In a useful new monograph on hydrogen, Prof Bill Nuttall and his co-authors are quite upbeat about the prospect for hydrogen, challenging the current view that the future will be mostly electric. ‘Electricity did not triumph in the twentieth century because it was the cheapest way to light a city at night or to drive factory machinery by day, it succeeded because it aligned with user needs (electricity was clean, convenient and increasingly reliable) and it also sat well with the Zeitgeist of the 1930s and modernism. Similarly, hydrogen transport and mobility sells itself not on price, but on other attributes’.
So will hydrogen and clean synfuels triumph in the Twenty-First Century? The authors of this monograph mostly seem to think so! And not just for ‘simply balancing the future electricity system.’ They say hydrogen ‘is much more than just an energy carrier. It is a potential future cryogen for high temperature superconducting magnets in a wide range of applications, but also hydrogen is an important chemical for industrial use.’ Well maybe.
There certainly are all sorts of big global options. For example, for synthetic electrofuels (e-fuels) derived from hydrogen, which they say, ‘are becoming important for being a carbon neutral alternative to conventional petroleum fuels’, with the basic production options being power-to-gas (synthetic methane and ammonia) and power-to-liquid (synthetic methanol, crude oil, kerosene and diesel). Biomass could also be an important feed stock. As an alternative hydrogen-carrier end product they are quite keen on ammonia and in general see molecules like this and hydrogen as having ‘several key benefits over electricity and electrification and one is global trade...Molecules are much more easily shipped around the world & indeed any vaporisation can be used beneficially to fuel the ships involved.’
However, they say we need to abandon the focus on the ‘colour’ based classification system and accept any ‘colour’ of hydrogen whatever its source. Not so sure about that! It’s true that, much like electrons, individual molecules of hydrogen are all the same, but environmentally it does matter how they are produced. Grey, black or blue hydrogen, derived from fossil fuels, even with some CCS, really won’t do in a zero carbon world, and although Nuttall seems quite keen on using nuclear heat or electricity to make red, purple or pink hydrogen, there are all sorts of uncertainties with nuclear technology- not least its costs. Green hydrogen from renewables via electrolysis sounds best- a does its subset, yellow hydrogen, from solar. But then we would say that! It does have to get cheaper... and cheaper than natural hydrogen, which some say may at some point win out against all other hydrogen options.
Meanwhile, as this timely monograph reports, some progress is being made with most of the hydrogen production options around the world, although so far a lot of it involves plans for fossil gas derived blue hydrogen projects, backed up by Carbon Capture. That may be why one of the monograph’s key conclusion is that ‘while ports and pipelines are key to the future roll-out of hydrogen at scale, it will be the CO2 pipelines that are the most important pipelines; indeed, they will be more important than future hydrogen pipelines.’
Arguably, hydrogen storage may actually be more important, with there being an interesting new report from Centrica which says that hydrogen storage could cut UK energy costs by £1bn annually by 2050. But it all rather depends on what hydrogen will mostly be used for- for green power grid balancing, industrial process heating and decarbonization, or for vehicle use- in cars, bikes, trucks, trains, buses, planes and ships? The monograph seems to see transport usage as quite significant, with hydrogen fuel cell systems having some advantages over Battery Electric Vehicles. But in general, BEVS seem likely to win out for now and hydrogen will mostly be used for other purposes - unless cheap natural (‘white’) hydrogen arrives in bulk. It’s a long shot, but then all bets could be off for all uses of hydrogen.
Though it may be wise not to take too many bets in this area! For example, H2Go power, who have been working on metal hydrides, as a chemi-absorbed solid hydrogen storge option, is being wound up. BNEF founder Michael Liebreich, who has been very critical of much hydrogen promotion, said, perhaps a little uncharitably, ‘it turns out that after 50 years of research, metal hydride storage is a still a scientific phenomenon without a viable use case. That was obvious to anyone with an ounce of common sense even before Li-ion battery prices began to plummet’. Ouch...
On the other hand, it is also not wise to ignore the possibility for technological breakthroughs in the hydrogen field. For example, in solar photo-chemistry for green hydrogen production and in advanced fuel cell development for hydrogen use. Hydrogen may not be the magic solution to our energy problems that some claim, but, as the monograph illustrates, there is a lot of innovative industrial and academic effort going on around the world in the hydrogen generation and applications area.
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