In Chile’s Southern Tip, a Bet on Hydrogen Worries Conservationists

The birds are like clouds in Bahía Lomas. Far off in the southern tip of South America, in the province of Tierra del Fuego, migration takes its highest form in this bay in the eastern mouth in the Straits of Magellan. 

Here, thousands of birds, like the Red Knot, congregate each winter after flying over 9,000 miles from north to south, in search of their wintering grounds. But amid the migrating shorebirds and vast expanse of beach, a potential wind farm development on public land takes shape only a couple of miles away.

These wind farm projects, part of the plan for “green” hydrogen in the Magallanes region, “carry a high risk” for the conservation of the sanctuary of Bahía Lomas, said Diego Luna Quevedo, a specialist in policy and governance for the organization Manomet Conservation Sciences.

For some, the problem is not a single wind farm. Instead, it’s the gigantic scale of the hydrogen industry in the Magallanes and its lack of planning, Luna Quevedo said.

In 2020, Chile presented an ambitious National Green Hydrogen Strategy as part of a plan to become one of the world’s top three exporters of green hydrogen by 2040. A focal point of the strategy is for Chile to become the “cheapest producer of green hydrogen on Earth,” wrote Juan Carlos Jobet, former minister of energy and mining, in the published 2020 strategy, referring to hydrogen produced by the electrolysis of water, using renewable electricity. 

For that reason, Magallanes and the Chilean Antarctic, Chile’s southernmost region, could soon become the heart of the country’s transition towards cleaner energy.

Hydrogen, however, has yet to be produced on any large commercial scale. Even smaller is the amount of green hydrogen that exists today. And yet, as Chile bets on producing over 13 percent of the world’s green hydrogen, many worry about what that means for this pristine region.

Made of Patagonian lagoons, wetlands and grasslands, the Magallanes region is host to multiple species of birds that use the habitat as a nesting and feeding site. “The Magellanic steppe is a mosaic of different habitats,” said Luna Quevedo. “It’s our equivalent to the Arctic tundra.”

The development of under-planned wind farms puts at risk the life cycle of birds already considered at risk of extinction, said Luna Quevedo.

Wind farms are needed to produce green hydrogen from water during electrolysis. Historically, hydrogen has been produced from natural gas, and therefore a distinction exists between green hydrogen made from water and renewable energy, and “gray” hydrogen derived from natural gas and non-renewable electricity (which is called “blue” hydrogen if carbon capture technology is used to capture the greenhouse gas emissions resulting from production). 

And yet, the debate isn’t entirely around hydrogen, said Luna Quevedo, adding: “We value hydrogen as a possible option of decarbonization, we’re just alerting about the way it’s being aggressively promoted and developed, particularly in this region.”

Bahía Lomas as a Sanctuary

When he was a boy, Ricardo Matus’ father worked in the national oil company and they lived in Cerro Sombrero, a village close to Bahía Lomas. Back then, little was known about the importance of the site for birds. On a map of Tierra del Fuego, he explained, Bahía Lomas is an open bay on the side of the Atlantic Ocean, about 40 miles from one end of the bay to the other. The area is a tidal plain, with a tidal variation that exceeds 4 miles every day, making it an important feeding site for many shorebirds.

“It used to be that we knew nothing about the place,” he said, “and it wasn’t until the 1980s, thanks to an overflight, that researchers saw it as an important bird site.” That flight was done on his father’s plane and was part of an effort by the Canadian Wildlife Service to create an atlas of the Nearctic shorebirds that wintered in South America. They flew over the entirety of the coast of South America—and discovered Bahía Lomas.

But as a boy, Matus felt like he didn’t appreciate the place. It wasn’t until he joined the efforts of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 2000 as the local counterpart in Bahía Lomas, when they were capturing and researching Red Knots in order to better understand their migration from the Canadian Arctic to Chile, that he became involved with the place.

Matus, now a naturalist, works with the researchers at the Bahía Lomas Research Center to study the feeding grounds for shorebirds. Some of the bird species that inhabit Bahía Lomas, and the Magallanes region in general, include the rare Magellanic plover, of which there are less than 500 individuals, and the ruddy-headed goose, on the brink of extinction in the South American continent. The region is a migration area for about 43 species of birds.

Although those and many other birds in the region have declined due to other causes, Matus worries about what the hydrogen industry might mean for this sanctuary and for the rest of the Patagonian steppe.

If the region becomes a major development hub for energy and wind turbines, “no other living being will be as affected as birds,” Matus said.

Researchers have extensively documented bird collisions and displacements by wind turbines around the world. Wind power facilities can degrade habitat, cause bird collisions and displacement, and disrupt important migratory routes, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. 

Though some studies say many more birds die due to building collisions than wind turbine collisions—or even the environmental impacts of the same fossil fuel industry that hydrogen is trying to replace—conservationists worry that the development of the hydrogen industry (including wind parks) could affect not only Bahía Lomas but the whole ecosystem of the Magellanic steppe. 

Preliminary estimates suggest that the hydrogen projects in the Magallanes region could reach about 2,900 wind turbines by 2027—an increase of 320 percent in Chile’s wind energy generation capacity. The country aims to produce 126 gigawatts of wind capacity.

“The magnitude of what is planned for Magallanes is what worries me,” said Carmen Espoz, dean of the faculty of sciences at the University of Santo Tomás and director of the Bahía Lomas Research Center, run by the same university.

Wind Farms for Hydrogen

On paper, at least, the development of green hydrogen in Chile sounds promising: the country has favorable conditions for renewable energies—including the Patagonian winds and the intense radiation of the Atacama desert—and is committed to a goal of carbon neutrality by 2050. According to a 2020 government report, the hydrogen industry will also create at least 94,000 new jobs from now until 2050.

The potential of the Magallanes’ region as a hub for clean energy means that they could produce up to 10 million tons of green hydrogen a year, says a report from the Chilean Ministry of Energy. For reference, Chile currently produces 70,000 tons of hydrogen using natural gas (only 0.1 percent globally), says the same report. Green hydrogen could help Chile reach its goal of decarbonization. 

And yet, scientists and local organizations worry that despite the role green hydrogen plays in displacing fossil fuels, scaling up its production would require extensive land use and a transformation of the region that could potentially alter ecosystems.

To reach Chile’s goal of producing over 13 percent of the world’s hydrogen requires at least 5,000 square miles of wind turbines in Magallanes, according to Luna Quevedo’s estimates. This could lead to 1,740 to 5,220 bird collisions per year, wrote Luna Quevedo, Espoz, Matus and others, in a letter published in Science in 2022, which would be critical for bird species with only hundreds of individuals remaining. Those numbers might be higher considering the area is an important migratory site, they say in the letter.

For wind turbine collisions specifically, different technologies are used around the world that can prevent or minimize bird strikes, like painting one blade of the turbine black, which increases visibility and minimizes collisions. Some wind companies are even experimenting with artificial intelligence to power the turbines down when birds approach. In a pocket of Southern California, a group of researchers applied this technique to California condors that inhabited an area with wind turbines with initial successful results. But ultimately, the easiest way is to avoid placing wind turbines in any site that is relevant to a bird’s lifecycle, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

Environmental Impact and Migration Corridors

Others say hydrogen in the Magallanes region could potentially help the region’s economy. “In an absence of change it will continue to extract oil and gas,” said Marcelo Mena, former Minister of the Environment in Chile who was on the Advisory Board of the National Green Hydrogen Strategy.

For Mena, “there’s no black or white.”

There are ways to produce green hydrogen with a minimal impact, he said, and for now, without having a complete assessment of the environmental consequences, it’s hard to know the full extent. There’s always room for improvement in developing these energies, said Mena.

When the projects are evaluated for environmental impacts, it should be rigorous, he said, but “what is being asked of the green hydrogen industry is not what is being asked of the oil and gas industry that we want to replace.”

In March, the public presented nearly 500 observations to the Environmental Impact Study of one of the wind projects in Magallanes, Faro del Sur, a $500 million project that would build 64 wind turbines in Punta Arenas. There are several other projects waiting to undergo environmental impact studies, although some have already been gathering information. If Faro del Sur gets approval, it might set a precedent for the next projects, according to Luna Quevedo.

Last December, a group of local and national organizations signed a letter asking Chilean President Gabriel Boric not to transform Magallanes into a “zone of sacrifice.” This term describes what has happened with other regions in Chile, like Quintero-Puchuncaví or Coronel, where people and ecosystems have been severely affected by industrial development (like coal power plants, in both cases). The letter also urged the government to consider proper land management regarding environmental impact. 

For now, some worry that despite the enormous potential of green hydrogen to decarbonize the planet, the lands of the country’s southernmost region are not compatible with producing 13 percent of the world’s hydrogen. Because of this, some researchers and organizations are asking for a safe corridor for the birds of the Magallanes, including those of Bahía Lomas. A corridor would prioritize habitats and sites needed for the life cycles of many bird species. These sites are then seen as “tracks” of non-intervention to protect birds.

The minimum should be required to protect these species, said Ivo Tejeda, executive director of the Bird and Wildlife Watchers Network of Chile (ROC). For him, that minimum includes protecting areas from any intervention, including creating a corridor for migratory birds.

“We want to see a transition to cleaner energy, but that isn’t an excuse to do things in a hasty manner,” said Tejeda. 

Even with an increasing worry among researchers and the public about the magnitude of the hydrogen industry in the Magallanes, the sanctuary of Bahía Lomas stands out for its closeness to potential wind farms.

“It just should not be admissible that a wind park will be next to Bahía Lomas,” Tejeda said.