### Reader’s Letter to The Guardian, 13th July 2024 ###
Dear Editor,
German press (Tagesschau, link below) announced that Germany is signing contracts for the supply of “green” hydrogen from Egypt with the plan being to import 250 thousand tonnes of “green” ammonia from next year onward. The contract has been signed with Fertiglobe, a company from the UAE, which will manufacture ammonia using wind- and solar- energy with facilities being built in Egypt.
The idea is to manufacture in a low-cost country and sell on to the highest bidder. Apparently the hydrogen will be used in gas-power-stations, primary industries (e.g. smelting) and in planes and ships.
But Germany has only one hydrogen-capable power-station (in Leipzig) and, as far as I know hydrogen planes and ships are still in the very early development phase. So where will those hundreds of thousands of tonnes of ammonia/hydrogen end up? Maybe, while waiting for demand for hydrogen to increase, that ammonia could be used as fertilizer or as an explosive … which does not bode well either for organic agriculture or for peace!
What about Egypt? Germany is making this deal with a company from the UAE as if Egypt didn’t exist. Probably the government of General Al Sisi (a dictator?) will receive fees for the use of the land and could, for example, upgrade his car-pool or buy some hi-tech tanks. To me this sounds very much like “energy-colonialism”!
The main question in my mind is what do we REALLY want to do? Surely the goal is to reduce emissions and certainly Egypt must also have a need for this power? So why not feed that energy straight into the Egyptian power-grid so that some of their (probably old and inefficient) power-stations can be closed down?
Instead we are going to convert the wind and solar power into ammonia, transport that thousands of kilometres and then re-convert into hydrogen: It sounds massively complication and also wildly energy-inefficient. And ammonia is poisonous and corrosive so what will the manufacturing processes do to the environment?
Surely, at the end of the day, it would be better to reduce some of our energy-hungry activities (e.g. flying and shipping/freighting) rather than dreaming of converting those to run on hydrogen … or some other unproven technology?
Yours,
Alan Mitcham
Hydrogen Imports: https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/energie/wasserstoff-import-liefervertrag-100.html
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