Green hydrogen is set to play a major part of the climate transition, but large-scale hydrogen production requires sustainable ways of managing water resources to avoid giving rise to water shortages and conflicts with agriculture over access.

A study from Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, published in Nature Sustainability, has considered a range of scenarios and how Europe’s hydrogen production might affect water resources, electricity prices and land use in 2050.

“Water is a resource that is often taken for granted in the energy transition. Our study is unique because we have connected the local perspective to the European perspective. We can show that even if hydrogen production does not require very much water in total compared to say agriculture, the local effects can be significant,” commented Joel Löfving, doctoral student at the Division of Transport, Energy and Environment at Chalmers.

The study analysed over 700 local water sub-basins in Europe, finding that in southern and central Europe, where favourable conditions for generating electricity with solar and wind power make green hydrogen production particularly attractive, access to water is estimated to be very limited by 2050, as local water resources are already under strain and vulnerable to climate change. Major industry clusters in Spain, Germany, France and the Netherlands, for example, could thus face a conflict with agriculture, for example, over water resources.

In addition to water use, the researchers studied how a large-scale hydrogen economy could affect Europe’s electricity prices. By plugging the hydrogen model into Chalmers’ Multinode model they were able to estimate changes in electricity prices between different regions.

The results show that electricity demand increases significantly in line with the amount of hydrogen produced, since it takes a lot of electricity to replace the energy in fossil fuels. Despite this, the results show that the impact on average electricity prices in Europe is relatively small. In regions with good access to renewable energy sources, such as northern Europe, the price impact is the smallest. In southern Europe, where some regions are dependent on a higher proportion of electricity from gas or nuclear power, for example, bigger price increases were seen.

Therefore, water, rather than energy, remains the major issue with green hydrogen, possibly limiting its use as a mechanism for transporting energy, especially as water usage is affected by population growth, climate change and increased agricultural use.

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