The Director of Statutory Development and European Funds, Luis Estaún, who has attended this event on behalf of the Vice President of the Government of Aragon, Arturo Aliaga, has travelled to Bilbao in the first hydrogen-powered vehicle registered in Spain, which is part of an informative project of the Aragon Hydrogen Foundation since September. Aragon is one of the 78 entities that have become part of the Basque Hydrogen Corridor, which has joined through the Aragon Hydrogen Foundation. 58 of them are private companies, eight institutions and the rest are technology, university and knowledge centres.
The presentation ceremony, which was held at the Euskalduna Palace in Bilbao, began with a speech by the chairman of Petronor, Emiliano López Atxurra, the company behind the project. Before beginning his speech, he dedicated his first words to the vice-president of the Government of Aragon, Arturo Aliaga, who is recovering from surgery. Atxurra highlighted Aliaga’s work as a pioneer and promoter of the Hydrogen Foundation in Aragon, when there was none of these characteristics in Spain, as well as other projects that opened the way to work with this technology for more than fifteen years.
Precisely, the Aragon Hydrogen Foundation has a fundamental role in the development of this technology that has emerged in Spain and Europe, where work in this field has been going on for a longer period of time. The advances are clear, and the private sector has responded by putting forward concrete proposals that can be put into practice in the short term.
This year, the autonomous community of Aragon will make its enormous potential as a green hydrogen producing territory more evident, largely due to the efforts that have been made, led by the Department of Industry, Competitiveness and Business Development, to speed up the processing of renewable energy projects and incorporate thousands of clean megawatts into the electricity system.
Another sector in which green hydrogen is going to be of major importance is the automotive sector, because we are going to start to see its contribution to decarbonising mobility.
Undoubtedly, another important milestone that will occupy the Foundation in 2021 is the publication of the Hydrogen Master Plan 2021-2025, a document of great importance, the result of exhaustive work that will organise and bring together the enormous potential of hydrogen in fields such as renewable production, storage, transport or more specific applications such as sustainable mobility, heavy transport, decarbonisation of industry and the hydrocarbon sector or logistics.
There are already projects linked to other infrastructures that can have a new life linked to a clean energy vector such as hydrogen. This is the case of the Canfranc International Railway, which could find the way to a future reopening with this technology. Hydrogen could lead Aragon to occupy a key place in this evolution due to its industrial capacities and its entrepreneurs, so that this process can take the form of concrete projects and new jobs created here. Collaboration with communities close to Aragon and with the south of France will be important, and hydrogen technology will play a decisive role in strengthening these relations.
