ExxonMobil Corp. and other fossil fuel companies are urging the European Union to relax targets to boost climate-friendly “green” hydrogen, hoping to win greater support for projects to manufacture the fuel using natural gas.
The United States-based oil major’s willingness to publicly throw down the gauntlet to policy-makers underscores the stakes for the fossil fuel industry as the EU fleshes out its plans to slash carbon emissions, ahead of June’s European parliament elections.
“You need to remove policy hurdles such as in the Renewable Energy Directive, so that you can faster scale the hydrogen economy in Europe, and use that to build out the infrastructure”, Simon Herbert, ExxonMobil’s vice-president of low carbon solutions, told the World Hydrogen 2024 conference in Rotterdam last week.
“It’s a question of allowing the market to work to allow every technology to develop”, Herbert said…
