Agenda

Hydrogen is not new in the oil and gas industry and has been used for decades by the refining and petchem businesses. But as we pivot towards decarbonizing the overall industry companies are re- examining how to integrate hydrogen into traditional business models. This session will explore the new integration - its current state, what companies are doing, and lay the grounds for the impact of hydrogen on Oil and Gas.

Hydrogen can be produced through low-carbon pathways using diverse resources including fossil fuels, such as natural gas and coal, coupled with carbon capture and storage; through splitting of water using nuclear energy and renewable energy sources, such as wind, solar, geothermal, and hydro-electric power; and from biomass through biological processes. This session will explore scalable innovation to produce hydrogen economically and via net-zero emission pathways as well as offering a comparison among the various colors of hydrogen.

Tangible opportunities exist in the quest of a hydrogen economy, conditioned by range of technical, regulatory, and practical challenges to be solved. One of these being storage. Large-scale utilization of hydrogen gas as an energy carrier will require significant bulk storage capacity. BNEF (Bloomberg’s New Energy Finance) estimated in 2020 that for hydrogen to be competitive with natural gas, over 14,000 salt caverns would need to be built in order to store pressurized hydrogen, at a cost of US$637 billion. Depleted oil and gas field and saline aquifer (porous media) reservoirs are additional options for hydrogen storage but require further research and testing. Liquefying the hydrogen, or converting the hydrogen to ammonia are options to increase density (and decrease storage costs), but add processing cost, and in particular, liquefaction of hydrogen is expensive.

The Hydrogen Transport Session will present how existing gas pipeline infrastructure can be repurposed for hydrogen transportation and identify the challenges and drivers for new “hydrogen specific” transportation infrastructure. The session will address the use of hydrogen blending into existing pipelines and discuss lessons learned from European projects such as the EU Backbone. The session will visualise the future of hydrogen transportation in a low carbon, net zero economy.

This session will feature three end use directions: transportation, power generation, and industrial applications and will explore the merits of developing blue hydrogen to speed the transition to zero emission energy.

The technological advancements and lessons learned through research, development, and demonstration of hydrogen technologies within the different parts of the value chain must be integrated to work as a fully functional system and economically profitable project. The focus of this session around systems integration is to understanding the complex interactions in order to design and develop a technically sound and optimized project within the local regulatory framework. We’ll be discussing regulatory constraints and government incentives, component interdependencies such as gas composition for required end use, costs balance with hydrogen transportation vs end use, environmental and societal impacts, and system trade-offs.

This session will engage participants in analyzing what the previous sessions suggest will be the future for hydrogen depending on the level and nature of oil and gas industry participation. How will the petroleum industry invest in hydrogen generation and usage, what will be the role of current oil and gas industry infrastructure, and how else with our industry utilize hydrogen as an energy resource and a product?