Hydrogen, Santa Claus of the French industry?

2024-03-21 07:30:59

If France has made hydrogen a pillar of its energy transition, the government is also counting on this small molecule to support reindustrialization and the relocation of jobs in France.

As a reminder, France has implemented, through the France 2030 investment program, an ambitious strategy around hydrogen. The plan makes it, among other things, a pillar of the ongoing energy transition. Thus, France 2030 has seen numerous investment projects, spread across the entire hydrogen value chain, receive financial support within France. At the European level, the PIIEC hydrogen has also made it possible, through the financing of 41 projects for more than 54 billion eurosto accelerate the continental strategy around hydrogen.

In France, the IPCEI Hydrogen makes it possible to accelerate and financially support around ten projects, with more than two billion euros in subsidies, in addition to 3.2 billion previously announced.

The objective, at the French level, is to develop a hydrogen sector, across the entire value chain of the molecule, which should make France one – the? – world leader in hydrogen technologies. To do this, the financing of the construction of four gigafactories of electrolysers, production sites of hydrogen tanks, fuel cells, but also of trains and hydrogen utility vehicles has already been initiated, strategies are also set up to source the materials necessary for the production of all this equipment.

More concretely, the French hydrogen strategy aims to develop know-how and competitiveness in electrolysis, which makes it possible to produce hydrogen from renewable electricity, whereas the latter is currently mainly produced by steam reforming, a CO2 emitting process. The production of hydrogen by electrolysis, using nuclear electricity, that is to say carbon-free, would allow the French industry to produce green hydrogen. It is for this reason, among other things, that the relaunch of French nuclear power is vital for France, both to be in the lead in terms of renewable electricity production, and to produce carbon-free hydrogen, a necessary condition for generalization. of its uses.

As we can see, the French strategy is ambitious, and above all interdependent. This is as much a strength as a weakness: The technological synergies currently being deployed must make it possible to implement an intelligent and resilient energy production, storage and distribution system, which supplies a transport industry. powered by renewable electricity and hydrogen… Attractive on paper, this ambition has as its Achilles tendon the necessary simultaneous success of the technological challenges currently underway.

At the end of 2023, a consultation was launched to review the hydrogen strategy established in 2020 and adapt it, with the aim of making hydrogen one of the keys to the decarbonization of the French but also European economy. The adaptation of this strategy, the exact contours of which will be known in the coming weeks, must support the industrial deployments already underway, creating direct jobs: 100,000 according to the government.

Mentioned in the plan published in 2020, support for research, innovation and skills development on hydrogen is, beyond support for projects via the PIIEC, the keystone of success , in the medium and long term, the deployment of a value chain on the hydrogen molecule that is efficient and competitive at the French level.

It goes without saying that this French success will also be a success, if it happens, at the continental level.

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