2023-09-25 11:41:31
“Coal is of course part of the history of Essen, but today Essen is much more than that! » Markus Pliessnig, communications director at the Essen Economic Development Corporation (EWG), wants to break preconceived ideas about his city which, until 1986, was home to one of the largest coal mines in the Ruhr and has long been the headquarters of the ThyssenKrupp metallurgical group.
This city of 580,000 inhabitants is now banking on a new El Dorado: green hydrogen, which could make it possible to decarbonize the powerful German industry and part of transport, buses and heavy goods vehicles. Berlin has made it one of the pillars of the country’s energy transition, with a national strategy launched in 2020.
Faced with this very young rush towards hydrogen, the city of Essen has cards to play. Two of Germany’s largest energy companies, E. on and RWE, have their headquarters there, not to mention 250 small and medium-sized energy companies and numerous logistics companies.
Public transport and industries
Concretely, the city plans to switch to hydrogen its entire fleet of urban buses within ten years. The first vehicles should enter service this year 2023, powered by local electrolysers, before completing, in stages, the supply for 300 buses.
At the industrial level too, pilot projects are being implemented at the metallurgist ThyssenKrupp, the glassmaker Verallia and the aluminum foundry Trimet. The latter plans to start supplying its Gelsenkirchen recycling plant with hydrogen from this September.
The energy supplier E. is also in the running with around fifty employees involved and projects in the test phase, notably in a refinery. “The war in Ukraine accelerated the process,” admits Carsten Borchers, managing director of E. on Hydrogen, at its premises in Essen. “It has long been seen as a niche, long underestimated, but its potential is immense. Things change “, he admits.
“Young and promising market”
Small businesses also feel the wind pushing them in this direction. In the aisles of the E-world exhibition, dedicated to energy and organized in May 2023 in Essen, an entire hall is devoted to hydrogen. “The economic outlook is very good,” notes Martin Wilhelm, co-founder of the company Kretotec, also based in Essen, and which has been offering electronic solutions adapted to hydrogen for a year.
“It’s a very young but very promising market in which we wanted to position ourselves as soon as possible,” he explains in front of his stand. “Essen and the Ruhr are ideal for getting started because there are companies specializing in energy, transport and higher education centers there. A perfect situation, therefore, to find customers and qualified staff,” adds this boss of six employees.
Specialized incubator and transport infrastructure
On the other hand, start-ups have more difficulty integrating into this market while they are still forming. Hence the recent creation of an incubator, H2UB, the first of its kind at European level. “This market is clearly driven by policies that want to decarbonize the economy,” recalls its leader Uwe Kerkmann. “It is not yet economically mature. This is a real challenge for start-ups who struggle to find partners willing to wait for the market to develop and become profitable. We are here to help them,” he notes.
It is also in Essen that part of the future transport by pipeline of the immense quantity of hydrogen that Germany will eventually need (110 TWh by 2030) is being prepared, 80% of which should be imported. , from Norway, Australia and even Chile. The gas transmission network operator Open Grid Europe (OGE) is already in the running with its “Hercules” project. It plans to transform 60% of the 12,000 kilometers of its current gas network and build 40% new pipelines by 2030 to supply western Germany with hydrogen. All that remains for the government to do is approve, by the end of the year, the regulatory framework for the machine to get underway.
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