How Water Could Be the Future of Fuel

by Nicolás Rivero and Emily Wright (Washington Post) A new generation of fuels could power planes and ships without warming the planet. -- ... Turning hydrogen into liquid fuel could help slash planet-warming pollution from heavy vehicles, cutting a key source of emissions that contribute to climate change. But to fulfill that promise, companies will have to build massive numbers of wind turbines and solar panels to power the energy-hungry process. Regulators will have to make sure hydrogen production doesn’t siphon green energy that could go towards cleaning up other sources of global warming gases, such as homes or factories.

To wean machines off oil, companies like Infinium, the owner of this plant, are starting to churn out hydrogen-based fuels that — in the best case — produce close to net zero emissions. They could also pave the way for a new technology, hydrogen fuel cells, to power planes, ships and trucks in the second half of this century. For now, these fuels are expensive and almost no one makes them, so the U.S. government, businesses and philanthropists including Bill Gates are investing billions of dollars to build up a hydrogen industry that could cut eventually some of the most stubborn, hard-to-remove carbon pollution.

It’s the most abundant element in the universe and its molecules store a lot of energy. It takes a lot of energy to bind two hydrogen atoms into a molecule — and once they’re connected, the bond is very unstable. The hydrogen atoms are itching to break apart and release all their energy the moment there’s enough heat and oxygen to kick off a chemical reaction.

That’s a useful property inside an internal combustion engine, which uses tiny explosions to turn a crank that spins the wheels of a truck or the propeller of a boat.

Green hydrogen could also cut carbon pollution beyond transportation, as an ingredient in fertilizers or to refine steel, chemicals and oil.

David Eaglesham, who co-founded the billion-dollar electrolyzer startup Electric Hydrogen, imagines a world where companies can buy electrolyzers off the shelf and run them in plants that produce tens of thousands of tons of hydrogen a year. That’s still years away as companies like his start to open factories.

But cheap electrolyzers alone aren’t enough to produce the amount of green hydrogen needed to fuel heavy transportation. “If the [electrolyzer] stack was free, you wouldn’t solve the problem,” Eaglesham said. It takes a lot of energy to split water molecules and force the hydrogen atoms to bond with one another.

The other all-important ingredient to make green hydrogen is cheap, green energy. Without a massive amount of renewable electricity, clean hydrogen-based fuels are a fantasy.

The danger of using grid power for hydrogen production is that, across the United States, just like in Texas, 60 percent of that energy comes from fossil fuels. Making hydrogen from electricity that dirty is worse than simply making it from fossil fuels, according to an April 2023 analysis from Energy Innovation, a clean energy think tank.

Experts say that for green hydrogen to be truly clean, it has to be made at a plant hooked up to its own dedicated wind turbines and solar panels, or follow strict rules for using newly added renewable electricity from the grid. Federal officials are setting clean power rules that will decide which hydrogen plants qualify for billions of dollars in tax credits.

To store it and use it, you have to cool it below -253 degrees Celsius and compress it until the air pressure is several hundred times higher than our atmosphere. Even then, it takes up much more space than other fuels, which makes it expensive to transport on ships and trucks. The best way to move it is by pipeline, and hundreds of miles of hydrogen pipelines already exist in Texas, but expanding that network will be time-consuming and costly.

Those carbon atoms arrive at the plant in the form of carbon dioxide pumped in from six nearby oil refineries. Typically, those facilities would let that CO2 — released when distilling crude oil into gasoline, jet fuel, diesel and other products — waft into the air.

On the other hand, capturing carbon from the air or factory smokestacks, turning it into fuel and then releasing it again recycles carbon that was already floating around. It doesn’t put any new carbon into the atmosphere.

A truck running on diesel made from hydrogen using only renewable electricity would create 89 percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions over the course of its lifetime than a truck burning diesel made from petroleum, according to a 2022 analysis from the European nonprofit Transport & Environment. READ MORE