The recent tragic events in Ukraine have demonstrated the clear need for the EU to speed up its energy transition in order to reduce its dependency on Russian oil and gas. Vice-President of the European Commission Frans Timmermans and Commissioner Kadri Simon announced REPowerEU this week, a communication outlining measures to accomplish just that.

Environmental Defense Fund Europe welcomes the Commission’s communication and the attention given to reducing demand, ramping up the production of green energy and diversifying supplies, including the development of a ‘hydrogen accelerator.’

However, the path to decarbonisation is littered with well-intentioned missteps. For example, previous experience with the promotion of diesel and biofuels has shown us that accidental environmental headaches can be created.  We must ensure that moments of vulnerability, such as we are currently experiencing, do not make us grab at ‘magic solutions’.

Environmental Defense Fund scientists have examined the potential near-term climate warming effect of hydrogen and their research in now out in the public sphere in a discussion paper (in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics) for scientific peer review. 

Although hydrogen emits no carbon dioxide when either burned or used in a fuel cell, it has an indirect, but powerful warming effect when leaked into the atmosphere, where it increases the amounts of other greenhouse gases such as methane, ozone and water vapour. This research shows that under the right circumstances – with well-designed and managed systems that prevent leaks -- hydrogen could be part of a clean energy transition. But even with moderate levels of leakage, it could be worse for the climate in the near-term than the fossil fuels it replaces. This is why it is important to get it right from the start, especially if the intention is to transport large amounts of hydrogen from outside Europe and across Member States.

To ensure the enormous, planned investments in hydrogen projects worldwide put us on the right path for the climate, we’ve laid out some key recommendations in the paper:

• Conduct more research on hydrogen’s warming effects relative to other greenhouse gases and develop models that can increase confidence in the impacts hydrogen deployment would have on global temperatures at varying leakage rates.
• Accurately measure leakage, which will require equipment capable of measuring hydrogen concentrations at the parts-per-billion level, so we can systematically quantify leakage rates.
• Use climate metrics that reflect the role that hydrogen leakage could play over the policy-relevant near-term, instead of relying exclusively on 100-year accounting.
• Include the likelihood of hydrogen leakage and its impacts in decisions about where and how to deploy hydrogen. For example, hydrogen could be produced and used in close proximity, with limited need to transport it, as a way to prevent leaks.
• Identify leakage mitigation measures and best practices. Lessons learned about minimising methane leakage can help, despite the differences in the properties of these two gases.

We must seize this crisis as an opportunity to move faster – but to move faster in the best-informed way for both the short and long term.