Environment [ Return towards  Long-term growth  ]

The Group offers its customers solutions for productive and environmentally friendly industrial processes:

• Oxygen used in the industrial manufacture of steel or glass reduces CO₂ and nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions and improves the quality of the final products.
• Hydrogen supplied by the Group is used by refiners for the desulfurization of hydrocarbons. As a result, more than 700,000 tonnes of sulfur dioxide emissions are avoided every year, which is more than the total annual emissions of a country like France (450,000 tonnes).
• The Group intervenes across the whole chain (concentration, purification, transport and injection of CO₂ in the subsoil), and more particularly in the development of oxycombustion technologies. Using oxygen instead of air in industrial furnaces produces more concentrated CO₂ emissions, which are easier to capture. The Group partners on many projects to test the full range of these technologies currently underway at sites across Europe, the United States and Australia.

The photovoltaic

In 2009, Air Liquide confirmed its position as the world-leading supplier to the photovoltaic industry, a continuously growing sector, by signing several industrial gas supply contracts with cell manufacturers.

The Hydrogen

The launch of the H2E (Horizon Hydrogen Energy) project in October 2008 aims for development hydrogen energy field, and reflects again the Group’s commitment to developing innovative technologies for the production and storage of hydrogen as well as the industrialization of fuel cells.

In October 2011, Air Liquide initiated Blue Hydrogen, a program dedicated to allowing the Group to gradually decarbonize its production of hydrogen for energy-related applications.
Specifically, Air Liquide has pledged to produce at least 50% of the hydrogen needed for these applications without releasing CO2 by 2020, through a combination of:

• using renewable energies, electrolysis of water and biogas reforming
• using techniques for the capture and storage of the CO2 released during the production of hydrogen from natural gas.