Year 2050 hydrogen business exceeds 2 trillion euros: Bank of America reveals who will be the winners and losers of the sector - Hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, has long attracted attention as a tool to help countries and businesses decarbonize, although many of its benefits have not yet materialized.
Almost all hydrogen is still made from fossil fuels. Vehicles with hydrogen fuel cells, which do not generate emissions, represent only a fraction of the transport sector.
But analysts at Bank of America say that's about to change.
"We believe we are reaching a point of leveraging the item at 90%, effectively and economically," according to a report by the bank.
The hydrogen economy is on track to generate 2.13 trillion euros by 2050, according to the bank, which quotes the Industrial Group Hydrogen Council. Indirect investment in total infrastructure, including fuel cell equipment, could amount to EUR 9.37 trillion for the same year.
The report draws attention to 'green hydrogen', which is produced using renewable energy, which will become a major global market.
99% of the hydrogen gas is made using fossil fuels, in a process known as methane vapor reform, which generates carbon emissions. So while hydrogen is commonly used in heavy industries, such as oil refining and chemical manufacturing, most of it is not considered " clean."
Year 2050 hydrogen business exceeds 2 trillion euros
Hydrogen gas can also be produced by electrolysis - dropping water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. If the energy that feeds that reaction is renewable, then it is green hydrogen.
The high costs of renewable energy has long been an obstacle to the generation of affordable green hydrogen.
In the report, analysts at Bank of America say that the rapid fall in clean energy costs is one of the 3 factors that have driven hydrogen. Over the past 5 years, the cost of renewables and electrolyzers has halved and is expected to fall again between 60% and 90% by the end of the decade.
Improvements in fuel cell technologies and electrolyzers are also making hydrogen grow, due to international attention to decarbonization, according to the bank.
Companies involved in the development of clean energy, such as solar, as well as renewable infrastructure, are the ones who will benefit most from the hydrogen boom, according to Bank of America.
Gas and electricity companies are also well positioned to benefit from hydrogen growth. Gas, for example, can adapt their networks to transport a mixture of hydrogen and natural gas, a cleaner combination that can be used to heat homes. Companies that produce electrolyzers, fuel cells and industrial gases will also benefit.
Instead, companies that extract oil, gas and coal are expected to suffer a drop in demand for their products, according to the bank. Large integrated oil companies, such as BP and Shell, could take advantage of the rise in demand for hydrogen by generating gas through electrolysis and selling it to stations.
End of Year 2050 hydrogen business exceeds 2 trillion euros
More news:
All that should improve the Spanish RadarCOVID app to succeed: tracking apps in Ireland, Switzerland or the UK are more transparent or have gotten more downloads
RadarCOVID, the application of the Spanish government that aims to help in the tracing of contacts to stop the coronavirus, already has its technology integrated with the health systems of all the autonomous communities. At the time these lines are written, only Madrid and Barcelona still do not issue the codes with which the infected COVID-19 will be able to report their positive on the platform and thus warn their close contacts that they have been exposed to a contagion.
The app began its nationwide deployment at the end of August. It's been a month and a few days since citizens from all over the country were able to check if this app actually works at all. The reality today is that few can say that they have received any notification from the application that has warned them that they may have been exposed to a contagion.
Several Andalusian medical unions warned Business Insider Spain how in the autonomous community of the South peninsular, for the moment, are delivering the codes to report positive COVID-19 unevenly. While there are health centers that have received the relevant instructions for doctors and health personnel to distribute these codes, in other outpatient clinics they have only learned of the existence of the platform through the media.
The app is available on Google Play, the App Store for Android, and in the App Store, its counterpart for iOS devices-iPhone -. However, neither of these platforms give too much detail about the number of downloads that RadarCOVID has. The State Secretariat for digitalization and Artificial intelligence is the body that oversees the development and operation of the app, and reports to the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation.
In recent days several users have regretted the lack of information and concrete on the effectiveness of the application. A report by AlgorithmWatch, a European Organization, detailed a few weeks ago that there is no human way to ascertain whether these applications serve to curb the coronavirus pandemic. Some researchers have pointed out that if cases of exposure to COVID-19 are reported to asymptomatic individuals, levels of virus spread may fall. All this depends on the number of citizens who download and use the app well.
But the lack of information or the possibility that there are not enough Spaniards using the application are easily salvageable circumstances. This is demonstrated by the similar applications of RadarCOVID for Ireland, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
COVIDTracker is the RadarCOVID of Ireland. SwissCovid is the Swiss counterpart. Both applications work exactly the same as the Spanish one: the mechanism that follows is a protocol developed by Apple and Google during the first steps of the pandemic. Both technologies announced that their API-their protocol-was ready at the end of May.
Until then the best positioned protocol was to be used by European governments is the DP-3T, a development in which several European researchers had worked among which was the Spanish Carmela Troncoso, of the Polytechnic School of Lausanne, in Switzerland.
Both the DP-3T and the Apple and Google development work in a similar way: phones with apps enabled send random, anonymized codes to nearby phones using a low-power Bluetooth protocol. In this way, devices make a history of the devices they have been close to. If a person indicates that they have been infected with COVID-19, the phones they crossed over in the last two weeks will receive an alert.
Both COVIDTracker and SwissCovid show in the user interface of their applications the number of active users within their respective platforms, as indicated by several users on social networks.
In both cases, there are even graphs showing the number of COVID-19 positives that have been confirmed on the platform and the number of close contacts that have been alerted thanks to it. There are statistics of how many positive codes have been confirmed and how many transmissions have been warned even daily.
Apparently, the RadarCOVID code allows you to do the same. But he's not.
One of the main concerns that were considered during the development of contact tracking technology was the possibility that its use would be mandatory. The European Commission framework already agreed in mid-April that apps would have to be mandatory.
However, countries such as France made an effort to provide the app with the maximum legal guarantees, and the application was the subject of parliamentary debate. Here it is necessary to note that the French application does not use the protocol of Apple and Google, but one that centralizes the management of contacts on a single server of which the Welsh Government owns, and that implies, for many experts, the possibility that the guarantees of privacy and anonymity of citizens are less.
In the UK— which is no longer part of the European Union-they launched a first version of the app, NHS COVID-19 App, which opted for the centralized model like the French one. Now, UK has announced the release of a new version of its app that, this time yes, uses the protocol designed by Apple and Google.
But in the event that the transmission of codes via Bluetooth leads to failures, the British government has chosen to integrate a functionality in its tracking application that is currently unique throughout the Old Continent. British public establishments have a legal obligation to place a QR code on the windows of their businesses or administrations.
In this way, all citizens who use the app to access public establishments will be able to use their app to 'register' in the same. Thus, if a bar or administration has to roll the blind because an outbreak of COVID-19 has been detected, citizens who have been to it will also receive an alarm on their phones.