International Cooperation and HR Training: Steps to Develop Energy Transition Technologies Announced at REW
Participants in the session ‘Creating Technologies for the Energy Transition: Current Challenges and How to Solve Them’ at the Russian Energy Week 2022 International Forum
discussed the development in Russia of renewable energy technologies, hydrogen infrastruc-ture, carbon capture and storage, storage facilities, and other promising trends. The session was organized by the Russian Energy Agency of the Russian Ministry of Energy and the Roscongress Foundation with the support of the Russian Ministry of Energy.
Opening the discussion, the session moderator, H2 Clean Energy CEO Alexey Kaplun, asked each expert to name three energy transition technologies that they think would be a pri-ority for Russia’s development in the near future. The experts’ responses included the fol-lowing options: capturing and utilizing carbon dioxide, using electricity to produce intermedi-ate energy carriers (primarily hydrogen), accumulating energy on a large-scale, and fuel cells.
Alexey Malyutin, Director for the Development of Strategic Initiatives at Gazprom Neft, said that a country other than Russia will be driving the development of the energy transition in the short term given the current political and economic situation.
“Consumption will most likely be driven by something that is not located in [Russia]. From this standpoint, we believe the key technologies will not be consumer technologies, but producer technologies: amine flue gas cleaning under low pressure, hydrogen liquefaction, and large-volume transportation. In the short term, they could give a powerful impetus to this industry’s development,” Malyutin said.
One of the most important challenges Russia faces today is to ensure the country’s tech-nological sovereignty. To resolve this problem, Russian fuel and energy enterprises are pay-ing much attention to supporting the development of renewable energy technologies, hydro-gen infrastructure, carbon capture and storage, storage facilities, and other promising trends. One such enterprise is RENERA, which develops technologies for electric power storage systems.
“By 2025, we will open the first plant in Russia that will produce lithium-ion cells and rechargeable batteries, primarily for electric propulsion and electric vehicles, because all esti-mates indicate that electric vehicle systems account for 90% of demand for such solutions, while renewable energy sources account for 10%,” RENERA CEO Alexander Kamashev said.
InEnergy Group CEO Alexey Kashin said that not a single country has full technological sovereignty today. “Technological sovereignty is perhaps the most difficult type of sover-eignty. Today, not only we do not have it, no one has it. There are individual technologies, and they are generally distributed among a large number of companies. If we compare our-selves in terms of the level of development, of course we are lagging behind. But we have advantages and our vast experience from the past. The Soviet Union had technological sover-eignty in many areas, and in this regard, you can probably remember how it's done,” Kashin said.
Human resources are another key aspect in the development of the Russian fuel and en-ergy industry. Anton Maximov, Director of the Topchiev Institute of Petrochemical Synthe-sis of the Russian Academy of Sciences, spoke about how it is crucial to restructure the train-ing of specialists in this regard.
Maximov stressed that it takes an average of 10–15 years to develop a specialist in this field. In order to train human resources who are in demand, business profits cannot be put ahead of technological development, Maximov said, adding that personnel needs to be trained in two key areas.
“The first is those who will ultimately apply these technologies. In this regard, it’s suffi-cient to create training programmes and implement them at the level of secondary educational institutions. The second is technology developers, and this is where we need an interdiscipli-nary product: people should be physicists, chemists, and even economists to some extent. This is a rather difficult task that requires the creation of special training programmes and substantial support for scientific and technological research. It’s not only universities, but al-so experimental pilot facilities at enterprises,” Maximov said.
Yury Gavrilov, Director for Strategy, Mergers and Acquisitions at MC METALLOIN-VEST, supported and elaborated on the talking point about the need to clarify the require-ments for technological research. “We could end up in a chicken-and-egg situation. To export these technologies, we first of all need to have a tested, industrially proven integrated solu-tion, and for this purpose, something must be done internally in an integrated form. Conse-quently, we are returning to the issue of investment,” Gavrilov said.
“What comes first: the cost-effectiveness of technologies that have been tested in exper-iments or the technologies themselves? This is the next question that arises when pondering this issue. There may be a situation – and we know of such examples – when a lot of money is invested, but the outcome is not quite the same product, there is no demand for such vol-umes on the domestic market, and we cannot export technology in this form. This is a crucial aspect. We need to look at this issue within the framework of policy and develop it in such a way that it is flexible enough so that we can link the issues of both the domestic and foreign markets together,” Gavrilov said.
Wrapping up the discussion, H2 Clean Energy CEO Alexey Kaplun offered a forecast about Russia’s interaction with its foreign colleagues in matters concerning the fuel and ener-gy industry taking into account the current political and economic conditions and outlined the country’s immediate prospects in this regard.
“At the start of this year, after a well-known date in February, a tectonic shift occurred in almost all indicators of the comprehensive hydrogen energy programme. However, I don’t think there is any need for panic here because if we look at the map, there are more states that are friendly to us and their plans for the development of hydrogen energy and, in principle, for the energy transition are extremely significant, but these countries do not have technolo-gies. That’s precisely why it seems advisable to export the technologies of this sector,” said Alexey Zhikharev, Director of the Russia Renewable Energy Development Association and a power industry partner at Vygon Consulting.
For more about the Russian Energy Week 2022 International Forum, please visit the of-ficial website: rusenergyweek.com.
