Energy System Interdependency

The interdependencies – either positive or negative feedback – provide insight into how the sketched pathways affect each other. One example is that the production of green molecules from the North Sea region would require a faster development of offshore wind to ensure enough electricity is available for electrolysis.

Blue hydrogen production requires natural gas and a CO₂ transport storage network. But strategies for reducing import dependency may limit the import of natural gas for the production of blue hydrogen. This could result in blue hydrogen only being produced from local sources of methane. Another dependency is that the CO₂ transport and storage infrastructure may re-use certain offshore hydrocarbon assets (pipelines, platforms, wells and reservoirs) for the transport and storage of CO₂. This requires these assets to be available for this purpose and that the natural gas production has ceased. This again could be competing with offshore hydrogen that may want to re-use the same assets for hydrogen production, transport and storage.

Green and blue hydrogen could compete for offshore assets and for offtake in the hydrogen market (also with the import of low carbon hydrogen), but also provide strong synergies as the production profiles and price setting behaviour for the commodities is much different. Together they can provide security of hydrogen supply for demand sectors and provide the volume needed to develop markets and infrastructure efficiently. The figure describes more examples on how the various commodities relate to each other, and how they affect pathways for these commodities.