Today climate change is causing another wave of enthusiasm. More than 350 big projects are under way and cumulative investment could reach $500bn by 2030. Morgan Stanley, a bank, reckons that annual sales of hydrogen could be worth $600bn by 2050. That is up from $150bn of sales today, which come mainly from industrial processes, including making fertilisers. India will soon stage auctions for hydrogen and Chile is holding tenders for its production on public lands. Over a dozen countries including Britain, France, Germany, Japan and South Korea have national hydrogen plans.
Amid the excitement, it is worth being clear about what hydrogen can and cannot do. Japanese and South Korean firms are keen to sell cars using hydrogen fuel cells, but battery cars are roughly twice as energy efficient. Some European countries hope to pipe hydrogen into homes, but heat pumps are more effective and some pipes cannot handle the gas safely. Some big energy firms and petrostates want to use natural gas to make hydrogen without capturing the associated carbon effectively, but that does not eliminate emissions.
Instead, hydrogen can help in niche markets, involving complex chemical processes and high temperatures that are hard to achieve with electricity. Steel firms, spewing roughly 8% of global emissions, rely on coking coal and blast furnaces that wind power cannot replace but which hydrogen can, using a process known as direct reduction. Hybrit, a Swedish consortium, sold the world’s first green steel made this way in August.
Another niche is commercial transport, particularly for journeys beyond the scope of batteries. Hydrogen lorries can beat battery-powered rivals with faster refuelling, more room for cargo and a longer range. Cummins, an American company, is betting on them. Fuels derived from hydrogen may also be useful in aviation and shipping. Alstom, a French firm, is running hydrogen-powered locomotives on European tracks.
Last, hydrogen can be used as a material to store and transport energy in bulk. Renewable grids struggle when the wind dies or it is dark. Batteries can help, but if renewable power is converted to hydrogen, it can be stored cheaply for long periods and converted to electricity on demand. A power plant in Utah plans to store the gas in caverns to supply California. Sunny and windy places that lack transmission links can export clean energy as hydrogen. Australia, Chile and Morocco hope to “ship sunshine” to the world.
With so much money piling into hydrogen the list of uses for it may expand. Much of the work is up to the private sector but governments can do their bit. One task is to crack down on greenwashing: hydrogen made from dirty fuels without high-quality carbon capture will not help the climate. New rules are needed to measure and disclose the life-cycle emissions arising from producing hydrogen and, given that it will be traded across borders, these need international agreement.
Government should also encourage hubs where different hydrogen users cluster, minimising the need to duplicate infrastructure. These are already emerging in Humberside in Britain and Rotterdam in the Netherlands. Hydrogen has its limitations, but it can play a vital role in bringing about cleaner energy.
Toothpaste in your tank
Hydrogen goop could be a more convenient fuel than hydrogen gas
Feb 27 2021 Economist
On paper, hydrogen looks like a dream fuel. Coal, oil and natural gas generate planet-warming carbon dioxide when burned. Hydrogen produces pure water. Hydrogen crams more energy into less space than batteries do (though, admittedly, less than petrol or diesel do). And an empty tank can be refilled with hydrogen much faster than an empty battery can be refilled with electricity.
In practice, things are trickier. Storing meaningful quantities of hydrogen gas requires compressing it several hundred-fold. Liquefying it is another option, but one that requires cooling the stuff to -253°C. Either process requires rugged tanks. Over time, hydrogen gas can infiltrate metals, weakening them and potentially causing cracks. Tanks must be built from special materials designed to resist this breakdown.
There may be a better way. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Technology and Advanced Materials in Germany, led by Marcus Vogt, think that supplying hydrogen as goop rather than gas offers a way around some of its limitations. They have been experimenting with a chemical compound that can be pumped into a cartridge and then persuaded to give up its hydrogen on demand.
Their invention, which they dub “Powerpaste”, bears a passing resemblance to toothpaste. Its main ingredient is magnesium hydride, a compound that, when introduced to water, reacts with it to form hydrogen and magnesium hydroxide (a substance more familiar as milk of magnesia, a stomach-settling antacid). The escaped hydrogen can then be diverted into a fuel cell, where it reacts with oxygen from the air to generate electric power. The magnesium hydroxide waste is emptied from the reactor automatically.
Dr Vogt’s scheme offers several advantages over batteries, petrol and more conventional ways of handling hydrogen. One is the storage of more energy per litre, and per kilogram, than either batteries or petrol can manage. A second is ease of refilling, which is simply a matter of swapping an empty cartridge of paste for a full one, and topping up the water, which is stored in a separate tank. A third advantage is that, unlike a battery, the paste does not gradually lose its stored energy if it is left on the shelf.
Moreover, the paste itself is non-toxic, as are the reaction’s by-products. But there are plenty of subtleties to work through. Left to its own devices, magnesium hydroxide reacts only slowly with water because the reaction forms a barrier on the material’s surface that inhibits further chemistry. To overcome this, Dr Vogt and his team have found a chemical additive that greatly accelerates the reaction. They have also found a way to ensure that the reaction can be controlled precisely enough to supply only as much hydrogen as is needed at any given moment.
The paste is unlikely to up-end the clean-car industry, where battery-powered vehicles have already established themselves as the dominant technology. But Dr Vogt nonetheless hopes that his invention may find niches. One early use could be in small vehicles such as scooters, or in flying drones where weight is at a premium. It is hard to scale down the sorts of heavy-duty tanks needed to store elemental hydrogen, he says. Powerpaste could thus enable longer ranges for scooters, and flight times for drones measured in hours rather than minutes. Miniature stoves aimed at campers are another idea.
A pilot plant in Brunswick, a city in Lower Saxony, will be able to produce four tonnes of the stuff per year when it is finished later this year. And heavier-duty uses are certainly possible, if that is what customers would like. Dr Vogt has already built a small demonstration unit for the German army.
Hydrogen hype is rising again—will this time be different?
Investors have been excited, and disappointed, before
By Vijay Vaitheeswaran: Global energy and climate innovation editor, The Economist, New York
Guzzlers of fizzy drinks in Brisbane could be helping to tackle climate change in 2023. By the end of the year, the vehicle delivering those sugary beverages may no longer spout climate-warming gases. PepsiCo Australia, the local arm of the world’s biggest purveyor of snacks and drinks, will test a new sort of lorry powered not by a dirty diesel engine but by fuel cells, devices that convert hydrogen to electricity while emitting only water vapour.
Enthusiasts are bubbling with excitement as a swirl of geopolitical and energy trends has put the spotlight once again on hydrogen, a clean fuel that can be made from a variety of primary energy sources. Hydrogen has seen previous false dawns. Two decades ago European and Japanese carmakers wasted billions chasing the dream of fuel-cell passenger cars. But governments and investors are betting that this time will be different.
One reason is growing interest in using hydrogen to replace fossil fuels in heavy industries, such as steel-making. That would help reduce carbon emissions—and could also boost energy security by reducing dependency on natural gas, the price of which has soared in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Environmentalists love that “green” hydrogen can be made with renewable energy in electrolysers—devices that use electricity to split water into oxygen and hydrogen. This has sparked a global rush to manufacture them, with around 600 proposed projects, about half of them in Europe. But Big Oil is keen on hydrogen too, because “blue” hydrogen can be made in a cleanish way from natural gas, if methane leaks are minimised and resulting carbon emissions are captured and sequestered.
Just how durable this latest wave of enthusiasm for hydrogen will prove to be should become clear in 2023. A global recession could slash funding for novel technologies as companies cut capital expenditure and investors grow risk-averse. Supply-chain disruptions could also spoil things. They have already forced itm Power, a pioneering British firm, to roll back plans to scale up its production of electrolysers. And as countries respond to the energy shock they may prioritise security of supply, from dirty sources such as coal, over new technologies that can help tackle climate change.
The biggest force pushing hydrogen forward will be government money in America
One telltale sign will be how many of those electrolyser projects actually go ahead. Andy Marsh, chief executive of America’s Plug Power, a pace-setter in the industry, predicts that global electrolyser sales will shoot up from almost zero a few years ago to $15bn in 2023. Bernd Heid of McKinsey, a consultancy, believes the first gigawatt-scale green-hydrogen project will get the go-ahead next year. Bloombergnef (bnef), a research firm, reckons electrolyser shipments will rise from 1gw now to 2.4-3.8gw in 2023, mostly in Asia.
But there is much enthusiasm about green hydrogen in Europe too. “Europe has been pregnant with a lot of projects but will finally give birth in 2023,” says Daryl Wilson of the Hydrogen Council, an industry body. He expects the regulatory uncertainty that has held back many of those projects to be cleared up. Mr Heid predicts that Europe will conduct the first global auction for hydrogen supply and demand, and that the European Commission will set up a European Hydrogen Bank in 2023.
Perhaps, but as that bnef forecast suggests, Asia will be worth watching, too. China is currently the biggest manufacturer of electrolysers, and the firm predicts that scaling up production will help it cut costs by 30% by 2025. India has unveiled policies to promote its own green-hydrogen industry. That is prompting Western firms to try to manufacture electrolysers and make hydrogen there. India’s Greenko, a renewables firm, thinks its joint venture with Belgium’s John Cockerill, an electrolyser giant, will produce the world’s lowest-cost ammonia (a fuel derived from hydrogen) by the end of 2023. homiHydrogen, an Indian startup, plans to make electrolysers that are “98% Indian-made” by that time.
But the biggest force pushing hydrogen forward in 2023 will be a tidal wave of government money in America. The Inflation Reduction Act, which is really a climate-change law, offers a staggering $3/kg in subsidy for green-hydrogen projects. Unlike Europe’s thicket of rules, America’s hydrogen policy is clear and extremely compelling, experts say. Many green-hydrogen projects, currently unable to compete against dirtier forms of hydrogen (which typically cost around $2/kg), will suddenly enjoy costs below $1/kg. In sun-kissed or wind-swept areas, some may even see negative costs.
Mr Heid predicts that America will leapfrog Europe in attracting hydrogen projects, with total investments possibly reaching $100bn by 2030. The global hydrogen race is hotting up, and 2023 looks to be a make-or-break year. Watch this gas.