The climate protection goals are most efficiently achieved with renewable electricity and green gases, especially hydrogen because it is carbon-free and can be used in all areas: households, small commercial enterprises, industry, transport, power generation and for the storage of renewable electricity. We at OGE are working to create a Germany-wide hydrogen network and have already launched the first few projects to plan and trial sustainable solutions.
For the energy transition to be successful, CO2-containing energy sources such as coal will have to be replaced by carbon-free sources. Hydrogen has a key role to play here. It enables the decarbonisation of a wide range of customer segments and also allows the seasonal storage of renewable electricity.
Our existing natural gas pipelines will be key on the way towards achieving climate neutrality. They already connect sources of supply with large energy consumers and storage facilities and can be gradually converted to hydrogen. Manageable conversion and newbuild projects will help make existing infrastructure available as cost-effectively and as quickly as possible.
We are looking to establish a Germany-wide, publicly accessible hydrogen network. The idea is to create a hydrogen market with a large number of suppliers and demanders. To this end, we are participating in hydrogen projects together with important industrial partners and are taking the first steps towards putting this vision into practice.
The GET H2 partners BP, Evonik, Nowega, OGE and RWE Generation want to jointly build the first publicly accessible hydrogen infrastructure. The GET H2 Nucleus project combines the production of green hydrogen with industrial customers in Lower Saxony and NRW. The approximately 130-kilometer network from Lingen to Gelsenkirchen will be the first H2 network in the regulated area with non-discriminatory access and transparent prices.
This project is about creating a regional hydrogen network on the basis of a 30 MW electrolysis plant connected to the grid of a municipal utility. The end-to-end hydrogen value chain will include industrial customers, a hydrogen filling station and end users supplied by the municipal utility.
With this project we want to create a supra-regional hydrogen network that is available to hydrogen customers from southern Lower Saxony to North Rhine-Westphalia. In the Hybridge project, the electrolyser will be built by grid operator Amprion to make use of surplus renewable electricity.
This project will produce hydrogen from natural gas. The CO2 generated in this process will be captured and safely stored in Norway. It will involve building a reformer with a capacity of 1 GW to produce large quantities of so-called "blue hydrogen" on a continuous basis regardless of the weather at comparatively low cost. The quantities are large enough to warrant the conversion of existing natural gas pipelines to hydrogen and then gradually establish a Germany-wide infrastructure. The project will pave the way for the German hydrogen economy.
