Hydrogen talked up

Powering the Future: RenewableUK's Vision of the Transition, sees renewables providing 76% of the UK's power needs, aided by green hydrogen use and flexible grid system development. The report notes that green hydrogen, produced by the electrolysis of water  using renewable electricity, holds ‘huge potential’ as a zero-carbon alternative to fossil fuels, in particular in heavy industry, shipping, and heating homes.

A strong case has certainly been made for green hydrogen use in the EU in a Fuel Cell and Hydgrogen (FCH) pathway report. Following on from the Hydrogen Council’s positive assessment  that I reviewed earlier, it claims that ‘hydrogen is the best (or only) choice for at-scale decarbonization of selected segments in transport, industry, and buildings’. The Fuel Cell and Hydrogen group looks to ‘the decarbonization of the gas grid that connects Europe’s industry and delivers more than 40% of heating in EU households and 15% of EU power generation requires hydrogen, but notes that ‘biogas, while an important lever, will not be available at the required scale. Electrification with heat pumps can replace natural gas to heat new buildings, but requires costly or even impossible retrofits in old buildings, which account for 90% of buildings’ CO2 emissions. Full direct electrification would also lead to major seasonal imbalances in power demand that would, in turn, require a power storage mechanism at large scale’.

The FCH report says that ‘hydrogen does not suffer from these shortcomings and can act as a complement to heat pumps. Producers can distribute some hydrogen by blending it into the existing grid without the need for major upgrades, but it is possible to go much further than this. Ultimately, energy suppliers can convert grids to run on pure hydrogen’, although a variant might be conversion of it to methane, with CO2.

The FCH view certainly represents a challenge to the mainly heat pump-led approach the UK government has adopted for domestic heating. That ‘heat by wire’ approach is also backed by the Energy System Catapult group, which sees heat pumps dominating by 2050. By contrast, FCH backs hydrogen and ‘heat by pipe’! It says ‘gas based heating systems can increase energy efficiency through the use of fuel cell-based combined heat and power (CHP) technology’.  Compare that to the approach adopted by Rosenow and Lowes who suggest that ‘ heat pumps are always likely to be cheaper than using the combustion of green hydrogen’. Certainly, as I noted in an earlier post, domestic heat pumps can have big efficiency advantages.  

However, FCH also sees hydrogen gas as playing a major role in other sectors. In transport, it says ‘hydrogen is the most promising decarbonization option for trucks, buses, ships, trains, large cars, and commercial vehicles, where the lower energy density (hence lower range), high initial costs, and slow recharging performance of batteries are major disadvantages. Fuel cells also require significantly less raw materials compared to batteries & combustion engines’. In terms of aviation, it says that ‘hydrogen and synthetic fuels based on hydrogen are the only at-scale option for direct decarbonization’.

In terms of industrial applications, FCH says hydrogen can be burnt ‘to produce high-grade heat and use the fuel in several processes as feedstock, either directly or together with CO2 as synfuel/electrofuel. In steelmaking, e.g., hydrogen can work as a reductant, substituting for coal-based blast furnaces. When used as a feedstock for ammonia production and hydrotreating in refineries, it could be produced from low carbon sources in future. Together with CO2, hydrogen can also displace hydrocarbons, such as natural gas, in chemical processes such as the production of olefins and hydrocarbon solvents (BTX), which make up a substantial part of feedstock uses. This provides a carbon sink, i.e., an opportunity for CO2 to be used instead of emitted.’

The FCH report also looks more broadly a system balancing and integration and says ‘hydrogen will play a systemic role in the transition to renewable energy sources by providing a mechanism to flexibly transfer energy across sectors, time, and place’. It argues that ‘hydrogen is the only at-scale technology for ‘sector coupling’, allowing to convert generated power into a usable form, to store it, and to channel it to end use sectors to meet demand. Electrolyzers can convert renewable electricity into a gas that has all the flexibility but none of the carbon emissions of natural gas’. FCH adds that ‘while batteries and demand-side measures can provide short-term flexibility, hydrogen is the only at-scale technology available for long-term energy storage. It can make use of existing gas grids, salt caverns, and depleted gas fields to store energy for longer periods of time at low cost.’

And finally it says that ‘hydrogen provides a link between regions with low-cost renewables and those that are centers of demand – e.g., connecting regions with abundant geothermal and wind energy in the north of Europe to the main continent, or as a means of importing renewable energy from northern Africa. Hydrogen enables the long-distance transportation of energy in pipelines, ships, or trucks, whether gaseous, liquified, or stored in other forms, which costs much less than power transmission lines’.

It is certainly a strong, wide-ranging case, assuming that green hydrogen can indeed be produced cost effectively using renewable power and that the use of fossil fuel-derived ‘blue’ hydrogen is avoided. And positive views on the economics of green hydrogen have come from Bloomberg New Energy Finance, which says that the falling cost of making hydrogen from wind & PV could cut greenhouse gas emissions by 34% in fossil fuel dependent sectors of the economy, such as steel, heavy-duty vehicles, shipping and cement.

BNEF’s 'Hydrogen Economy Outlook' claimed that green hydrogen could be produced for $0.8 to $1.6 /kilogram in most parts of the world before 2050. With the cost of the storage and pipeline infrastructure included, the delivered cost of renewable hydrogen in China, India and Western Europe could fall to around $2/kg in 2030 and $1/kg in 2050. BNEF said the cost of the H2 electrolyzer technology has fallen by 40% in the last 5 years, and can continue to fall if deployment increases. Looking ahead it says ‘hydrogen has potential to become the fuel that powers a clean economy. In the years ahead, it will be possible to produce it at low cost using wind & solar power, to store it underground for months, and then to pipe it on-demand to power everything from ships to steel mills.’

So will it happen? The FCH roadmap looks to hydrogen providing 24% of total EU energy demand by 2050, and a recent industry initiative called for 10% of EU gas to be renewable gas (biomethane/green hydrogen), by 2030. There are certainly strategic industrial and political opportunities and advantages as well as commercial incentives  for hydrogen development and Power to Gas conversion. And technologically, hydrogen offers way to use renewables more effectively. As FCH says it ‘makes the large-scale integration of renewables possible because it enables energy players to convert and store energy as a renewable gas. It can be used for energy distribution across sectors and regions and as a buffer for renewables. It provides a way to decarbonize segments in power, transport, buildings, and industry, which would otherwise be difficult to decarbonize’. It does sound very promising – assuming we can build enough green power, and green gas capacity/infrastructure.