EDITOR’S LETTER

The move towards a decarbonised world is accelerating fast. Our annual review of storage terminal expansion projects, featured in this issue, reveals just how large a proportion of operators’ capital investment is targeted at projects that will enable them to play a role in delivering new energies to consumers, especially in the more developed industrial markets. Northern Europe in particular is awash with new plans, often supported – or even driven – by port authorities keen to play a role in helping their countries, their clients and themselves meet the targets and priorities set by the Paris Agreement and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. But it is not just Europe where the action is. There are several major projects in the Gulf coast states of the US, where low-carbon and renewable sources of energy can be used to create new fuels that, with carbon capture and re-use/ sequestration, can be zero-carbon themselves. West coast states are also very keen on renewables. And new projects are coming forward in other areas of the world, including southeast Asia

As has been pointed out in these pages before, established storage terminal operators will often find themselves in the right place to meet the new demand for the movement of new energy streams, as the customers for decarbonised energy will largely be the same as those for traditional hydrocarbon energy; that does not mean that changes will not have to be made, nor that the sources of those new energies will be in the same part of the world as hydrocarbon resources – though in fact some of them are, especially those oil producing parts of the Middle East and North Africa that are also blessed with regular sunshine.

What strikes me about the way that things are moving is that the new supply chains for hydrogen, ammonia, methanol and the other energy vectors being touted as the future are being developed in an holistic way. In this they mirror the original development of the LNG business, where pretty much all projects were inaugurated with the collaborative participation of producers, consumers, terminals and shipping interests.

Now, in very much the same way, new energy projects involve not only the upstream producers (and, where relevant, the suppliers of raw feedstock) and the receivers but also those providers of storage capacity at either end, shipping companies and distributors to move the product to the end user. That final leg may follow on from a conversion point, for instance when ammonia or an LOHC is used to ‘carry’ hydrogen in a more stable form.

Likewise, those who will be involved in the downstream distribution of clean energy are looking to get their own decarbonisation projects going. After all, there is no point in moving carbon-free or low-carbon energy halfway around the world if the final leg relies on transport fuelled by old-fashioned hydrocarbons. Shipowners, both in the shortsea and inland sectors, are already investing in cleaner-burning vessels and road haulage companies, many of which are currently helping build the new downstream supply chains, are also buying new vehicles that can run on hydrogen, electricity or liquefied biogas. There are those out there who think the energy transition is a chimera; there are others too who think industry is not doing enough. Both are wrong – the future is already becoming apparent.

Peter Mackay

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