德国国际安全事务研究所-氢革命用电解槽（英）

NO. 57 SEPTEMBER 2022 Introduction Electrolysers for the Hydrogen Revolution Challenges, dependencies, and solutions Dawud Ansari, Julian Grinschgl, and Jacopo Maria Pepe Due to Europe’s gas crisis and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, ramping up the hydro-gen market has become more urgent than ever for European and German policymakers. However, ambitious targets for green hydrogen present an enormous challenge for the European Union (EU) and its young hydrogen economy. Apart from the demand for electricity, there is above all a lack of production capacities for electrolysers. The envisioned production scaling of electrolysers is almost impossible to achieve, and it also conflicts with import efforts and cements new dependencies on suppliers of key raw materials and critical components. Although a decoupling from Russia’s raw ma-terial supply is generally possible, there is no way for the EU to achieve its goals with-out China. Aside from loosened regulations and the active management of raw material supply, Europe should also reconsider its biased preference for green hydrogen. The ongoing energy crisis and Russia’s inva-sion of Ukraine have pushed hydrogen into an increasingly central role in the EU’s climate and energy policy plans. Already in 2020, the EU set ambitious targets in its hydrogen strategy. Yet, the European Com-mission’s (EC) latest proposal, REPowerEU, now specifies and raises those targets dra-matically. First, the previously demanded 10 million tonnes of annual hydrogen pro-duction within the EU are to be comple-mented by another 10 million tonnes of an-nual imports by 2030. Second, REPowerEU corrects the previous estimate for the required domestic electrolysis capacity: Not 40 gigawatts (GW), but 120 GW of electroly-sis capacity will be needed to produce 10 million tonnes of hydrogen in Europe. The revised targets are intended to achieve the EU Fit for 55 emission targets as well as energy independence from Russia. The EC plans to rely exclusively on green hydrogen. It is obtained by separating water molecules (H2O) into hydrogen (H2) and oxy-gen (O2) in an electrolyser powered by renewable electricity – without direct car-bon dioxide (CO2) emissions. However, there are also other, low-carbon technologies that produce hydrogen, such as steam reforming with natural gas, including CO2 capture – so-called blue hydrogen. It is questionable whether the ambitious EU goals can be realised while only relying on one technology. The additional renew-able electricity needed to produce 10 mil-lion tonnes of hydrogen would amount to almost the entire EU-27 electricity genera-tion from wind and solar power in 2021. SWP Comment 57 September 2022 2 Yet, manufacturing the electrolysers them-selves will be even more challenging: The electrolysis capacity currently installed in the EU will need to increase almost 900-fold within just eight years. Moreover, Europe faces the dual challenge of ramping up elec-trolysis capacity while simultaneou