Hydrogen is the “new gas”

"Chancellor Scholz is working on a hydrogen alliance with Tokyo. While Germany is still discussing its environmental friendliness, the Japanese are already getting down to business.

The fascination of Japan as a country of hydrogen technology is unbroken in Germany. By special request, Olaf Scholz will visit a company that has something to do with hydrogen during his short visit to Japan on Friday. 

Chiyoda in Yokohama, with the support of the Japanese government, has developed and tested a technique with which hydrogen can be transported across the world's oceans to Japan. Sometime around 2030 and beyond, the company wants to use the technology commercially. But the signal that Scholz is sending with the visit is clear: Germany wants to work with Japan on hydrogen.

A new global business needs to be developed, enthuses Scholz in Tokyo in order to achieve the ambitious climate protection goals of both countries. Hydrogen is the new gas. 

The real energy transition consists in converting the industry with its large consumption to the environmentally friendly hydrogen.

 Japan's Prime Minister Fumio Kishida stands by at the press conference and listens attentively. He says nothing about hydrogen.

Open markets

A global business requires open markets. Scholz uses the opportunity in Tokyo to warn against de-globalization. "For the first time since the 1930s and 1940s, the extent of economic openness and international networking has been declining in an empirically measurable manner," said the Chancellor in front of the Chamber of Foreign Trade. Free trade, fair competition and open markets cannot be taken for granted. "We have to be careful that this does not result in decoupling and no pretext for protectionism," says Scholz. At Kishida he is running into open doors.

Japan and Germany are resource-poor countries that are dependent on imported energy. This parallelism is emphasized in government circles in Tokyo, in order to then justify why Tokyo and Berlin support the sanctions against Russia, but shy away from a quick abandonment of gas and oil from Russia. 

The apparent harmony hides fault lines. 

While Germany is considering giving up Russian oil and gas in the medium term, Japan is not thinking of withdrawing from three oil and gas production facilities on Sakhalin and in the Russian Arctic. To protect the energy supply, but also for geopolitical reasons, the government does not want the plants to fall into Chinese hands. And while Scholz affirms that Germany wants to do without Russian coal by the fall, Kishida dodges the journalists' question about a timetable for Japan.

Flexible energy policy

In general, Japan takes a more flexible approach to energy policy than Germany. After the triple meltdown in the Japanese power plant Fukushima Daiichi in 2011, the federal government of Germany decided to phase out nuclear energy. But Japan's government is sticking to nuclear power. The population's resistance to nuclear power is now dwindling. For the first time in more than ten years, a majority of 53 percent in a survey by the business newspaper Nikkei advocates restarting decommissioned nuclear power plants as long as it is safe to do so. 38 percent opposed it.

Kishida said this week that the country needs to reconsider nuclear power amid rising energy prices and the weak yen. Since the nuclear accident, Japan has put ten or around a third of the reactors that are in principle operational back on line. "To reduce our dependency on foreign countries in the energy sector, the use of nuclear energy, a quasi-domestic energy source, is essential for us," said the vice chairman of the powerful Keidanren trade association, Toshiaki Higashihara, in welcoming Scholz.

Japan also thinks pragmatically when it comes to hydrogen. While Germany is discussing the colors of hydrogen and its environmental friendliness, Japan is getting down to business. The country has just had “brown” hydrogen from Australia, frozen to minus 253 degrees, shipped to Japan on a ship to demonstrate this transport technology as a global premiere. 

Green hydrogen could later also be transported in this way. Kawasaki Heavy Industries, one of the leading companies in the project, wants to build on the pilots to develop a hydrogen supply chain after 2030. Chiyoda in Yokohama treats the hydrogen with a solvent so that it can be stored or transported in liquid form at normal pressure conditions.

Cooperation with ports in South Asia and Europe

In 2020, for example, the company brought hydrogen from Brunei Darussalam to Japan by ship for a test. Chiyoda already has partnerships with the Port of Rotterdam. But the costs are still too high to commercialize the technology.

The pilot projects on transportation stand out from a plethora of hydrogen projects in Japan. Government and companies are producing green hydrogen near the nuclear ruins of Fukushima or are testing hydrogen-powered forklifts and trains. Years ago, Japan was the first country to set up a national hydrogen strategy. But even in 2030, only 1 percent of electricity should come from hydrogen. Only then will the energy source be used on a large scale, according to the Ministry of Industry. 

The country knows how quickly hydrogen dreams can fly out of the window. The government once wanted 40,000 fuel cars on the roads for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. But Toyota has only sold 6,500 of the Mirai hydrogen car in Japan and 18,700 globally, mostly in North America. The number in Germany is so small that Toyota does not name it."