The discussions in Chapters 3 and 5 have shown that conventional fossil as well as renewable resources are limited and that strong competitions between the future uses of the primary energy carriers exist. In Chapter 16 the necessity of long-term transport of hydrogen for such reasons as relevant geographical distances between location of resources and demand centres was discussed in detail in the geographical scope of a country. Now, this chapter deals with questions of import or export of hydrogen. While import strategies – or energy corridors – are common and well known for natural gas, oil and electricity, the idea of hydrogen corridors is foreign to many people.

Such hydrogen corridors offer, among other things, in the long term the possibility of coping with the energy resource limitations for hydrogen production and improving energy supply security. Domestic energy resources are limited within the most industrial countries and, therefore, one open research question is whether it is a sustainable option to produce hydrogen outside and import it.

What is a hydrogen corridor?

In the following, we understand as a hydrogen corridor the import-based supply chain of hydrogen, including production in the country of origin and transport to the border of the country of destination. For a better understanding of what is a hydrogen corridor and which elements can be involved, an example for a concept of a hydrogen corridor between Iceland and the EU25 is shown in Fig. 17.1. Here, the principle is as follows.