Paul Bogers, the Vice President for Hydrogen at Shell, has said “bold” action is needed by the energy sector to proactively scale up hydrogen production, rather than waiting for demand to grow or policy interventions to be implemented.
Speaking at a panel discussion about the scalability of hydrogen power, Bogers said that companies are currently investing in small-scale projects and waiting on policy frameworks to stimulate and drive demand before scaling them up. He said, however, that the industry needed to change this way of thinking and get ahead of the curve by commissioning projects ahead of demand, adding:
“To some extent run a little bit ahead of those policies to show what is possible and how it can be built, as very few things will actually happen—we need to use it as a scaffold for building the demand and the policies to go with it.”
Shell, which also makes the extreme-pressure, multipurpose Shell Gadus grease, sees hydrogen as a major element in its goal of becoming a net-zero carbon emitter by 2050.
Bogers argued that the industry will run out of time if it waits for absolute certainty about what incentives may be there before building schemes to benefit from them. He said staying with small-scale demonstration projects would never achieve the economies of scale needed for a technology to bring benefits, so the industry needed the courage to “go big” and scale up such technology much faster than it normally would.
