The Green Hydrogen Summit in Abu Dhabi opened this morning and host Masdar chose former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson as its keynote speaker. In what was a typical meandering Boris speech, there was much praise for the UAE, a lot about windfarms, but not very much at all about the place of green hydrogen in the journey to net-zero, writes DecarbonisationNews.com Editor Gary Wright
Masdar drafted in former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson for the keynote speech at the opening of the Green Hydrogen Summit in Abu Dhabi today (April 16).
He may have been forced to resign as Prime Minister in the UK, but his ties with the UAE stretch back almost 15 years, when he was Mayor of London. He was keen to remind delegates of his environmental credentials and the close links between the UAE and the UK.
In a trademark speech by Johnson, he made his usual asides, which he sees as jokes but often confound his audience – especially overseas – and just about managed to weave in a couple of green hydrogen references in what otherwise might have been seen as a Boris list of UAE investment projects in the UK. And he while he made many references to his eight years as Mayor of London, he made few to his ill-fated time as Prime Minister.
“I seem to have brought the weather with me,” he said as he opened, referring to the thunder storms across the UAE following his arrival. He told delegates he had first visited the UAE 10 years ago while he was Mayor of London. He referred to the subsequent ‘Golden Age’ of cooperation between the UAE and UK, which he said was so strong that during his time “London was known, by some, as the Eighth Emirate”.
“There can be no better place to hold the summit than Abu Dhabi, a centre of great technological innovation as I discovered this when I first came to the UAE,” he said. He recalled how he attended a banquet that served camel (another Boris joke about one of his fellow colleagues ‘getting the hump’, seemed to bypass the audience) and how he was then transported by a fully autonomous electric vehicle, much to his amazement at the time.
In the audience was HE Dr Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, member of the UAE Federal Cabinet, Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology, the UAE’s special envoy on climate change, and Chairman of Masdar. He was the President of COP28 last December – the first CEO to serve in this role.
Johnson congratulated HE Dr Sultan Al Jaber on the success of COP28 and contrasted it to UK’s hosting of COP26 in 2021 when he was Prime Minister, saying he knew how difficult the UN summits are to host and heaped fulsome praise on Dr Sultan and the UAE.
He understood how getting all the countries attending to agree was like “herding cats”. But he added: “I’ve got to be honest, there was a difference between COP26 and COP28: the difference was that the Glasgow UN summit was before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, before the spike in inflation and before we saw the price of hydrocarbons jump and everybody frankly began to get quite so sceptical about Net Zero.
“So, hats off to you here in Abu Dhabi – we did the soft cop, you did the tough cop…if you see what I mean. And yet you triumphed and the UAE Presidency prevailed over some of the gloomy global media that were sceptical about the prospects of COP28.
“You way exceeded expectations of the NGOs and here in the world’s greatest and richest basin of hydrocarbons you persuaded the world at COP28 to move beyond fossil fuels. And you did it by sheer force of technological argument.”
After such praise some in the audience may have been expecting him to refer to green hydrogen. But no, he moved to growth of solar farms across the Emirates and how “for years you have been helping us in the UK to change the way we think about power generation.”
After a brief reminder of an Essex offshore windfarm project, Johnson reminded the audience how he had installed electric car charging across the capital and encouraged people to buy electric cars, while he was Mayor of London, but in 2008 it didn’t take hold. He said these ideas take time. Anyone who has seen Johnson speak knows how he frequently seems to wander off and make jokes that sometimes are missed by the audience but his enthusiasm and respect for the UAE was obvious.
Then he was back to windfarms and he talked of the new project in the shallow waters of the North Sea between the UK and Denmark, which had linked the UK to mainland Europe until it was flooded 8,000 years ago following a landslip in Norway and subsequent tsunami. He offered a quick history lesson on the area now home to the Dogger Bank windfarm project. Explaining that the area had been populated by Prehistoric man until the disaster, he added a Borisism: “The people were doggedly, dogging away in Doggerland”.
It’s a three phase project across 500 sq kms and the UAE has a 49% stake in Dogger Bank South, to generate clean green electricity, he told delegates.
Finally, his point – and it was relevant to a conference focused on green hydrogen – was that when the wind blows so hard in the North Sea, too much power is generated and the grid can’t cope with the surge. Currently, the UK pays power providers not to produce, which Johnson felt was comparable with the “insanity of the EU Common Agricultural Policy, where farmers are paid not to produce. “It’s called curtailment and it’s obviously bonkers and and a waste of money,” said Johnson.
“So, obviously you electrolyse that extra electricity to produce green hydrogen,” he finally offered, though some scientists might question his explanation. “The use cases for green hydrogen are obvious. Steel to industry to large modes of transport that may need the kind of torque or grunt – ‘that’s a technical term’ – that you can’t get from a battery.”
He referred to his flight to the UAE with state airline Etihad and said it was the height of luxury people might think that “nothing could possibly lift those facilities aloft perhaps except kerosene”. He offered: “Nothing perhaps, except hydrogen.”
He took a swipe at sceptics who said it wouldn’t happen – like his experience in 2008 with electric cars in London. “These things take patience leadership and innovation an that needs countries like UK and UAE to work more closely together.” We collaborate and he joked that the audience might remember the Emirates cable car, built for the 2012 Olympics in London, where he was famously photographed dangling from a cable waving two small Union flags..
Then he moved away from hydrogen, this time praising the UAE’s nuclear power with 20% generation – far above the UK – and said he believed there was more the UAE could do with the UK on nuclear.
“And where we see the UAE and UK have come together – including opposing the lunacy of the Iranian drone attacks,” he said. “Together we will not only promote peace, we will develop the technological solutions to enable the world to tackle climate change and to cut the cost of energy in long term, and to produce millions of good, well-paid jobs.
“And in routing the doubters and confounding the sceptics as you did at COP, I know that the UAE and the UK will be in the lead on green technology, and on green hydrogen and all other forms of green technology.”
