It’s like a gas station, except that it delivers green hydrogen, produced on site, and we therefore leave it without emitting any greenhouse gases. Toulouse-Blagnac airport inaugurated its Hyport this Monday, presented as “a first in Europe”.
This station has two distribution centers, one on the city side and the other on the slopes side. Its mission is for the moment to recharge the shuttles connecting the car parks to the airport, the buses transporting passengers to their plane, the plane tractors as well as the generators supplying the ground devices with electricity.
“Today, in France, 95% of the hydrogen consumed is made from steam reforming [de combustibles fossiles]. We do it using water electrolysis,” explains Guillaume de La Grand’rive, hydrogen project manager at Engie Solutions. Here, “the electric current in the water produces by electrolysis, at one terminal, oxygen and, at another terminal, hydrogen, and it is the hydrogen that we recover,” he continues.
Thanks to the dams of the Pyrenees
“The Hyport is capable of producing “a little more than 400 kg of hydrogen per day, that’s about 20 buses or 200 cars,” explains its president Marion Deridder-Blondel, specifying that the “filling times” at hydrogen are very fast for “zero emissions in use”.
“Green hydrogen is produced from green electricity, here from Pyrenean hydroelectric dams and a photovoltaic power plant in Aude,” assures Carole Delga (PS), president of the Occitanie region. Hyport is in fact largely co-financed by the Occitanie Regional Energy and Climate Agency (Arec) and Engie Solutions. This green hydrogen, “it is not a false promise, it is a reality here in Occitania” and “a first in Europe in an airport”, insists the elected official.