by Ingrid Vaileanu 

​MEET4HYDROGEN HAS ESTABLISHED ITSELF AS THE FIRST BUSINESS CONVENTION DEDICATED TO HYDROGEN APPLICATIONS.

This mars 2025 the conférence H2 Ports H2 Sky organized in Marseille in France was dedicated to the hydrogène transition acceleration in different sectors. 

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Among relevant topics this conference is dedicated to hydrogen applications: maritime, river, port, air, space, and airport: 

- A very significant international outreach

- Key speaker and participant profiles in the hydrogen sector

- The Delivery Award highlighting successful hydrogen projects

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Dr. Florin Paun, one of the invited guest speaker of this conference in 2025, after having been invited guest speaker at the French-German Forum at the Senate in Paris in 2024, presents some of the disruptive technologies enabling consumption of liquid Hydrogen delivered as Low pressure gaseous Hydrogen to Fuel Cells but also as High pressure gaseous Hydrogen for injection in future decarbonated highly efficient Internal Combustion Engines.

These are some of the main competitive advantages of French industrial innovations and experiments based on science (patents, development, experimentations, scientific research, PhD theses, articles, etc.) for the hydrogen futur solutions. 

In the context of hydric stress, the development of energy solutions based on hydrogen (produced with less water consumption compared to the carbon extraction, for example) becomes a matter of national and European futur sovereignty.

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France has a dream: leading the way in the standardisation of hydrogenation for advanced mobility.

French patents and experimentations give competitive advantages to French innovations in hydrogen solutions across different sectors. France is ready to propose standards and accelerate the deployment of hydrogen innovations in ports and in the sky!

Listen to the inspiring message from Dr. Florin Paun, invited guest speaker at the French-German Energy Forum in the French Senate in 2024, and at the H2Ports H2Sky Conference in 2025.

H2Ports and H2Sky Conference in Marseille: Discussing Groundbreaking Hydrogen Innovations

"We filed patents related to this new type of innovative architecture for distributing gaseous hydrogen at high pressure without the use of a cryo-pump. We discovered that the examiners sent us back eight other patents that were ranked for specialists in categories A, X, and Y. This means that when you have a good patent, there are eight other patents trying to solve the same problem in a different way, and they all use the so-called buffering technology for isochoric compression. By the way, cocorico — ours is one of nine patents in the world on this topic. That's why I'm launching an official call to standardise the high-pressure distribution of hydrogen through buffering solutions, based on five French patents among the nine existing worldwide. So you have Boeing, General Electric, and EnCal Labs — a joint laboratory with MIT — three in the United States; one at Shenzhen University in China; and five French patents: Total, GTT, Engie, Safran, and Aresia. So I believe this is the place to build a standard around the French patents." Source : Discours de Dr. Florin Paun (https://www.linkedin.com/in/florin-paun-562931/?skipRedirect=true; www.florin-paun.com), ancien Directeur Innovation Onera et acteul Directeur Partenariats et Proprieté Intellecteulle d’Aresia, innitiateur et co-auteur des 5 brevets Aresia pour le futur de l’hydrogène liquide) lors de la conférence France Hydrogene : H2ports H2Sky 2025 ; https://youtu.be/uhz5O66cwmw;https://www.interviewfrancophone.net/h2port-h2sky-la-france-du-hydrogene

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For more details :

https://meet4hydrogen.com/2025/en/

www.florin-paun.com

Forum Franco Allemand au Sénat, 2024

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Note: More details about the importance of the Aresia Patents for the futur of the liquid hydrogen technologies.

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Source: French Senate — Speech by Dr. Florin Paun (https://www.linkedin.com/in/florin-paun-562931/?skipRedirect=true; www.florin-paun.com), former Innovation Director at Onera and current Director of Partnerships and Intellectual Property at Aresia, initiator and co-author of Aresia's 5 patents for the future of liquid hydrogen), invited guest speaker at the French Senate by the 2024 Franco-German Forum

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https://youtu.be/mHt8VcgG-LE

"You spoke about the specificity of aerospace: I am an aerospace engineer, from Bucharest. But before that, I was part of the Romanian Olympic physics team, at the General Competitions [Concours généraux]. So I'll be happy to make you love physics, for those in the audience who don't already love it. Then I went through Polytechnique, here, because it's an obligatory step — but let's keep it simple.It was also said that Europe was originally built around energy. That immediately makes me think of the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age: in fact, the ages of humanity, technologically speaking, were not ages of energy, they were ages of materials. And Europe, on the other hand, was built around energy, with the Coal and Steel Community. I would also like to point out that economically, a country, a society, cannot survive without access to energy — I was going to say decarbonized, but I prefer to say: cheap.First, a bit of historical recap. We had the industrial revolution, made possible by coal. We then gained access to photovoltaics — our German friends are a bit "crazy," but they're right on this point, with this quote that's very dear to me: "the sun doesn't send you an invoice." That's brilliant. So we have energy, we know how to convert it into electricity with a positive carbon balance for photovoltaics — it's a bit less true for wind, but these technologies are becoming carbon-positive too. So we have access to decarbonized energy, that's important.But on the other hand, in our everyday life, we have a problem with electric current: at the physics level, we don't really know how to store it, we don't know how to transport it without losses, without major infrastructure. That's the real problem: we have access to energy, but we don't know how to store it properly. And especially as an aerospace person, I'll tell you: we don't know how to store it for mobility, to carry it with us. A locomotive, you give it coal, wood — in Africa, I even learned that they used coffee! It's silly, but they put that in the locomotive and it moved. So you need to carry the energy with you when we talk about mobility.So we think: batteries, like with Tesla. And here I'll get into some numbers, just to compare orders of magnitude: petroleum, diesel, that's 46 MJ per kilogram stored. A battery, on the other hand, is around 0.7 MJ per kilogram. 0.7 compared to 46: that's where you see that we simply don't know how to store electricity properly with current batteries. I'm not here to argue, but the numbers speak for themselves.There's also gas: it's carbon-based fossil energy, and there isn't yet an environmental party that has really gone after this practice — I think they would have targeted it already. But people use it because it's practical, not for the planet, let's be clear — and especially because it's practical from an energy standpoint: 46 MJ/kg.But I have good news to announce: hydrogen is 120–130 MJ/kg, almost three times more! So we think we'll make green hydrogen. Except it takes about 33 kWh to produce 1 kg of hydrogen, which comes out to a production cost equivalent to about €1.55 per liter of diesel equivalent, just in production cost alone. So we're far from the goal of cheap energy in Europe. So we have a problem with green hydrogen.But there is a solution, one that our German friends demonstrated as early as 2006: Power-to-Gas. It consists of transforming the cost of the energy produced into what's called a marginal cost. Rather than stopping the wind turbines in the North Sea because the grid is saturated — even though they want to keep turning — you let them keep turning and use that electricity to electrolyze water. [Unclear passage about water salinity / a percentage yield.] They then feed hydrogen directly into their gas pipeline network in Germany — that's starting to be clever. They sometimes have up to 6% hydrogen in their gas. Now we're really onto a solution.That's where hydrogen from green energy becomes profitable: when you think in terms of marginal cost. But for that, you also need a bit of economics — and I wonder how many journalists, or even decision-makers, really understand the concept of marginal cost. You can get to very low costs per kWh, and that's where it gets interesting: rather than stopping production, you make hydrogen when the grid can no longer absorb more renewable input. Green hydrogen then becomes a "buffer" hydrogen for storing energy, and economically, that becomes viable. And there's also the turquoise solution, promoted by France, based on pyrolysis — which will please Total and other industrial players.Now, we have hydrogen, we've solved the cost problem. In terms of energy density it's much better, but in terms of volume... We hear a lot about hydrogen aircraft, they exist, you've seen them fly — but you actually need three times the storage volume, so you reduce cabin capacity, and you lower the cruising speed from Mach 0.85 to about Mach 0.6. Watch out for volume: it's seven times more voluminous for the same amount of energy stored on board. To go back to my "tons of coffee" I want to bring with me on my locomotive, so to speak — either it's compressed gas at 700 bar (imagine a leak in a tank at 700 bar, knowing that on top of that hydrogen doesn't just ignite, it can actually detonate — for the uninitiated, detonation is when the flame propagates faster than sound, so you get burned before the explosion even happens, nice) — or it's liquid hydrogen, but at below -253°C [not 153°, likely a transcription error], and there you get into a real engineering challenge. Solutions exist, but when you use it, you go through a fuel cell, where our German friends are very good — I must admit I'm doing research on this — they're also very good at electrolyzers, which is no coincidence given that we're investing by buying stakes in a German startup that produces hydrogen for Baku. The fuel cell itself needs gaseous hydrogen at room temperature, supplied at under 10 bar.But if we want to save the European automotive industry — because we're in the process of killing it, I just got back from the Auto Show, go see the disaster for yourself, go confront people and tell them: 'I don't care about your electric car, show me an Audi RS3, I want thrills, that engine is magnificent' — we're very good in Europe at engines. Do you know what the engine and gearbox represent in a car? You're going to understand the disaster awaiting us if we go all-in on battery-electric, facing heavily subsidized Chinese competitors. We shouldn't fight on that ground — I'm sorry, Mr. Carlos Tavares, but you're wrong on this point, we shouldn't go confront them on their own turf. We need to stay on our turf, and burn this hydrogen in our internal combustion engines, which are the best in the world. And contrary to what some experts claimed, we now know how to burn hydrogen in combustion chambers without producing NOx — that problem is solved. From there, you need to distribute the gaseous hydrogen at the right pressure, at the right temperature, above 20 bar, starting from liquid storage. As a reminder, in endurance racing (24h/8h), you have to stop at the pit to refuel. There, we don't yet have a solution: we have technological bottlenecks with the liquid, we don't have an adjustable valve below -253°C, we don't have a reliable pump, so we can't yet precisely control the flow rate.

Be aware that this issue of hydrogen distribution — right pressure, right temperature, adjustable flow rate, starting from liquid storage — is the subject of numerous patents around the world, with competing and complementary players: the University of Shenzhen, GE, Boeing, MIT... And do you know who holds the majority of these patents? France: Total Energies, GTT, Engie, Safran, and Aresia!"

Source: Speech by Dr. Florin Paun (...), at the Senate, invited guest speaker of the Franco-German Forum organized by Revue Passages ADAPES, Emile Malet.

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