Green Hydrogen: Can It Power a Carbon-Free Economy?

May 17, 2021

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by Jim Robbins (Energy Today) Saudi Arabia is constructing a futuristic city in the desert on the Red Sea called Neom. The $500 billion city — complete with flying taxis and robotic domestic help — is being built from scratch and will be home to a million people. And what energy product will be used both to power this city and sell to the world? Not oil. The Saudis are going big on something called green hydrogen — a carbon-free fuel made from water by using renewably produced electricity to split hydrogen molecules from oxygen molecules.

This summer, a large U.S. gas company, Air Products & Chemicals, announced that as part of Neom it has been building a green hydrogen plant in Saudi Arabia for the last four years. The plant is powered by 4 gigawatts from wind and solar projects that sprawl across the desert. It claims to be the world’s largest green hydrogen project — and more Saudi plants are on the drawing board.

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Europe, which has an economy that is saddled with high energy prices and is heavily dependent on Russian natural gas, is embracing green hydrogen by providing funding for construction of electrolysis plants and other hydrogen infrastructure. Germany has allocated the largest share of its clean energy stimulus funds to green hydrogen. “It is the missing part of the puzzle to a fully decarbonized economy,” the European Commission wrote in a July strategy document.

Hydrogen’s potential as a fuel source has been touted for decades, but the technology has never gotten off the ground on a sizeable scale — and with good reason, according to skeptics. They argue that widespread adoption of green hydrogen technologies has faced serious obstacles, most notably that hydrogen fuels need renewable energy to be green, which will require a massive expansion of renewable generation to power the electrolysis plants that split water into hydrogen and oxygen. Green hydrogen is also hard to store and transport without a pipeline. And right now in some places, such as the U.S., hydrogen is a lot more expensive than other fuels such as natural gas.

While it has advantages, says Michael Liebreich, a Bloomberg New Energy Finance analyst in the United Kingdom and a green hydrogen skeptic, “it displays an equally impressive list of disadvantages.” “It does not occur in nature so it requires energy to separate,” Liebreich wrote in a pair of recent essays for BloombergNEF. “Its storage requires compression to 700 times atmospheric pressure, refrigeration to 253 degrees Celsius… It carries one quarter the energy per unit volume of natural gas… It can embrittle metal; it escapes through the tiniest leaks and yes, it really is explosive.” In spite of these problems, Liebreich wrote, green hydrogen still “holds a vice-like grip over the imaginations of techno-optimists.”

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Green is the new kid on the hydrogen block, and because it’s manufactured with renewable energy, it’s CO2-free. Moreover, using renewable energy to create the fuel can help solve the problem of intermittency that plagues wind and solar power, and so it is essentially efficient storage. When demand for renewables is low, during the spring and fall, excess electricity can be used to power the electrolysis that is needed to split hydrogen and oxygen molecules. Then the hydrogen can be stored or sent down a pipeline.

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BloombergNEF estimates that to generate enough green hydrogen to meet a quarter of the world’s energy needs would take more electricity than the world generates now from all sources and an investment of $11 trillion in production and storage. That’s why the focus for now is on the 15 percent of the economy with energy needs not easily supplied by wind and solar power, such as heavy manufacturing, long-distance trucking, and fuel for cargo ships and aircraft.

The energy density of green hydrogen is three times that of jet fuel, making it a promising zero-emissions technology for aircraft. But Airbus, the European airplane manufacturer, recently released a statement saying that significant problems need to be overcome, including safely storing hydrogen on aircraft, the lack of a hydrogen infrastructure at airports, and cost. Experts say that new technologies will be needed to solve these problems. Nevertheless, Airbus believes green hydrogen will play an important role in decarbonizing air transport. “Cost-competitive green hydrogen and cross-industry partnerships will be mandatory to bring zero-emission flying to reality,” said Glen Llewellyn, vice president of Zero Emission Aircraft for Airbus. Hydrogen-powered aircraft could be flying by 2035, he said.

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A company called SGH2 recently announced it would build a large facility to produce green hydrogen in southern California. Instead of using electrolysis, though, it will use waste gasification, which heats many types of waste to high temperatures that reduce them to their molecular compounds. Those molecules then bind with hydrogen, and SGH2 claims it can make green hydrogen more cheaply than using electrolysis.

California officials also see green hydrogen as an alternative to fossil fuels for diesel vehicles. READ MORE

Executives Pen Letter to Newsom Calling for Major Investments in Hydrogen Infrastructure (NGT News)

Interactive map – Truck hydrogen refuelling stations needed in Europe by 2025 and 2030, per country (European Automobile Manufacturers Association)

Excerpt from NGT News: Specifically, the companies called on Newsom to boost funding in the state’s Clean Transportation Program reauthorization. They asked Newsom to direct the California Energy Commission to dedicate $500 million of the $1 billion to hydrogen fuel infrastructure to serve the light-duty, transit and heavy-duty vehicle markets.

Through the Clean Transportation Program, California is on track to provide $240 million for the development of hydrogen fueling infrastructure. That figure represents just 7% of total zero-emission infrastructure spending, according to the California Hydrogen Coalition. To become mainstream, the hydrogen economy cannot be based on subsidies, note the executives, and sustainable markets must be created. They cited a recent study by the California Air Resources Board that says “self-sufficiency [for the light-duty market] can be achieved by 2030 with state support of up to $300 million.”

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Signing the letter were officials from Toyota, Hyundai, BMW, Shell, Chevron, American Air Liquide Holdings, Ballard, Bayo Tech, Faurecia, Hexagon Purus, Nel-Americas, Nikola Motor, Plug Power, PowerTap Hydrogen Fueling Company, True Zero, Cellcentric, Cummins, Linde, 122 West, Black and Veatch, Mann + Hummel, Chart, Iwatani, Toyota Tsusho and Ways 2 H. READ MORE