
SH2AMROCK Newsletter
SH2AMROCK Tribe established first hydrogen foothold in Ireland.
Galway, the Irish “City of Tribes”, recently added a new millennium Tribe to the 14 ancient Tribes who dominated the political, commercial and social life of the city of Galway in Western Ireland between the mid-13th and late 19th centuries. The “SH2AMROCK Tribe”, consisting of 26 members, gathered in Galway on December 12, 2024, to cement the establishment of the first Hydrogen Community of local producers, distributors and users of hydrogen in Ireland. The SH2AMROCK project is part of the EU Commission’s ambition, supported by the EU Clean Hydrogen Partnership, to establish 50 Hydrogen Valleys by 2030 in Europe and will be the first direct replication of EU’s first Hydrogen Valley, HEAVENN.

Situated at the most Western tip of European transport and energy networks, Galway is historically and geographically well positioned to link clean energy networks to the first hydrogen markets nationally, as well as overseas. SH2AMROCK’s Tribe members cover the full value chain from clean hydrogen production, to its distribution across key hard-to-abate sectors, including key infrastructure.
With a total investment of approximately €80mln, of which 10,2 mln EU funding, it will showcase the capacity of H2 to maximise penetration of RES through sector coupling, while facilitating widespread integration of renewable H2 into Ireland’s energy system. SH2AMROCK will realise this goal through the deployment of the country’s first hydrogen valley and multi-modal H2 transport hub in Galway – accelerating the island of Ireland’s energy transition and decarbonisation across multiple end-user applications.
Following the tradition of Tribes along EU’s main transport corridors.

The intriguing history of Tribes in Galway started with the the families of Athy, Blake, Bodkin, Browne, Darcy/D’Arcy, Deane, Font, French, Joyce, Kirwan, Lynch, Martin, Morris and Skerritt descending on the City of Galway in the late 1300. Of the 14 families, 12 were of Anglo Norman origin, while two—the Darcy (Ó Dorchaí) and Kirwan (Ó Ciardhubháin) families—were Normanised Irish Gaels. From the Irish Family History Centre, we learned that the Blake family for example, who settled in Connacht (the western province) by the 14th Century, were operating sea-going vessels and traded goods with ports on the Western coast of France, and Spain.
These old trading routes are now part of one the Core transport corridors in Europe, the North Sea Rhine Mediterranean Corridor as part of the Trans European Network for Transport (TEN T), one of largest trade routes over water and land in Europe. TEN T is part of the EU’s Connecting Europe Facility, that is supporting the uptake of clean energy, digital and transport networks. SH2AMROCK will concentrate its activities in and around the Port of Galway, that was recently added as a “node” to TEN T. As the most Western tip of this network, it will be connected to various sustainable infrastructure developments along these routes. Coordinated by the University of Galway, the SH2AMROCK Tribe includes the Galway Harbour Company and Galway Aviation Services Limited as well as the Irish Public Transport agency, CORAS IOMPAIR EIREANN, to develop heavy duty applications and complementary infrastructure for the use of hydrogen, supplied by Irish power company Bord Na Mona Powergen.
SH2AMROCK, an artificial intelligent tribe

SH2AMROCK’s location in Ireland is offering also an exciting opportunity to explore rapid developments of AI, in visualizing this energy transition, but also its potential impact on energy use and electricity grids with regards to the deployment of datacentres, Dublin being one of Europe’s five largest data centre hubs. According to the Irish National Hydrogen Strategy “the use of hydrogen as a primary energy source for large electricity users, such as data centres, is considered a low priority end-use, as the direct supply of electricity from renewable sources will be more efficient. However, data centres require a high degree of reliability and typically require on-site backup generation should their electricity supply fail at any point.
Given the location specific impacts that large energy users can have on electricity networks, renewable hydrogen in combination with direct renewable sources and co-located with large energy users could be used to fuel on-site back-up generation, alleviating the potential challenges associated with decarbonising these sectors in the short to medium term.” According to a recent KPMG report, thanks to its popularity as a tech hub, plus structural demand drivers such as cloud adoption and smart device proliferation, Ireland is seeing soaring demand for new data infrastructure. However, supply side bottlenecks threaten to temper this growth in practice; key among them: low carbon energy supply.
SH2AMROCK’s objective to facilitate the introduction of hydrogen into the Irish energy mix to increase flexibility, security, and resilience as well as aid sector coupling to achieve further penetration will help to reduce energy dependency and poverty issues, currently at record high levels. By providing hydrogen as an indigenous means of fuel that can address the needs of industry, vehicle fleets, and the general public in the built environment, free from the costs of import and carbon taxes. Through the establishment of large-scale hydrogen projects, Ireland can facilitate domestic production to produce low-levelized costs of hydrogen which, in the long-term, can be some of the most competitive in all of Europe.
It takes a Tribe to build a Hydrogen Valley.

SH2AMROCK is dedicated to furthering cross-sector collaboration within Ireland, and will bring skillsets, experience, influence, and local knowledge together in several ways. The overall project will cross many sectors to deliver its deployment scope – renewable energy generation, gas supply/distribution, transport fleet operators, industrial processes. The project consortium features companies in a range of sizes from micro -SMEs that service isolated communities, to multi-national corporations with over 10 million customers worldwide, as well as public sector authorities, and academic & R&I institutions.
SH2AMROCK also features trans-national collaboration in the island of Ireland, through direct replication and engagement with NI to promote an all-Ireland hydrogen approach, as well as international efforts through the project’s replication regions – Slovenia, Ukraine, Cyprus, North Macedonia and South Africa. Furthermore, not only will this interdisciplinary and international co-operation be seen within the project consortium, but also externally though the engagement of partners from a variety of sectors in other linked interdisciplinary projects.