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De Blasio, Nicola

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De Blasio, Nicola

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2020 - 202419

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    Geopolitical and Market Implications of Renewable Hydrogen: New Dependencies in a Low-Carbon Energy World
    (Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, 2020-03) De Blasio, Nicola; Pflugmann, Fridolin
    To accelerate the global transition to a low-carbon economy, all energy systems and sectors must be actively decarbonized. While hydrogen has been a staple in the energy and chemical industries for decades, renewable hydrogen is drawing increased attention today as a versatile and sustainable energy carrier with the potential to play an important piece in the carbon-free energy puzzle. Countries around the world are piloting new projects and policies, yet adopting hydrogen at scale will require innovating along the value chains; scaling technologies while significantly reducing costs; deploying enabling infrastructure; and defining appropriate national and international policies and market structures. What are the general principles of how renewable hydrogen may reshape the structure of global energy markets? What are the likely geopolitical consequences such changes would cause? A deeper understanding of these nascent dynamics will allow policy makers and corporate investors to better navigate the challenges and maximize the opportunities that decarbonization will bring, without falling into the inefficient behaviors of the past.
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    Deploying Energy Innovation at Scale for a Low-Carbon Economy: The Private Sector Role - ENGIE
    (Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, 2020-09) De Blasio, Nicola; Krishnamoorthy, Shankar; Kapadia, Zul; Mayer, Abigail; Schiele, Johanna; Sweeney-Taylor, Anthony
    Providing secure, reliable, affordable energy that is needed to fuel prosperity for all without causing devastating environmental consequences is perhaps the greatest challenge of the 21st century. Over the coming decades, global energy systems will need to transition from an era which relied on fossil fuels to one more dependent on clean energy. This transition will not simply consist of replacing one energy source with another. Rather, it will affect the systems, networks, and partnerships that embody the energy industry as we have known it for the last century. Many of these changes will be driven by technological innovation, which in turn will impact the nature and value of existing assets, supply chains, and regulatory and policy institutions. But innovation by itself is not the goal; the real objective is to deploy innovation at scale and bring the ensuing products and services to market in a secure, reliable, and affordable way. Academia, business, governments, and civil society are all searching for innovative solutions to actively decarbonize all energy systems and sectors, and yet today’s pace of energy innovation is simply not fast enough to meet the challenge. Why is this not happening more rapidly? What needs to be done to speed up the innovation effort? Success is possible, but it will require close coordination of policy, technology, capital, and society. Partnerships between the public and private sector will be central to this effort and must be complemented by the ability to educate all stakeholders on the challenges and opportunities inherent in the energy transition. By focusing on real-world energy companies and eliciting the perspective of stakeholders, our goal is to uncover lessons learned from the private sector and recommend new paths to lead in the transition to a low-carbon economy. What steps is your company taking to adapt and change in response to the climate crisis? What is the role of the private sector in meeting or exceeding the Paris Agreement targets? Where are there opportunities for leadership? As part of the new Global Energy Technology Innovation (GETI) initiative at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center we asked these and other questions of industry leaders around the world. In the spring of 2020, I convened the inaugural student study group “Energy Innovation and the Transition to a Low-Carbon Economy: Advising Fortune 500 Companies.” This report, part one of a broader series of interactions with leaders in energy and innovation and Harvard students, dives into these issues through the lens of a multinational utility. We present the insights of ENGIE’s Executive VP Shankar Krishnamoorthy, who is leading the company’s strategy and innovation efforts, and provide the study group participants’ advice on how ENGIE could continue its low-carbon transition into the future.
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    India - The New Global Green Hydrogen Powerhouse?
    (Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, 2024-03) Gili, Alessandro; De Blasio, Nicola
    India aims to become a leading powerhouse in green hydrogen production by the next decade as part of a broader industrial strategy to achieve a $5 trillion GDP economy by 2028. Hence, India must develop new approaches to produce vast amounts of green energy at affordable prices to support its economic development, growing population, and carbon reduction targets. Neither the public nor the private sectors can address these challenges alone, and technological innovation must increasingly play a role. To achieve its ambitious goals, New Delhi must incentivize the creation of fully-fledged green hydrogen industrial value chains (such as fertilizers and steel), which includes scaling up domestic electrolyzer manufacturing capacity.1 This strategy will avoid the inefficiencies and mistakes of the past, during which dependence on foreign manufacturing (i.e., Chinese solar technology) undermined the country’s ability to deploy robust industrial clean technology value chains at scale. To accelerate the development and deployment of hydrogen value chains, the Indian Government must design appropriate incentives to drive adoption while supporting workforce development. However, our research demonstrates how land availability, water scarcity, and infrastructure challenges could limit India’s ability to become a green hydrogen export champion.2 These factors would require India to produce hydrogen in less densely populated areas and efficiently transport it to demand or export centers. However, these regions also face higher infrastructure gaps.3 Successfully tackling these hurdles while establishing a business-friendly regulatory framework - to mobilize the necessary private investments - would allow India to corner new green hydrogen markets connecting the Middle East, Europe, and other key countries in the Global South. As witnessed during the G20 presidency, India could pioneer a new economic development model based on technological innovation, thereby side-stepping the carbon-intensive approaches of the past. Accelerating the transition to a low-carbon economy should not be perceived as a risk hindering growth but as an opportunity to reduce socioeconomic imbalances and achieve industrial leadership. Is India ready?
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    Green Hydrogen Industrial Value Chains: Geopolitical and Market Implications
    (Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, 2023-02) De Blasio, Nicola; Eicke, Laima
    The global transition to a low-carbon economy and adopting the needed clean energy technologies at scale will significantly impact existing value chains and transform production-to-consumption lifecycles. Regulatory and business models will need to rapidly evolve to manage the resulting substantial cost challenges and dramatic shifts in stakeholder interactions while continuing to create value. Green hydrogen is likely to play a pivotal role in a carbon-free future, as its adoption will enable the decarbonization of energy-intensive industrial processes whose emissions are hard to abate through simple electrification—such as steel and cement production. However, to take advantage of the economic opportunities created by its adoption at scale, countries will need to rethink the roles they could play in a new energy landscape and define strategic industrial policies accordingly. Our research shows how successful industrial policies must reflect a country’s potential value chain positioning in future green hydrogen markets and elucidates macro geopolitical trends that could reshape international relations as countries compete for industrial leadership, market shares, and opportunities for job creation.
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    MIGHTY: Model of International Green Hydrogen Trade
    (Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, 2022-08) Nunez-Jimenez, Alejandro; De Blasio, Nicola
    The Model of International Green Hydrogen Trade (MIGHTY) is an optimization model to investigate renewable hydrogen production, consumption, and trade between countries. MIGHTY supports strategic analysis by policymakers and investors about the potential roles that countries and regions will play in future renewable hydrogen markets. For this purpose, MIGHTY uses mixed-integer linear programming optimization to find the combination of domestic renewable hydrogen production and international imports that minimizes annual supply costs—which include production and transportation costs—while meeting the hydrogen demand of one country or a group of countries. This paper introduces the model and describes the model formulation, including a brief explanation of how MIGHTY accounts for pipeline diameters and renewable hydrogen cost curves. Finally, limitations and options for future development are discussed.
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    The Future of Energy Value Chains in the Transition to a Low-Carbon Economy: An Evaluation Framework of Integration and Segmentation Scenarios
    (Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, 2023-08-14) De Blasio, Nicola; Zheng, Derek
    The transition from energy systems dominated by fossil fuels1 to ones based on renewable electricity and “green” molecules will significantly impact existing value chains2 and forge new pathways, interactions, and transformation steps from production to consumption. Regulatory and business models must rapidly evolve to manage the resulting substantial cost challenges and dramatic shifts in stakeholder interactions while continuing to create value. Fossil fuels have paved the way for rapid industrialization and economic growth for many decades, but business-as-usual would only exacerbate existing socioeconomic imbalances. Due to these disparities, we tend to divide the world into Global North and Global South, which from a semantics perspective seems to imply that the former has already reached the achievable and the latter only need to catch up. But if the rest of the world were to attain the same per capita energy consumption (and associated emissions) as the Global North, the results would be environmentally catastrophic. The critical question is how to navigate the delicate balance of sustaining growth while achieving prosperity for all and accelerating the transition to a low-carbon economy. The answer must lie not only in globalization but increasingly in technology innovation. Innovation is everywhere - policy, finance, technology, and business - driving dynamics not seen in the energy sector since the Industrial Revolution. As new technologies and processes develop to sustain growing energy needs, understanding how these will impact existing energy value chains or cause new ones to emerge is crucial for navigating the energy transition successfully. The first step in this process is identifying key technologies driving disruptive change and understanding how they create value. To do this, it is critical to recognize that a technology by itself is not necessarily valuable for all stakeholders. Technologies, no matter how innovative, can offer little to no value unless contextualized to a specific company and its asset portfolio because technologies cannot be decoupled from their applications. In other words, the actual value of a technology lies in its potential to drive business opportunities rather than its overall innovative content. This is why a game-changing technology in one sector may hold little or no use in another. For example, a lumber company will derive little to no value from a medical artificial intelligence imaging technology, even if extremely valuable for the healthcare sector. Elucidating the role of innovation in shaping future value chains also requires understanding who could best leverage a specific technology – and how. The key to maximizing overall value and accelerating the transition to a low-carbon economy can be found only by understanding the opportunities and challenges of deploying technology at scale and the complex role that different stakeholders could play. Analyzing existing energy value chains highlights the many ways stakeholders position their offerings—including adopting sustainable business models, specializing in key technologies to gain a competitive advantage, or responding to regulatory constraints. These decisions generally result in two outcomes: integration or segmentation. As we move toward a more decarbonized and decentralized future enabled by technological innovation, the public and private sectors must work together to rethink their roles. To facilitate this discussion, we propose a framework to guide the understanding of how innovation can drive integration or segmentation scenarios and why stakeholders may want to pursue a specific outcome. While it is challenging to encapsulate in this framework all the factors influencing the process, we have identified three criteria encompassing the key determinants: Strategic Value, Techno-Economic Relatedness, and Risk. We apply the proposed framework to three technologies that, if adopted at scale, could significantly change energy systems as we know them: renewable hydrogen3; carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS)4; and blockchain.5 Only a cohesive and collective understanding of how energy value chains will evolve can enable each participant to best prepare for and succeed in the energy transition. Stakeholders who can embrace the new energy landscape will gain significant competitive advantages, while the others risk fading into obsolescence. This paper is structured as follows: after a literature review, Section 2 defines the concepts of value chains, value-chain analysis, and integration and segmentation scenarios. Section 3 introduces a comprehensive framework to explain innovative technologies’ role in the transition to a low-carbon economy based on the three criteria mentioned above. Section 4 applies the framework to the three indicated technologies. Finally, Section 5 offers recommendations for catalyzing innovation’s successful development and deployment in an accelerated transition to a low-carbon economy.
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    Is China's Hydrogen Economy Coming?
    (Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, 2020-07-28) De Blasio, Nicola; Pflugmann, Fridolin
    To accelerate the global transition to a low-carbon economy, all energy systems and sectors must be actively decarbonized. While hydrogen has been a staple in the energy and chemical industries for decades, renewable hydrogen is drawing increased attention today as a versatile and sustainable energy carrier with the potential to play an important role in the carbon-free energy puzzle. Our recent article, “The Geopolitics of Renewable Hydrogen in Low-Carbon Energy Markets” explores the global implications of renewable hydrogen adoption at scale and shows that the role countries will likely assume in global renewable hydrogen markets depends on their renewable energy resource and freshwater endowments as well as their ability to deploy enabling infrastructure. Using the same analytical framework, this paper focuses on China and the potential role of renewable hydrogen in accelerating its transition to a low-carbon economy. Our research goal is to provide policymakers and other stakeholders the means to make informed decisions on technology innovation, policy instruments, and long-term investments in enabling infrastructure.
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    The Future of Renewable Hydrogen in the European Union: Market and Geopolitical Implications
    (Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, 2022-03) Nunez-Jimenez, Alejandro; De Blasio, Nicola
    As countries around the world pledge to remove nearly all carbon emissions from their economies within the next forty years, the spotlight has moved to the deep decarbonization of all energy sectors. This aggressive push to decarbonize has sparked renewed interest in clean hydrogen—defined as hydrogen produced from water electrolysis with zero-carbon electricity. While hydrogen has been a staple in the energy and chemical industries for decades, renewable hydrogen is now enjoying unprecedented political and business momentum as a versatile and sustainable energy carrier that could be the missing piece in the carbon-free energy puzzle. While success is possible, this transformational effort will require close coordination between policy, technology, capital, and society to avoid falling into the traps and inefficiencies of the past. This report focuses on the market and geopolitical implications of renewable hydrogen adoption at scale in the European Union (EU) and presents long-term strategies based on three reference scenarios. Each scenario focuses on one key strategic variable: energy independence, cost (optimization), or energy security. Our analysis shows that only by working together can the EU become a global leader in clean hydrogen innovation and simultaneously contribute to the EU’s climate and energy security goals, a more robust economy, and a more integrated union. What would it require to become hydrogen independent? Where should production be located for cost-competitive supplies? What is the enabling infrastructure that needs to be developed and deployed at scale? How could supply risks be mitigated? Only a thorough analysis of future scenarios can provide policymakers and investors with answers to these key questions, as well as a deep understanding of the associated market and geopolitical implications.
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    Sustainable Mobility: Renewable Hydrogen in the Transport Sector
    (Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, 2021-06) De Blasio, Nicola; Hua, Charles; Nunez-Jimenez, Alejandro
    The transportation sector is the second-largest source of CO2 emissions, after electricity and heat generation, accounting for about 25 percent of global emissions.1 However, it is also one of the most challenging to decarbonize due to its distributed nature and the advantages of fossil fuels in terms of high energy densities, ease of transportation, and storage. Moreover, the degree of difficulty in decarbonizing varies significantly across the sector, making the challenge even more daunting. So far, emissions reduction strategies have focused on improving vehicle and system-wide efficiencies, mode switching, and electrification. The latter is proving relatively easy for smaller vehicles that travel shorter distances and carry lighter loads. However, sector-wide decarbonization pathways will require a transition to low-carbon fuels and the deployment of enabling infrastructure to support innovation at scale. Renewable hydrogen holds promise in sustainable mobility applications, whether by powering fuel-cell electric vehicles (FCEVs) like cars, trucks, and trains or as a feedstock for synthetic fuels for ships and airplanes. Fuel cells convert hydrogen-rich fuels into electricity through a chemical reaction. FCEVs use a fuel cell, rather than a battery, to power electric motors, and operate near-silently and produce no tailpipe emissions. Hydrogen-powered vehicles offer key advantages, including shorter refueling times, longer ranges, and a lower material footprint compared to lithium battery-powered alternatives. However, high costs of ownership and a lack of enabling infrastructure are key challenges that must be addressed through policy support, technological innovation, and financial investment. Hydrogen can complement existing efforts to electrify road and rail transportation and provide a scalable option for decarbonizing shipping and aviation. Figure 1 summarizes the mobility segments for which battery electric vehicles (BEVs), FCEVs, and vehicles running on bio- or hydrogen-based synthetic fuels are most applicable.
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    Technological Innovation and the Future of Energy Value Chains
    (Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, 2022-04) De Blasio, Nicola; Zheng, Derek
    The transition from energy systems dominated by fossil fuels1 to ones based on renewable electricity and carbon-free molecules will significantly impact existing value chains2 and forge new pathways and transformation steps from production to consumption. This transition will bring not only substantial cost challenges but also promises to dramatically alter stakeholders’ interactions along value chains. Technological innovation is driving dynamics not seen in the energy sector since the Industrial Revolution, and it will be key to accelerating the transition to a low-carbon economy while sustaining growth and achieving prosperity for all. But as new technologies develop to meet growing energy needs, understanding how these technologies will impact existing energy value chains is crucial for navigating the energy transition successfully. To elucidate these dynamics, we must first identify the key technologies3 driving disruptive change and then understand how their deployment at scale might impact existing value chains or cause new ones to emerge.