Europe has done a big step towards large-scale green hydrogen production and use, many questions are still open on the final use of green hydrogen, will it simply replace grey hydrogen for the industry or will it replace the fossil fuels for the stationary and transportation?

In any case, a big question is up here in the air. If the green hydrogen will be produced on mass-scale with a economical price (below $2/kg), how shall we manage the green hydrogen in terms of transportation and distribution? An easy answer will be to create hydrogen islands, where the renewable electricity excess will produce green hydrogen through electrolysis. However, this vision does not match the flexibility that any energy grid needs and there’s no economical technology to store the hydrogen (natural salty caves are not everywhere).

So, the green hydrogen needs to be transported from point of excess production to point of consumption, like electricity or natural gas. The cost of such infrastructure is huge, specially when such a hydrogen distribution will come at the time that our societies still need to maintain a high quality natural gas and electricity grid.

So what to do?

Here comes the idea of blending hydrogen with natural gas to transport it, not specifically to burn it but also to deblend it at destination and use it as pure green hydrogen. This blending process has proven to be efficient until 20% green hydrogen blended in the natural gas, which is more than enough at least for the next decade.

So what is needed to make it happen?

Blending is straightforward and deblending is effective and cost-effective. The lacking link is the ability to monitor the pipelines and to bring safety and online knowledge on the blend chemical composition (percentage of hydrogen, methane… in the blend)