Is Hydrogen the New Oil?

September 23, 2021

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by Fred Pearce (China Dialogue) Hydrogen may have lost the race to fuel electric cars but it looks a likely contender to replace fossil fuels in trucks, ships, planes and heavy industry -- ... Japan, once a passionate advocate of nuclear energy, now has serious hydrogen ambitions. The country has the world’s largest network of hydrogen filling stations. It is planning to replace fossil fuels with hydrogen in heavy industries such as steel-making. And it has a head start in organising imports of the fuel. In 2019, Kawasaki Heavy Industries launched the Suiso Frontier, the world’s first ship designed to carry liquefied hydrogen. It aims to tap promised Australian hydrogen production.

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Wide-spread use of hydrogen, it if really happens, will have been a long time coming. The first hydrogen-powered engine was working as long ago as 1807, and people were proposing making hydrogen by electrolysing water, to replace coal as early as the 1860s. But coal and oil were always cheaper. And the Hindenburg disaster, when a hydrogen-filled airship exploded in 1937, gave the fuel a reputation as unsafe.

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There is talk that a global “hydrogen economy” can emerge to save the climate from carbon emissions. Hydrogen could power trucks, ships and planes and be used to produce everything from cement to steel and fertiliser. Saehoon Kim, the head of Hyundai’s fuel cell division told a British trade association webinar last year: “In the past, our technology and industry was all about collecting oil, delivering oil and using oil. And now, in the future, it will be collecting sunshine, delivering sunshine and using sunshine – and what will make that possible is hydrogen.”

Others are much more sceptical. “It is only ever going to be a niche energy source,” said Tom Baxter, a chemical engineer at the University of Aberdeen.

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“Green hydrogen can never be cheaper than the green electricity needed to make it,” he said.

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Hydrogen is rarely burned directly as a fuel source. Instead it is used as a carrier of energy, made where cheap energy is available for manufacture and shipping round the world to where it is needed. Usually that means in a fuel cell inside a vehicle engine, where the gas is mixed with oxygen, releasing its energy and emitting only water vapour.

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The gas contains more energy for every tonne than any fossil fuel, and avoids the need for batteries. But manufacturing it takes a lot of electricity. So it is only as climate friendly as the energy used to produce it.

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In their long-term plans, major oil companies are looking at hydrogen as a potential source of income, once demand for petrol and diesel starts petering out.

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“For the moment, fossil fuels are cheaper and much more widely available than hydrogen. This comes in part because of large government subsidies across the globe which amount to US$400 billion. If those subsidies were removed, alternative fuels like hydrogen would stand a better chance of becoming widely adopted,” said Seifi Ghasemi, chief executive of US industrial gas company Air Products at a BNEF conference in New York this year.

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Airbus, the world’s second largest plane maker, last year unveiled plans for three different zero-emission “concept” hydrogen planes that it says could be in service by 2035. Meanwhile, California start-up ZeroAvia has a six-seater research plane already running on hydrogen.

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Sceptics say creating global supply chains to manufacture, ship and deliver hydrogen is too cumbersome and inefficient, especially when the infrastructure would have to be built from scratch. By some counts, around two-thirds of the energy would be lost along the way.

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“Primary steel and ammonia production are sensible entry points for green hydrogen,” he (Falko Ueckerdt of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research) says. In both cases, the hydrogen can replace fossil fuels as an essential part of the process, as well as providing energy.

But he warns that rising demand for hydrogen in areas such as heating buildings could give an advantage to cheap blue hydrogen and create a “fossil-fuel lock-in that endangers climate targets.”

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" ... Infrastructures exist for almost any synthetic liquid hydrocarbon, while hydrogen requires a totally new distribution network,” argued Ulf Bossel, a fuel cell consultant and Baldur Eliasson, researcher for ABB Switzerland, in a white paper on the hydrogen economy. READ MORE

Energy and the Hydrogen Economy (Ulf Bossel and Baldur Eliasson)

The Future of the Hydrogen Economy: Bright or Bleak? (Cogeneration and Competitive Power Journal)

ESG & ENERGY: HYDROGEN’S POTENTIAL COMES WITH TRADEOFFS (Cornerstone Macro)

Does a Hydrogen Economy Make Sense? (Proceedings of the IEEE)

Saudi Arabia wants to be top supplier of hydrogen - energy minister (Reuters)

Excerpt from Ulf Bossel and Baldur Eliasson: In this study, the energy consumed by each stage is related to the energy content (higher heating value HHV) of the delivered hydrogen itself. The analysis reveals that much more energy is needed to operate a hydrogen economy than is consumed in today's energy economy. In fact, depending on the chosen route the input of electrical energy to make, package, transport, store and transfer hydrogen may easily double the hydrogen energy delivered to the end user.

But precious energy can be saved by packaging hydrogen chemically in a synthetic liquid hydrocarbon like methanol or dimethylether DME. We therefore suggest modifying the vision of a hydrogen economy by considering not only the closed hydrogen (water) cycle, but also the closed carbon (CO2) cycle. This could create the intellectual platform for the conception of a post-fossil fuel energy economy based on synthetic hydrocarbons. Carbon atoms from biomass, organic waste materials or recycled carbon dioxide could become the carriers for hydrogen atoms.

Furthermore, the energy consuming electrolysis may be partially replaced by the less energy intensive chemical transformation of water and carbon to synthetic hydrocarbons. As long as the carbon comes from the biosphere ("biocarbon") the synthetic hydrocarbon economy would be as benign with respect to environment as a pure hydrogen economy. But the use of "geocarbons" from fossil sources should be avoided to uncouple energy use from global warming. READ MORE

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