Frank de Bruijn appointed as professor at the University of Groningen

On 29 June, the unit manager of H₂SF was appointed as a professor at the University of Groningen’s Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences. His field will be that of Gas Conversion Technology. Yesterday, Frank held his inaugural lecture, titled “The role of gas in sustainable energy management”. Here is a summary of his speech.

The system of energy management in the Netherlands is largely based on the use of natural gas, partly owing to its domestic gas supplies. Natural gas is the main fuel used to generate electricity and also in the built environment and energy-intensive industries. At the same time, in the Netherlands the ratio of energy consumption from sustainable sources is one of the lowest in Europe.
To drastically reduce CO₂ emissions and wean ourselves off our dependency on fossil fuels, we need an accelerated energy transition as well as a blueprint for sustainable energy provision for the future.
Gas management should play a central role in this blueprint. Gas will be vital to our efforts to balance power supply and demand, as well as meet the demands for energy and raw materials on the part of industry, the transport sector and the built environment. This gas will need to become increasingly “green”, however, if we are to get closer to achieving a sustainable system of energy provision.
A very large installed wind and solar energy capacity would enable us to meet one third of the Netherlands' current demand for energy. In order to meet the remaining demand for energy from renewable sources, we would have to rely mainly on biomass imports.
Carbon capture and storage will probably prove to be an indispensible alternative when it comes to drastic CO₂ reductions. A flexible gas infrastructure can play a vital role in increasing the sustainability of our energy system, so that the reduction targets remain attainable, even if the implementation of renewable energy does not proceed as quickly as planned.  Such a flexible gas infrastructure could be constructed on a substructure aimed at the distribution of natural gas combined with a growing share of green gas, along with a substructure for hydrogen and possibly a substructure for synthetic gas. 

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