Stakeholders within the energy sector are pushing for speedy efforts toward developing a comprehensive national policy and a roadmap on hydrogen energy.
This, Executive Chairman of the GMEA Group, Charles Laba, notes will activate the needed investment and business activity relating to hydrogen country as well as accelerate the country’s national energy and climate plan.
Speaking during the Offshore Africa Energy Summit 2022, organised by Jurbert Communication Limited, in Accra he also noted this could stimulate capital spending on new infrastructure and spur sustainable economic growth and development in the post – pandemic era.
“We have to enable ourselves and be prepared for what’s coming. It’s a matter of will we be ready when this comes or will we not be. If we look back at the history of Ghana, when we discovered oil in 2008, we were not ready for it and that created a backlog of processes and procedures that did not allow us to capitalize on the oil boom earlier on than we did………………and the same story will happen with Hydrogen, if we are not ready. If legislature, processes and procedures and all the different mechanics are not in place when hydrogen comes,the story will be the same.
If we don’t have the right policies in place and we don’t welcome investors, with open arms, I am afraid we can’t afford this. The investment is going to be in billions of dollars. So we have to encourage potential investors who are interested in doing this to come with us, hold our hands and work together,” he said.
He further noted that, traditionally sourced from natural gas and coal, hydrogen, would continue to play important roles in industries that contributes highly to GDP and shifts the dynamics in the global renewable power market thereby pushing the green hydrogen to the forefront.
Globally, hydrogen plays a vital role as a storage medium that has both the highest capacity and the longest energy release time. Added benefits includes hydrogen being converted efficiently into electricity and used flexibly for domestic energy supply.
The overarching expectation is that hydrogen would play a key role in a future climate-neutral economy, enabling emission-free transport, heating and industrial processes, and aside inter-seasonal energy storage.
The Offshore Africa Energy Summit 2022 was organised by Jurbert Communication Limited, publishers of Offshore Africa – an oil and gas magazine.
It was themed: ‘Business Drivers and how they Are Shaping the Future of Energy Delivery and Investment Returns’.
