How to Build a Green Hydrogen Economy for the US West

by Jeff St. John (GreenTechMedia) The Intermountain and ACES projects may be the start of a regionwide green hydrogen generation and transmission network. -- Out in Utah, a coal-fired power plant supplying electricity to Los Angeles is being outfitted with natural-gas-fired turbines that will eventually be able to run on hydrogen, created via electrolysis with wind and solar power and stored in massive underground caverns for use when that clean energy isn’t available for the grid.

This billion-dollar-plus project could eventually expand to more renewable-powered electrolyzers, storage and generators to supply dispatchable power for the greater Western U.S. grid. It could also grow to include hydrogen pipelines to augment and replace the natural gas used for heating and industry or supply hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle fleets across the region.

That’s the vision of the Western Green Hydrogen Initiative (WGHI), a group representing 11 Western states, two Canadian provinces and key green hydrogen industry players including Mitsubishi and utilities Dominion Energy and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. WGHI launched Tuesday to align state and federal efforts to create “a regional green hydrogen strategy,” including “a large-scale, long-duration renewable energy storage regional reserve.”

WGHI’s members hope this green hydrogen hub can “avoid uneconomic grid build-out, prevent renewable curtailment, repurpose existing infrastructure, reduce greenhouse gases and air pollution, reduce agricultural and municipal waste, and diversify fuels for multiple sectors from steel production to aviation.”

But industry groups say this kind of expansion will take a concerted effort, support for which has just begun to emerge from the U.S. federal government. The WGHI plans a regional approach "that's taking a page from the playbook" of green hydrogen plans being put f orward in Europe and Asia, said Laura Nelson, executive director of the Green Hydrogen Coalition advocacy group.

Green hydrogen is still at least four times as expensive to produce as “brown hydrogen” made from fossil fuel feedstocks, and the infrastructure to generate and use it needs development to bring down those costs.

One key factor in that cost reduction will be “scale, not just of our projects, but of the electrolysis industry,” which will need to grow its annual production capacity by several orders of magnitude and improve in efficiency over the coming decade.

One example is a project being proposed for Berkeley Pit, a massive former open-pit copper mine near Butte, Montana filled with billions of gallons of contaminated water. Earlier this year, Mitsubishi Power opened discussions with state and local government officials on a plan to convert that water to hydrogen using the rising amount of wind power being built in that state and nearby Wyoming.

Hydrogen’s lower energy density compared to natural gas requires more storage and transport capacity of a specialized design largely confined to oil and gas production zones today.

Wärtsilä’s engines power about one-third of the world’s cargo ships and a good deal of electricity generation, he said. It’s been making strides in converting its engines to run on 100 percent hydrogen and is developing hydrogen generation projects in the U.S. and Europe.

In a study focused on California, Wärtsilä showed that zero-carbon hydrogen, or methane generated with carbon-capture technologies, to fuel power plants is a much less expensive alternative to building the battery capacity needed to cover the final 5 percent to 10 percent of grid power needed to reach its 100 percent carbon-free energy goals.

Mitsubishi’s Browning (Paul Browning, CEO of Mitsubishi Power America) agreed that “green hydrogen is an energy storage technology. That’s really important because if you look at it as a fuel, you want to compare it to the price of natural gas and coal and other fuels — and that comparison does not look very good for hydrogen.”

“The proper comparison is what it would cost compared to lithium-ion or other storage technologies,” he said. READ MORE