During the premier gathering for the global hydrogen community in the Americas region at the #H2Americas2023 Summit & Exhibition, we spoke to global and regional #hydrogen and #energy leaders about the future outlook for the hydrogen industry, including an interview with H.E. Mr. Omar Paganini, Head of the Ministry of Industry, Energy and Mining from the Government of Uruguay.
“Today I had the pleasure to speak as a keynote here at the Hydrogen Americas 2023 and I was presenting the case of Uruguay. Uruguay in the South of South America country where we have already gone through our first energy transition, our electricity is 97% renewable and now we have to move forward to a second energy transition, so we think we are an interesting case for the world to see, the next steps that should be done, and we have chosen green hydrogen as a way to go. We have a combinations of much more renewable resources that we can use domestically, so that we can turn that into renewable electricity and with that produce hydrogen, but also we have a very sustainable forestry complex, and we have a lot of biomass and CO2 that is from biological origin, biogenic CO2, so combining hydrogen and biogenic CO2 we can get into the new e-fuels industry, and we think that’s the way to go in the next years for Uruguay, we are already evaluating and already giving some permitting to interesting projects from international companies to produce green methanol, to produce green gasoline or sustainable aviation fuel and we think Uruguay combines in a rather compact territory, lot of renewable sources, lot of CO2 from biological origin, so that we are a test bed for the world to build the new e-fuels that can combine with electricity, and move forward in the decarbonization of the world.
Well we have been in a lot of conversations with other countries, with Europe, with the European Union we have agreements signed with Germany first, with the Netherlands, and we think that there should be a hemisphere strategy regarding hydrogen, with the U.S. as a support for a development but don’t forget that South Americas has a lot of potential in renewable resources much more than it will be able to use in their local economies, so we think as a problem globally and specifically we think from the America’s point of view, there’s an opportunity to develop an important boost in the transformation of energy around the world in our region, and we think that the U.S. has to play a part, we wanted to present the case here so that decision makers from the U.S. take us into account and think about not only to develop the supply side the technology, but also to develop the demand so that we can be a provider of these new energetics.
Well we have published our hydrogen road map, it’s a national strategy we are already attracting projects, and what is exciting is that we see that we are getting a response from international companies that want to develop rather big projects in Uruguay, we’re talking about some gigawatts of electrolyzing capabilities in the North near Argentina and the center, and the parts where the renewable resources are strong and also there’s a lot of biogenic CO2. So we see that things are moving forward, we also have a pilot project for trucks, so Uruguay is aligning and as we did in the first transformation where all the political parties in parliament went forward with this very aggressive introduction of wind power, we now are seeing that people in Uruguay are also agreeing broadly on this second energy transition.”
Join us at #H2Americas2024
Co-hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy, join global and regional #hydrogen and #energy leaders at #H2Americas2024 Summit & Exhibition taking place 11-12 June 2024 in Washington D.C. The event welcomes 4000 industry professionals, 200+ Speakers, 100+ Exhibitors and 40+ sponsors to share the latest news, establish key connections and sign business deals to accelerate the deployment of the hydrogen economy. Register your place among hydrogen pioneers.
