Bernabè relaunches on gas: new technology for green hydrogen

Renewables «are the first answer when it is understood that the rapidity with which CO2 is accumulating in the atmosphere will undoubtedly create unexpected consequences. At first they were off the market and subsidized, then the cost dropped. The Asia Pacific region has installed more than half of the world's renewables and thanks to the effect of scale, costs have decreased by 50% in the last five years. It was enough to increase production and improve the technology to obtain huge benefits. However, the limits are known: enormous spaces are needed and there is discontinuity in production».

It is one of the significant passages of the interview with Franco Bernabè, president of Acciaierie d'Italia (formerly Ilva), with Corriere della Sera on Tuesday 11 January. Bernabè knows the world of energy inside out, after his long experience at the head of Eni, and fixes some points as well as anticipating some news: a new gas cracking technology, capable of producing green hydrogen, without CO2 emissions.

The energy transition has started but will it be possible or not to do without hydrocarbons? “Petroleum – is the answer – will still be needed above all for chemistry. And gas is the most recent of the fossil fuels, with lower CO2 emissions and was considered until recently the source of transition for the next hundred years». The time to decisively reduce global warming is short, Bernabè acknowledges, but “natural gas has two characteristics: there is plenty of it for hundreds of years; and lends itself with a cracking process to the atomic separation of hydrogen from carbon, to produce hydrogen without emitting CO2».

It is therefore a new technology that the former Ilva is exploring together with Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia and the Milan Polytechnic. «There were some engineering problems – explains the president of Acciaierie d'Italia – but the Nobel Prize in Physics Carlo Rubbia and the researchers from the Milan Polytechnic maintain that they can be solved. Carlo Mapelli of the Milan Polytechnic, who is a director of Acciaierie d'Italia, is working on a similar technology but with a different process. The gas can be transported to steel plants, where the cracking process by pyrolysis or catalysis can take place».

All this requires investments and it will still take time but the project, states Bernabè, “may be one of the many solutions that contribute. I'm just saying that you can't think of abandoning fossil fuels, with the potential for innovation still inside. When a problem is complex, the human mind can solve it if it applies itself to it. Instead, if we approach the issue of energy transition as a war of religion, then we lose ourselves».

Bernabè believes that the closest European deadlines in the field of renewables and CO2 cannot be achieved. Hence the importance, in the field of energy, of developing a wide range of solutions without closing the doors a priori. Bernabè does not touch on the issue of nuclear power, one of the options currently being examined by the highly divisive European taxonomy (as well as the choice on hydrocarbons) so much so that the contrasts between the various countries are blocking decisions.

Chicco Testa has also intervened in recent days on the subject of energy transition with an article in the Foglio, relaunched via Twitter by Assoambiente. Testa also points out how useless and harmful ideological wars on energy are.