Roadmap for hydrogen society/economy supported by petroleum sector

Abstract

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) special report on Global Warming of 1.5?C presents the assessment concerning accelerated deep decarbonization, which is at the core of global mitigation strategy. The same report also presents the high agreement and robust evidence of risks in faster and deeper mitigation strategies through possible threats to multiple social and economic dimensions of sustainable development for both countries with rich hydrocarbon resources and nations with high dependency on fossil fuels for revenue, economic development and employment generation. The same concerns are also presented in literature on just transition, which are representing the arguments concerning possible job loss, loss of investment flow despite new resource identification, high risks of stranded assets, lower revenue earning with fluctuating oil and gas prices, and dwindling resources. Another set of literature on policy instruments talk of need for diversification of economy and energy sector to ease these adverse consequences of transition and need for creating enabling conditions. The diversification discourse is mostly dominated by focus on new investment opportunities limited to wind and solar energy sectors. At the same time, the countries at risk discussion get dominated by GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) countries. On the other hand, all these discourses ignore multiple challenges and realities in many small but fast emerging developing country perspectives. Therefore, this paper presents and discusses a possible energy transition roadmap, where the existing infrastructures and resources are utilized as enablers for a faster and deeper cross-sectorial decarbonization. The research question of this paper is how can accelerated global transition address the 'trio': 'just, sustainable, and peaceful' transition through cooperation with oil and gas dependent emerging economies and what is the potential for leapfrog. We refer this 'trio' with reference to oil and gas based fossil fuel energy systems, which is caught up in a complex combination of problems due to likely uncertainty and redundancy of human resource currently engaged in the sector, stranded asset due to prospective early retirement of infrastructure and projected reduction in investment, and need for finding substitute of fossil based energy carrier to cleaner, renewable energy carrier. In this way, development of hydrogen society/economy have been pointed out as possible roadmap for accelerated decarbonization, by solving the problem of affordable large scale energy storage from intermittent renewables and enabling continuous use of combustion based technologies without carbon emission. Our hypothesis is that paving the way for and realization of the future hydrogen economy can be accelerated by utilization of natural gas and petroleum-related knowledge, technologies, experience, and infrastructure. Large scale hydrogen production via conversion of existing technologies for gray hydrogen (hydrogen from natural gas without carbon capture and storage) to blue hydrogen (hydrogen from natural gas with carbon capture and storage), will create a functioning hydrogen market and support development of hydrogen based energy conversion technologies to pave the way for green hydrogen (hydrogen from renewable energy sources). This paper includes an introduction part, and then, the issue are discussed from economical, environmental, societal, and technological points of view. Finally, a comprehensive roadmap for launching a hydrogen hub (HH) for the Gulf region is proposed from a geopolitical aspect.