EU's Timmermans Sees Opportunity In Cooperation With Russia On Blue Hydrogen

MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 01st December, 2020) The European Union's Green Deal chief, Frans Timmermans, said Tuesday that the bloc was open to working with Russia on a technology that captures CO2 emissions to produce "blue" hydrogen.

The method aims at cutting greenhouse gas emissions during the industrial production of gas and is seen by the EU as a path toward making "green" hydrogen from water using renewable energy and electrolyzers, in line with its plan of going carbon-neutral by 2050.

"Of course, what we aim for is green hydrogen produced by renewable energy, but blue hydrogen which is produced with decarbonized natural gas is also an important element in the transition. I do believe this will be an interesting option to further explore in the bilateral relationship between the EU and Russia," Timmermans said.

The European commission vice president inaugurated a three-day EU-Russia climate conference on Tuesday. He said energy transition will be of "extreme importance" in their ties as Russia too saw hydrogen as an "interesting option," knowing that electricity was not a one-size-fits-all solution.

Speaking on the coronavirus, Timmermans said the EU would not only go ahead with the Green Deal plan but counted on it to boost the pandemic-hit economy by pushing it into the next phase.

"We discovered that the Green Deal is not only an answer to the climate crisis but it's also the strategy we can use to recover from COVID crisis and because we are not just faced with the climate crisis and a biodiversity crisis, we are also faced with an industrial revolution that will demand our economy to move to the next phase anyway. So we decided to pursue the Green Deal as our growth strategy," he explained.

The European Parliament reached an agreement with the EU member-states in November to approve the largest stimulus package of 1.8 trillion Euros ($2.2 trillion) to boost the union's recovery from coronavirus pandemic.