Green hydrogen: politics is missing out on future technology

Mr. Taneja, when you think of your company, most people think of tires, rubber and Bibendum, the Michelin man. How did you come to the future technology hydrogen?

The situation at Michelin is different from that of suppliers who are under pressure from the transformation in the automotive industry. Our core products are tires, and they are also needed with increasing electrification. In fact, the demands on the tires in electric vehicles are actually increasing due to the high acceleration performance.

Michelin has never been a pure supplier to the automotive industry. We are much broader. The tires are of course known to the general public. But we are also represented in the areas of 3D metal printing, medical technology and conveyor belts. We started selling tickets over a hundred years ago. And then there is also the gastronomy with the Michelin Guide. We thought about where we can continue to grow. Where do we have experience? And that includes the fuel cell.

Fuel cells and hydrogen are a building block for the mobility of the future. Both are also strongly emotionally charged. For the consumer, however, this is a very airy vision: There is hardly a vehicle on the market.

We founded the Symbio joint venture with Faurecia. We want to achieve a market share of 12 percent worldwide and a turnover of 1.5 billion euros by 2030. We are currently building hundreds of fuel cells per year with Symbio and we will open another plant. Series production there will begin in 2023. These are our business goals and of course we want to make a contribution to climate-neutral mobility. That is possible with the fuel cell.

The end of the classic combustion engine is sealed, we are currently experiencing a strong push in e-vehicles. The ranges are right for most customers and the prices are now also where is there still room for the fuel cell?

It’s such a black and white discussion. We don’t see it that way. We are convinced that the fuel cell will complement e-mobility. There will be both, because both systems cannot work on their own. When I look at how much water is needed in battery production to break down the lithium salts, I know that this is not sustainable and cannot work in the long term. What is the performance of the German electricity grid today? If you calculate what happens when everyone connects their vehicle to the charging station after work in the evening, you see that electricity alone will not work. If only one million people want to charge their vehicle at the same time after work, then they need around 350 gigawatts. As of today, the entire German power grid does not offer sufficient power for this.

There you have a point. In fact, it is rather unlikely that enough lithium can be funded for the mobility transition.

In traffic this is not an “either or”. One can easily imagine battery-powered electromobility in many areas of the car, but less so in the case of large trucks, long-distance traffic and heavy goods vehicle traffic. And it will work fine in the end if we take both opportunities. To say that we are only relying on one technology and that we are only expanding an infrastructure will not work, neither with hydrogen nor with electricity. We would have achieved a lot if politics understood that.

You say that, technically speaking, the problems of the fuel cell have been solved. But for the customer, the density of “filling stations” is also crucial if he wants to get around in his hydrogen vehicle. but Little is happening in terms of hydrogen infrastructure.

For both fuel cells and electromobility, we need framework conditions that can only be created by politics. And that’s happening too slowly. Too few conditions are being created to enable the industry to get the kind of approaches we have on the road in reality. But if we don’t get started now, we will miss the climate targets. At the end we have a discussion where the industry says: “We would have been able to do it if the framework had been there.” The citizen doesn’t really understand why we’ve been talking for ten years, but so little has happened.

For climate-neutral mobility, we need the entire cycle: the production of green hydrogen, a flat system of filling stations and then the vehicles. At the moment it doesn’t exist, when can you expect it?

The Federal Ministry of Research is working on various projects for the production of sustainable hydrogen. Once in North Africa and then in Australia. That is certainly a good thing, but you can also produce green hydrogen in the EU. The EU has said that by 2030 we will be producing up to 10 million tons of renewable hydrogen in Europe. We rely on this and then take the responsibility to say that if these framework conditions are created by the European Union, then industry must invest now and take this step so that we can achieve climate-neutral mobility.

But at the moment we are seeing the same signs as with the topic of electromobility ten years ago, where major commitments are being made. But when it really comes down to implementation, everything sinks into a bureaucratic swamp. But climate change is urgent and if the 2030 climate targets are to be met, then it has to stop, otherwise we will not be able to successfully transform mobility in Germany and the EU. Business and politics have to talk to each other and we now have to agree on the things that will then be dealt with in the next few years. If we don’t get the topic off the ground today, we’ll miss out on a huge opportunity.

And what does that mean? They think the world does not wait just because our mills are grinding slowly.

If the right framework is not created here, companies will be forced to relocate jobs from the European Union and, above all, from Germany. In international competition, production will migrate to the markets. But we want to build up production capacities in Europe.

Regardless of politics, the fuel cell has the reputation of being an eternal bearer of hope. A favorite project of engineers. Field tests have been going on for years, but fuel cells almost never make it into series production.

Clear statement: The technology is so advanced and with Symbio we are currently already producing fuel cells for smaller fleets in a pilot plant. So we’re already producing, that’s no longer the status of research and prototypes. And we want to go into mass production as quickly as possible in order to reduce manufacturing costs to a tenth by 2030. We are successful in the market. We are currently working with the public sector and the Engie Group to expand a hydrogen network around the planned Symbio plant near Lyon to show how this can work – the Zero Emission Valley. We are happy to share these findings and consider how you can do something like this in other regions.

You can be skeptical about costs and series production, but you have to admit that no one denies hydrogen as an advantage. You can call it “green” produce and it stores regenerative energy for a long time.

Exactly, renewable energies can be very powerful. We can already see that today. Power that is not used immediately. And for this reason it is very important that we develop a technology that really stores this energy and can hold it for a long time, and hydrogen can do that very well. And this green energy can then in turn be used by the fuel cell. This specifically relieves the power grid and really solves the problem of fluctuations in energy generation. For countries in Europe, the combination of renewable energy and green hydrogen offers the further advantage that the entire value chain can take place in Europe.

This is a great promise: The euros that we are now transferring to Putin for gas and sheikhs for oil remain in the Union. That sounds tempting, what’s the problem?

If you want more vehicles to run on hydrogen around 2030, then you have to start really slowly now. These things have a different lead time than the election rhythm. I say we don’t have a choice. There are two damn good reasons why politicians must make bold decisions now. The first are the people who are at work here today. They need jobs and we need jobs for our prosperity in Europe. And if we don’t make these decisions, then these industries and jobs will migrate. And we have to prevent that with all our might. Especially for Europe and not necessarily for industry. And the second point is, if we don’t make bold decisions now, our children will pay the price. Climate change is a reality and is not waiting. I have four children. I don’t feel like explaining to them later why we missed the chance. But for that we really need a different policy than we have seen in the past ten years. I take the liberty of saying that here.

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