Oz Is Just As Barmy About Hydrogen: Smart Energy Council Presentation Q&A

Not way back, I had the chance to speak with over 300 principally Australian contributors in a Smart Energy Council webinar. It was organized to use my uncommon timezone alignment with Oz as I spend just a few weeks in New Zealand as a digital nomad. Over 600 signed up, many from different time zones to get entry to the recording obtainable from the hyperlink.

The organizer Steve Blume, former President of the Council, and I assumed it will be helpful to reply many of the dozens of questions in articles and share with the registrants as properly. That is the third of some articles with responses, which will probably be aggregated and shared by the Council as properly for contributors. The primary article was on aviation and maritime shipping questions and the second lined biofuels and HVDC.

The framing of my ready remarks was the Radical Electrification of Transportation. I’ve revealed lots on the topic as I’ve dug by means of most modes over the previous 15 years.

To summarize my presentation, all ground transportation will electrify. That’s vehicles, vans, buses, utility automobiles, trains and mining automobiles. All inland transport and two-thirds of quick sea shipping will electrify, with only the longest routes requiring biofuels. Transport and rail will even drop in tonnage as a result of removing of bulk fossil fuels from masses. Aviation will probably be disrupted by electric regional air mobility, autonomous flight, and digital air visitors management, and only trans-oceanic flights will require biofuels in 50 years.

Meaning the billions of tons of fossil fuels per 12 months requirement for extraction, processing, refinement, and distribution are going away and being changed by tens of hundreds of thousands of tons of expertise metals similar to lithium and cobalt, in addition to just a few hundred million tons of biofuels for aviation and maritime transport. That’s all very doable.

The ready remarks skimmed over all of that in half-hour or so, leaving far too little time for questions, and so I’ve chosen to answer most of them in writing.

Hydrogen

What’s the marketplace for inexperienced fertilizer? WA just lately sanctioned a big fossil gas / SMR fertilizer plant focusing on the Indian market indicating there’s a restricted market.

About 30 million tons of hydrogen is used immediately to fabricate about 170 million tons of ammonia for nitrogen fertilizers. That’s all coming from pure fuel and coal hydrogen immediately.

That’s an enormous world market, however the query is what insurance policies are driving uptake of inexperienced ammonia? When Europe’s carbon border adjustment mechanism kicks in, that will probably be a driver. 

Lack of inexperienced fertilizer markets is a brief time period drawback associated to the dearth of a market sign requiring them, not the dearth of an actual market.

In fact, when utilized, ammonia additionally creates NOx, a potent greenhouse fuel, so the market has to decrease regardless, but it surely’s going to stay massive in my view.

If there isn’t any massive future marketplace for inexperienced hydrogen, how will all of the renewable (photo voltaic, wind) vitality generated at instances of low demand be saved (or will or not it’s wasted)?

There’s an electrical energy ecosystem that may characteristic some overbuild of wind and photo voltaic, plenty of transmission, an inexpensive quantity of grid storage within the type of pumped hydro, redox movement batteries and cell-based batteries, and a few demand administration. That can account for about 95% of circumstances. The rest will probably be competed for by varied low capex options which can favor low-cost vitality for finest income. There isn’t a ton of room in that world for inexperienced hydrogen to develop.

However there’s a large marketplace for inexperienced hydrogen nonetheless. The 120 million tons we manufacture from fossil fuels and use — the most important market is oil refining — is a local weather change drawback on the identical scale as all of aviation globally. The hydrogen demand that isn’t going away as we radically scale back refining oil, particularly excessive sulfur crude like Alberta’s and Venezuala’s, must be changed with inexperienced hydrogen.

To select on 2019, that 12 months’s whole renewable electrical era globally was simply ample to make the entire hydrogen we manufacture immediately. We’re not going to be constructing multiples of that to show hydrogen into an inefficient and ineffective retailer of vitality.

What do you see because the function of inexperienced hydrogen from remoted large geothermal potential areas?

If I perceive the query, it’s not about white or pure hydrogen, however utilizing geothermal warmth and electrical era to drive manufacturing of inexperienced hydrogen. 

And in that case, I level to a really clear sign from our world economic system about hydrogen immediately: 85% of hydrogen is manufactured at level of use.

Why? As a result of distributing hydrogen as a molecule is absurdly costly. As a fuel it’s extremely vulnerable to leaking, embrittling metal and messing with electronics, in addition to being very low in density by quantity. Folks claiming we’ll be placing it in pipelines and ships are blowing smoke. Folks claiming we’ll reuse current pure fuel or oil pipelines for hydrogen are blowing opium smoke. 

Reuse of current pipelines would require radically decrease volumes of hydrogen than pure fuel. The vitality delivered could be a fraction of pure fuel vitality as a result of physics of the molecules. And retrofitting current pipelines is a bit expense, as not solely the inside wants coating usually, however new compressors, electronics and sensors are required alongside the size of the pipeline for that decrease vitality supply. Constructing new pipelines is even worse.

Each pipeline for hydrogen research I’ve checked out retains making the identical errors of drawing the system boundaries really poorly, or making utterly unsupportable assumptions in favor of hydrogen and towards HVDC.

Transport hydrogen in ocean tankers as we do LNG could be at minimal five times the cost per unit of energy as LNG giving hydrogen transport each advantage of the doubt. And as a reminder, LNG imports are already the most costly type of vitality any nation has, and are used solely as a final resort to maintain the lights on.

If there’s a giant geothermal plant in the midst of nowhere, in different phrases, manufacturing hydrogen with it in all probability doesn’t make sense in comparison with transmitting the electrical energy to demand facilities which embrace locations which make hydrogen at level of use.

There is likely to be some circumstances the place manufacturing ammonia fertilizers at a geothermal location is sensible, and if there’s a geothermal location close to an iron mine, then manufacturing inexperienced iron with the hydrogen might make sense.

What would you say to a trucking firm about to put money into hydrogen infrastructure?

Don’t do it.

Hydrogen for trucking is a lifeless finish. Battery vitality densities which are commercially obtainable immediately and at excessive expertise readiness ranges will present thousands of kilometers of fully loaded range. Electrical energy to battery to motor to wheels is not less than thrice as environment friendly as electrical energy to hydrogen to motor to wheels in the perfect case situation for hydrogen, so operational prices will at all times be thrice as excessive. And hydrogen gas cell vans are way more costly than battery-electric vans, however get no economic system of scale benefits from mild automobiles, so won’t ever have decrease capex prices.

Pay extra for vans. Pay extra for vitality infrastructure. Pay extra for vitality. What rational trucking firm would wish to try this?

I at all times like to have a look at examples from around the globe the place the experiment has already run its course to see what the outcomes are. China has 1.1 million battery-electric buses and vans on its roads, and below 10,000 gas cell automobiles. Mining giants Rio Tinto, BHP, and FMG have all come out just lately and stated that each one mining automobiles could be battery-electric.

There’s no future in hydrogen for trucking, so any cash a agency places into it’s wasted.

What’s your opinion on the UMich system which purports to be a synthetic photosynthesis system 10 instances extra environment friendly and one hundredth the dimensions of earlier units of its type?

Largely that it’s a so-what.

The effectivity claims are for direct use of daylight to transform water to hydrogen on the level of daylight hitting the cell. That implies that to supply any helpful quantity of hydrogen, you would need to pump an terrible lot of water into tiny cells, then seize the hydrogen that bubbles out of it throughout a really massive space.

As a mind-set about this, we will take a dust low-cost photo voltaic farm and join it with primary wiring. The electrical energy throughout that space might be concentrated into an industrial scale electrolysis facility with large pumps, large pipes and large electrolyzers working very effectively.

Or we will assemble the identical scale of photo voltaic farm, as a result of this stays an vitality equation, and unfold pumps for water and tiny tubes throughout all the expense, have tiny hydrogen seize pumps at every cell, then unfold a parallel however utterly separate community of hydrogen tubes that gather all that hydrogen. We’d have just about the identical electrical wiring to observe, management and function the system, however it will be paralleled by two separate fuel and liquid distribution techniques.

And whereas the cell is likely to be low-cost in its class of expertise, it received’t be almost as low-cost as photovoltaic cells.

This is likely to be helpful in outer area. It’s not significantly related on earth.

What’s your perspective on CSIRO, Australia’s nationwide science company, and GHD Advisory calling for Australia to concentrate on hydrogen-powered transport — alongside electrical automobiles — or threat being left behind our worldwide counterparts?

That CSIRO was a stable group that received issues proper, and that it was overwhelmed up lots by the earlier federal administration. 

I used to quote CSIRO analysis frequently. Not a lot for the previous decade. Now it’s a bit iffy as to the standard of issues that come out of it.

It is a working example. That CSIRO got here to this conclusion makes it clear that it has fallen removed from its earlier pinnacle of excellence. You’ll be able to’t have a look at the worldwide information on hydrogen for transportation, the thermodynamics, or the economics critically, examine it on a degree taking part in discipline with actual world options and discover that it needs to be taken critically.

That fossil gas majors are pushing laborious to make hydrogen a retailer of vitality doesn’t make it make sense.

In any case, this was a report for rent from GHD. If you purchase a consulting agency’s providers, you get the outcomes you need. Who paid for the report and who set the phrases is an inexpensive query with nonsense like this.

What about Rolls Royce’s plans to make some EVs into electrical vehicles?

That only Bond villains will have home hydrogen refueling, and Rolls Royces are favored by Bond villains, so there’s a fantastic demographic match, even when solely in a cinematic fantasy world.

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And so, one other set of questions requested and answered. Nonetheless to come back, fossil fuels, politics and extra.

 

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