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Green Hydrogen: The Future of Energy
By Yara ELhemely
Climate change has posed a severe threat to the whole world and demonstrated the urgency of reducing carbon emissions. Hence, the world has recently strived to find an alternative for traditional energy sources and to generate eco-friendly energy. Hence, green hydrogen has gained momentum among experts as an energy carrier from which we can generate renewable energy, such as: solar, wind, and water energy. Green hydrogen is the most eco-friendly energy as it is zero-carbon. This means that it protects the environment and contributes to combating global warming.
Why Green Hydrogen?
Countries are fiercely competing with each other to generate green energy and to be its top producer. This perfectly aligns with the undeniable advantages of green hydrogen, which are as follows:
- It is a renewable and an eco-friendly source of energy as it does not produce polluting gasses during combustion.
- It can be stored easily, used and transferred at any time.
- It is multifunctional as it can be used and consumed by households as a substitute for electricity and natural gas. Equally important, it can be used as an alternative for fuel as it is the case in the US where around 7600 cars use hydrogen fuel.
- It is expected that green hydrogen will be used in other industries, such: as aircrafts, ships, and heavy industries.
Green Hydrogen in Egypt
With the availability of renewable energy, including solar and wind energy throughout the year, Egypt has undertaken steps to generate and produce green hydrogen. For now, Egypt has produced and generated 5800 MWs of renewable energy, constituting 20% of Egypt’s total energy consumption. Concurrently, it has adopted a strategy for promoting investments in renewable energy. To this end, it has developed an energy map.
Furthermore, Egypt plans to increase its consumption of renewable energy to 50% before 2035. Thus, it has adopted a new strategy to diversify its renewable energy sources, of which green hydrogen has a major role since it is considered as the future of energy. Therefore, Egypt is to develop and adopt a holistic national strategy for green hydrogen, alongside launching pilot projects worth 3-4 billion dollars.
Experts foresee that the green hydrogen sector will attract investments worth 11 trillion dollars by the end of 2050 as it will fulfill about a quarter of the global demand of energy by 2050. It is also presumed that investments in green hydrogen will exceed one billion dollars annually by 2023.