Strategic plan for Ontario’s hydrogen hub in Sarnia-Lambton

The Sarnia-Lambton region is home to Ontario’s largest cluster of current and potential hydrogen producers and users, including stakeholders across the petrochemical, hybrid chemistry, advanced manufacturing, and value-added agricultural sectors. Over 150,000 tonnes of hydrogen are produced and utilized within Sarnia-Lambton each year as feedstock for refining, chemicals and fertilizer production.

The Sarnia-Lambton region already acts as a large-scale, multi-industry hydrogen hub. The strategic plan's goals are to transition to low-carbon hydrogen production, enable the implementation of transformational technologies that utilize hydrogen for deep decarbonization to grow demand, and attract direct investment to benefit the local economy and communities. The key challenges with developing this strategic plan revolved around industry agreement and differing perspectives on where the region should focus investments and action. There are many potential opportunities matched by an equally large number of challenges and barriers to implementation. Stakeholder engagement was crucial to flush out the varying perspectives and identify opportunities for stakeholders to work together to overcome barriers.

The overall goal was to develop a Roadmap and Investment Attraction Action Plan for attracting investment and creating jobs to benefit the local economy. SLEP engaged us to lead the development of the Strategic Plan to accomplish this. The Strategic Plan, published online by SLEP here, presents the outcomes of extensive stakeholder engagement, assessment of regional strengths and weaknesses, learnings from hydrogen hubs globally and modelling of forecasted hydrogen demand and cost competitiveness.

To kick off the strategy development, we engaged with over 20 stakeholders across industry, academia, and research and development organizations via virtual workshopping tools to collect insight and perspectives on current industrial activity, hydrogen production and use, and growth and decarbonization plans. Stakeholder engagement completed during the strategic plan development included workshops, interviews and discussions with major stakeholders and reviews and responses to draft modelling and reporting. We collected energy demand information across the region, developed forecasts for low-carbon hydrogen demand across several potential solutions, and evaluated the region's economic competitiveness compared to other hydrogen hubs. With input from stakeholders on the barriers to implementation, we developed the Investment Attraction Action Plan consisting of actionable items and suggested timelines for SLEP and stakeholders across six major categories – Tackling Policy Barriers, Promoting and Enabling the Hub, Partnerships, Developing Shared Infrastructure, Workforce Training, and Community Engagement & Education.

The information and analysis presented in the published strategic plan shows the Sarnia-Lambton region has strategic advantages for hosting the launching point of a large-scale, multi-faceted low-carbon hydrogen economy in Ontario. The region is well-positioned to be one of the largest low-carbon hydrogen hubs in Canada and a leader in industrial decarbonization, as well as research and development of low-carbon hydrogen solutions.

There is a significant opportunity for scaling up the local low-carbon hydrogen hub in Sarnia-Lambton by replacing the existing hydrogen feedstock demand with low-carbon hydrogen. Additionally, blending hydrogen into the region’s four natural gas power plants to reduce peak carbon intensity of the Ontario electric grid, blending hydrogen into industrial natural gas heating systems to tackle large-scale industrial emissions reductions and blending hydrogen into the local low-pressure gas distribution network feeding residential, commercial, and light industrial customers. By 2050, demand could range from nearly 500,000 tonnes of hydrogen per year to over 1 million tonnes per year in the region alone.