Browsing by Author "Lottonen, Johannes"

The EU’s climate goals require that, among other things, the internal gas market is decarbonised as much as possible. Hydrogen and hydrogen-based synthetic fuels have been identified as one of the major solutions for decarbonising the internal gas market. The inclusion of hydrogen to the internal gas market will fundamentally change the internal gas market. The decarbonisation will also have positive implications to security of gas supply as hydrogen can be produced in the EU with water and electricity. This will allow the EU to reduce its reliance on third country gas suppliers. However, the inclusion of hydrogen requires extensive transmission infrastructure as hydrogen production cannot always be geographically close to industrial facilities using hydrogen. Additionally, large-scale hydrogen transmission has been identified as more cost-effective than electricity transmission. The TEN-E Regulation and Projects of Common Interest play an important role in actualising the infrastructure projects. The purpose of this thesis is two-fold. Primarily, it will examine how a hydrogen transmission project can fulfil the general and specific criteria of Article 4 of the TEN-E Regulation. Fulfilling these criteria allow the project to potentially be included in the list of Projects of Common Interest published by the European Commission. At the same time, this thesis will examine how the proposed new gas market legislation, climate legislation and other energy legislation affect the internal gas market and the forming hydrogen market. This thesis will also examine what potential challenges the hydrogen transmission projects and the forming hydrogen market will face. In short, fulfilling the eligibility criteria is tied to the amount of renewable and low-carbon hydrogen which the transmission project makes available to the market, the benefits to the market and interconnection of networks enabled by the project, the possibility for efficient and non-discriminatory competition as well as the impact to the security of supply of the EU’s energy market. The potential challenges include prolonged legislative processes regarding gas market and climate legislation, issues caused by the variability of the renewable power generation, certain competition issues and legislative burden on the forming hydrogen market.