Fluorescent vomit and a racism row: Is this Europe’s clean energy future?

An international conference this week was meant to be a European showcase for “clean hydrogen,” touted as an emissions-free fuel of the future.

Instead, European Hydrogen Week descended into a bitter standoff between top EU officials, industry chiefs and environmental activists critical of the lucrative sector, who repeatedly disrupted the event in increasingly dramatic — and colorful — ways.

After one protester rushed the stage on Tuesday, she appeared to fall ill. Then suddenly, clutching her stomach, the woman vomited fluorescent green fluid into a bag and onto the floor.

“I’m sick,” the besuited activist shouted, “I’m sick of greenwashing!”

It was a far cry from the soaring rhetoric accompanying the event’s launch on Monday. Speaking from the same stage that would soon be splattered with incandescent vomit, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen hailed hydrogen for “its potential to power heavy industries, to propel trucks and trains and to store seasonal energy.”

Brussels has allocated tens of billions of euros in investments to boost production of the fuel, which is generated using renewable electricity to split water molecules and releases no carbon when burned, as part of a bid to generate 10 million tons of the gas each year in the EU and import the same volume from abroad by 2030.

“It is the dawn of the clean hydrogen era,” von der Leyen declared.

Yet, again and again, demonstrators took issue with the event’s high-flying proclamations.

Protesters stormed the event to warn against the “colonial plunder” of the developing world and water resource depletion as a result of the growing hydrogen industry. Many of the firms behind new hydrogen initiatives are linked to fossil fuel companies, which already have large distribution networks and significant capital to jointly invest in the growing industry.

That hasn’t helped assuage suspicions from green groups.

“I am coming from the South, from the lands you have stolen from us, where you have been stealing our water for years for you and your industries’ profit. The same water you want to steal to produce your green hydrogen,” shouted Manuela Roya, an activist from Chile, which has plans to ramp up its own production of the gas.

The governments of Brazil, India and a number of other developing countries also set out their stall at the conference, hoping to attract significant investments needed to help the EU meet its hydrogen import targets. WeSmellGas, one of the pressure groups that coordinated the protests, is calling for that trade to be banned, ensuring renewable power capacity is used to decarbonize the economies of those countries first and foremost.

💥BREAKING

Activists interrupted #EUH2Week … again & again

Why? Because we are SICK of EU Hydrogen
🔒 locking us into #FossilFuels
💀 lead to violent land grabs, unjust debt+water depletion in former colonised places
🍞 worsening food insecurity

No to #EUEnergyColonialism💥 pic.twitter.com/kdGgQ26DGG

— WeSmellGas (@WeSmellGas) November 21, 2023

Grzegorz Pawelec, director of intelligence at Hydrogen Europe, one of the organizers of the event, maintained calls for the EU to ban imports of green hydrogen from outside the bloc were “completely unreasonable.”

“Hydrogen can be a way for those developing economies to attract direct foreign investments and create jobs locally,” he said in an interview. “I cannot see any drawback from attracting those large-scale hydrogen production projects.”

He conceded that the water used in hydrogen production is “substantial,” but argued that compared “to the amount of water that goes into producing gasoline or diesel, per kilowatt hour of energy, it’s less.”

Speaking to POLITICO, Inga Davis from WeSmellGas said “green hydrogen is absolutely not the climate solution its proponents would claim,” arguing that fossil fuel firms have a vested interest in the fuel as it preserves their hold on energy infrastructure.

These firms, Davis noted, have also spent millions lobbying Brussels and governments across Africa, South America and Asia on hydrogen.

“It makes sense on an economic level to be a big hydrogen exporter to Europe. But why does that make sense? Because these countries are in enormous amounts of debt to the biggest global financial institutions,” Davis said.