PUERTOLLANO, Spain (AP) — In Spain, the dream of an emissions-free future for heavy industry starts with a rugged Castilian hillside covered in solar panels, and ends with an ice-cold beer. When the beer will be available, and how much it will cost, depends on an intervening rollout of green hydrogen.
This Mediterranean nation wants to become the European leader in hydrogen produced exclusively from renewable energy. With plenty of sunshine and wind and wide-open countryside to host those power sources, Spain’s ambition is to export the gas to the rest of the continent.
Green hydrogen is created when renewable energy sources power an electrical current that runs through water, separating its hydrogen and oxygen molecules through electrolysis. The result does not produce planet-warming carbon dioxide, but less than 0.1% of global hydrogen production is currently created this way.
As the global price of solar power continues to fall, Spain is betting that it can rapidly build a new supply chain for sectors of the economy that require hydrogen for industrial processes, and which have been harder to wean off fossil fuels.
Critics of Spain’s ambitions have warned there isn’t enough renewable energy capacity to produce green hydrogen that can replace natural gas and coal in the making of petrochemicals, steel and agricultural products.
But supporters are relying on the country’s plans for a head start to implant themselves in the nascent green hydrogen economy. The International Energy Agency estimated in December that Spain would account for half of Europe’s growth in dedicated renewable capacity for hydrogen production
“The sense of urgency is that everyone seems to be racing to be the first to export green hydrogen,” said Alejandro Núñez-Jiménez, an expert in green hydrogen policy at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. “Once you build energy infrastructure, it’s going to be there for decades. So it’s really a game where the first one might lock in the situation for many years,”
A glimpse of the potential for green hydrogen can be seen in Puertollano, a former mining town now home to a large industrial park where Spanish energy company Iberdrola and fertilizer manufacturer Fertiberia have partnered to create the first zero-carbon plant nutrients in the world. The fertilizer will one day be scattered onto malt barley, which will then be used to make Heineken’s first “green malt” beverage.
Etienne Strijp, president of Heineken Spain, emphasized the difficulty of stripping carbon out of agricultural processing “Being carbon neutral throughout our value chain represents an enormous challenge,” he said at the announcement of the company’s plan to produce green malt.
The green hydrogen plant in Puertollano, Europe’s largest functioning facility, is currently in a pilot phase. Iberdrola owns the 100 megawatts’ worth of solar panels that power electrolyzers to separate water from hydrogen. Huge hydrogen storage tanks then feed pipes that take the gas direct to Fertiberia, where it is used to make ammonia, the foundational chemical in nitrogen fertilizers.
