How Hydrogen Energy Plays a Key Role in Canada's Clean Energy Transition

Stantec’s Role in Hydrogen Technologies

Rachel: What does Stantec do and what is its role in pure hydrogen?

Pietro: Stantec is a global engineering and advisory company. Our role in hydrogen is to provide expertise in manageable chunks. When looking at the value chain of hydrogen, you're looking at five or six manageable sections, and we can provide expertise on the factor inputs, whether electricity or water. We can help with the technology selection to make hydrogen. We can also help out with the compression, handling, storage and distribution.

Finally, if hydrogen projects involve fueling cars or trucks, we could help at that station. In the advisory section we provide, we've done projects where we've helped countries look at how they will produce hydrogen. We've helped companies think about which markets they want to get into.

Why Hydrogen is Gaining Visibility

Rachel: Why would you say hydrogen is getting such visibility these days?

Pietro: I think everybody's becoming quite aware of the effects of our lifestyles and the emissions of CO2. Governments have made promises to their people and to the governments of other countries that we need to reduce the amount of CO2 emitted.

If you're producing green hydrogen, when you combust that, or when you use that hydrogen, you're not emitting CO2. That's why I think there's that interest. They want to be part of this solution.

The Three Major Hydrogen Production Processes

Rachel: Are there different types of hydrogen manufacturing processes? And if so, why are these important?

Pietro: That's a good question. Many people think hydrogen is just hydrogen, but you can make hydrogen in many different ways. They've been labelled gray, blue and green, just so the technology and the concepts become accessible to people.

Gray hydrogen is when you're using global natural gas. It's essentially the most common way of doing hydrogen right now. 95% of all the hydrogen in the world is produced through either gray processes using natural gas or coal, where the carbon dioxide emitted through the process isn't captured. Meaning it's emitted into the atmosphere.

Blue hydrogen is taking low carbon dioxide from that process and sequestering it.

In many ways, a lot of people would consider green hydrogen production the best hydrogen because it's produced from electrolysis and not from fossil fuels. You're using water and electricity, and you're not emitting CO2 when making it.

The differences are that gray hydrogen has cheap production costs. Blue hydrogen is a bit more expensive but significantly cheaper than green hydrogen. Green hydrogen is the most expensive. So it's important that we make those decisions. What is the best possible solution for a project for a region and a government to promote?

How Canada Can Speed up the Hydrogen Energy Transition

Rachel: What markets do you think will open up first for this and why? Also, how do you think Canada can speed up the adoption process on this?

Pietro: I think the most visible market right now is the market for trucks and cars because electric vehicles affect people personally. They could see the investments that have to be made. The industries themselves will make those investments to meet their own corporate, government, or other targets they want to set for themselves that people typically do not see.

The Role of Hydrogen Renewable Energy in the Global Energy Transition

Rachel: In your opinion, Pietro, what is hydrogen's role in the global energy transition? How can it help Canada reach its 2050 net-zero emissions targets?

Pietro: Society has to look at ways to adopt a better or different style of living. If you look at Canada's strategy to meet the CO2 targets, it does so through different parts of the economy. And it looks at ways to reduce fossil fuels.

How can we do something without the use of fossil fuels? That's just the first thing we should do. Then, we are looking at how we improve the efficiency of what we already do.

The third thing that everybody's looking at is electrification. Can we exchange oil for electricity and can we produce that electricity cleanly?

Finally, hydrogen comes and cuts across all of these. You can put hydrogen in many different ways and industries to meet the three things I've mentioned before. So hydrogen's got a long way to go, and it could bring us a long way into meeting the targets.

Learn More About Hydrogen's Role in The Energy Transition

As countries around the world aim to decarbonize the global energy system, hydrogen deployment and the Canadian hydrogen industry is more important than ever. With the help of companies like Stantec, we can combat various critical energy challenges and support clean hydrogen production. 

If you're interested in learning more about topics like the national hydrogen strategy from those actively changing the game in North America's energy sector, register for the next Global Energy Show today.