Thursday 22 February 2018

Shell: Hydrogen can play vital role as energy storage medium

 

Hydrogen can play a very important role in the long duration storage of energy.

That’s the view of Mark Gainsborough, Executive Vice President of New Energies at Shell, who said the company is looking at hydrogen's application as a transportation fuel and also exploring how power to hydrogen value chain could be used in the future.

He believes a cleaner energy future is “both desirable and possible” as the world needs to go through a major energy transition - the energy giant has aimed to reduce its net carbon footprint of the products it sells to customers.

Speaking to ELN at IP Week in London yesterday, he said: “Hydrogen has an important role to play in the energy system in the future, both as a fuel for transportation and we see it being used in fuel cell electric vehicles but we also see longer term, that hydrogen could have an important role in the power to liquids.

“You could imagine a world in the future where you have times of day when you have very cheap renewable power on the system and a smart thing to do with that, especially if you’ve got an excess of power at certain times of the day, a smart thing to do could be to convert it into hydrogen through an electrolyser and then have that hydrogen available to use at another time when you’ve got less renewable power on the grid. So, we can see this role for hydrogen as an energy carrier and as an energy storage medium.”