powered by green hydrogen by 2045. When the first one comes online in 2026, it will cut the plant’s carbon dioxide emissions by more than 3.5 million tonnes, Ms. Becker said. On a global scale, retrofitting the steel industry to run on green hydrogen instead of coal could cut emissions by more than 5 per cent.
Although the shift would make steel more expensive to produce, subsidies, emissions taxes and carbon border tariffs could erase some of the price difference for buyers.
“As the price for carbon dioxide rises, conventional steel will be very expensive,” Ms. Becker said.
Research for this article was made possible with the support of Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung Washington’s Transatlantic Media Fellowship.