The executive secretary of the Latin American Energy Organization (Olade) Alfonso Blanco, said Tuesday that Latin America can become a world power in low-cost hydrogen production as the clean fuel that replaces fossil fuels.
Blanco pointed to the production of green hydrogen as one of the great opportunities in the region. The Olade leader maintained that Latin America has “great storage capacity” and the ability to produce it at a much lower price than other regions of the world. “It is a great opportunity for our region,” he added.
Likewise, Blanco pointed out that Latin America has an advantage over the rest of the world to reach the goal of zero carbon emissions, as it is the region in the world with the highest share of clean and renewable energy in its energy matrix. 30% of the energy consumed in Latin America comes from clean and renewable sources, compared to 13% of the world average.
“It is an issue that we have to take into consideration. Latin America and the Caribbean have renewability in their DNA,” he stressed.
In this sense, the executive secretary of Olade advocated achieving greater integrity in the continent’s energy markets through IRAIC and being able to “achieve a production of renewables that reaches 70% (of the energy matrix) by 2030.”
“Renewable energies are abundant in our region and enter through market mechanisms without the need to apply price mechanisms and other instruments that make energy costs perceived by consumers as high,” he added.
The German ambassador to Ecuador, Philipp Schauer, and the director of the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs at Yale University (United States), Paul Simons, until recently deputy director of the International Energy Agency (IEA), also participated in this meeting. ).
In his speech, Schauer also highlighted the potential of Latin America for the production of hydrogen and said that the German Government is allocating some 2,000 million euros outside its country to the creation of a world market for this type of energy.
Simons stressed that it is possible to avoid the goal that the global average temperature will increase by two degrees Celsius by 2050 if all the requirements established so far by the different countries are met. However, the specialist stressed that he sees it as difficult for these intentions to crystallize, mainly because of China, which does not plan to reduce its emissions before 2030, which would imply an unusual abandonment of coal plants in the following years while increasing the renewable supply.
Simons was also skeptical about the great demand for minerals such as lithium, copper and rare earth minerals, which require new technologies to abandon fossil fuel sources, materials that are concentrated in a few countries and whose processing is practically monopolized by China.