After months of postponement, the Italian government’s long-awaited hydrogen strategy has finally seen the light of day, with three scenarios – high, medium and low deployment – illustrated by the Italian Environment and Energy Security Minister Gilberto Pichetto Fratin. There was no shortage of ‘confirmations’, such as the centrality of Snam’s SouthH2Corridor mega-project, which envisages the construction of a 3,300-kilometre gas pipeline to connect North Africa and in particular Tunisia and Algeria with Germany. But reading the text one also finds a few surprises. The government has reduced the demand estimates to 2030 (0.25Mton/year instead of the 0.70Mton foreseen in the 2020 guidelines) and consequently also the installed capacity, from 5 to 3 GW of electrolysers.
The reduction is consistent with the targets set out in the PNIEC published this year, which already opened the way for ‘renewable or low-emission’ hydrogen not only to hydrogen produced from renewables, but also to hydrogen produced from fossil gas (with CCS to 2050, provided it can guarantee an emissions reduction of up to 70 per cent) and even from nuclear energy.
The executive also ‘revised’ the production targets in Italy: 4.47 Mtoe and 8.35 Mtoe, in the ‘low’ and ‘high deployment’ scenarios respectively, corresponding to 1.5Mton and 2.9Mton of hydrogen per year by 2050. Preliminary data in the guidelines estimated potential targets for hydrogen shares in final energy consumption of up to 2% by 2030 and up to 20% by 2050, compared to 17.7% for ‘hard to abate’ industry, 31.3% for transport (including ships and aircraft), and 0.7% for civil. This is despite the fact that there is no shortage of studies explaining how the use of hydrogen may make sense in heavy industry but not in transport.
And then there is the question of funding. The 6 billion euro foreseen in the Italian recovery plan are crumbs compared to the investments the government plans to put in place: up to 24 billion for the high deployment scenario. We are talking, however, about estimates. There is as yet no guaranteed demand for hydrogen in 2030 or even 2050. So who will cover the cost of the investment in the infrastructure envisaged in the strategy, starting with the SouthH2Corridor, which Snam estimates at 4 billion euro for the Italian section alone?
Finally, the strategy omits to make explicit overall and sectoral emission reduction targets. Perhaps one reason for this is that more and more data show that hydrogen’s contribution to decarbonisation would be much smaller than hoped for, if not non-existent in some cases.
The most recent research assigns hydrogen a climate-changing power that would be 12 times that of carbon dioxide.
A study published in February 2024 shows that the use of ‘blue’ hydrogen (i.e. produced from fossil gas with CO2 capture and storage) can lead to an increase in emissions of up to 50%, if the climate impact of the entire supply chain is assessed.
The long-distance transport of hydrogen is also extremely inefficient: to move hydrogen over thousands of kilometres requires 3 times the energy needed to transport fossil gas.
Thus higher costs and a huge waste of energy produced from renewables, in the case of green hydrogen, as well as precious natural resources such as water. In the case of green hydrogen produced in Tunisia, there are plans to build desalination and water treatment plants to bring the water to the ‘ultra-pure’ form needed for the electrolysis process. This means starting with 20 litres of seawater or more to get the 9 litres of ultra-pure water needed to produce 1kg of hydrogen, in a desertic or semi-desertic context where access to and management of resources are already a source of social tension. This is a neo-colonial approach, aiming at building a market for the profit of the usual suspects, including Snam, beyond the rhetoric of the Mattei Plan in which it is framed.
