After years of sometimes working in the shadows, then the beginnings of a movement started three or four years ago and two years 2018 and 2019 full of promises and projects, the year 2020 marks a transition to hydrogen for higher speed: that of the desire to set up a real carbon-free hydrogen sector, from production to use.
The prominent role given to hydrogen in the recovery plan has in fact marked, in the midst of the COVID crisis, the strong direction of a low-carbon energy transition: one of the key issues in the anticipation of the post-oil era.
In the following pages, you will discover the deployment framework for this carbon-free hydrogen sector which is being implemented in France and more widely in Europe. A deployment resulting from a political will, which itself stems from the work accomplished for years by the very active AFHYPAC association to raise awareness of this sector, an association which, it is no coincidence, has been called since 2020 France Hydrogen.
It is therefore natural that our file continues on the path of its president. Challenges and perspectives!
2020: hydrogen odyssey
By making public his 2020 report on hydrogen in France, Philippe Boucly, president of France Hydrogène, discusses the turning point taken during this year. “The year 2020 will remain significant in several respects,” he says. For everyone, the scale of the ongoing health, social and economic crisis has profoundly changed our certainties and our habits, our way of working, of traveling, of meeting. For us, hydrogen professionals, the year 2020 will also remain the year of scaling up, for which we have been mobilizing every day for a long time and which will allow hydrogen to become a competitive alternative in the race low-carbon solutions to achieve neutrality by 2050. Five years after the Paris agreements, the climate emergency has never been so strong.
The consequences of the health crisis on entire sectors of our economy make it a more than pressing economic emergency. In this context, hydrogen has a decisive role to play, not only to achieve our climate objectives, but also to create value by developing the competitiveness of our industry and employment throughout the country. The French government understood this well and seized the opportunity of the recovery to provide significant support for our sector. The National Strategy for the development of carbon-free hydrogen, made public on September 8, 2020, signs an ambitious and coherent program where the economy meets ecology, in line with the vision set out in our manifesto in July. Decarbonize industry and invest in production capacities to create a competitive French electrolysis sector, develop carbon-free heavy mobility, support R&D and the development of skills in key technological building blocks: these three axes must enable the France to become a champion of renewable and low-carbon hydrogen at European and global levels. It has the strengths and the amount of support announced gives it the means. In January 2020, we were all talking about the hydrogen decade. We are entering into it today resolutely with the dynamism that is ours and with the support that the government strategy gives us. A strategy which recognizes our sector as an industry in its own right – with high environmental, technological and economic added value – and which commits us.
If we will be vigilant about its implementation, which must benefit French industrial players within the framework of economic development of the territories, we now have the responsibility to co-construct a harmonious, coordinated and structured deployment, both on the whole of the value chain and throughout the national territory.
Let us seize this unique opportunity and rise to the challenges that lie ahead of us! »
