But perhaps hydrogen’s greatest potential lies in its ability to store energy for rainy days. While fossil fuels are energy stores from prehistoric sunlight, hydrogen can be used to store solar energy from the previous 12 hours. “Green hydrogen is needed to continue increasing the amount of renewable energy,” says Mowill. Once a power grid reaches a critical mass of renewable inputs from sources like wind and solar, something has to step in to stabilize and smooth out those supply and demand peaks and troughs. “You can’t solve that with batteries; it’s on a scale that wouldn’t be practical,” says Mowill. “Hydrogen is a very good way to balance this out.”
And unlike batteries, hydrogen can be transported efficiently. It can be compressed into liquid hydrogen, which requires some energy, or it can be turned into ammonia, which is already being transported around the world, so”cracked” again in hydrogen and nitrogen at its destination.
Countries like Japan and South Korea, which are home to energy-intensive industries (like steel, car and ship manufacturing) but lack the renewable resources to sustainably power them, are eager to import hydrogen from countries with excess renewable energy. , like Australia.
“The idea is basically that you produce these hydrogen molecules or direct derivatives of hydrogen in countries with abundant renewable resources,” says Carlos Trench, director of hydrogen projects at Engie Australia and New Zealand. “Then you transport the molecules, whether it’s ammonia or any other derivative, and then you reconvert that molecule into green energy at the destination where direct renewable energy development is not feasible.”
Japan has already declared its intention to be a world leader in the hydrogen economy as part of its carbon neutrality strategy. South Korea expects hydrogen to supply about a third of its energy by 2050.
But Percy stresses that for all the excitement, green hydrogen still plays a big part in the global decarbonization game. “It’s really very small scale right now,” he says. But it is accelerating.
China’s state-owned energy company, Sinopec, has construction started in what will be the largest green hydrogen facility in the world. When completed, it will produce 30,000 tons of green hydrogen each year. (At the moment, less than a million tons low-carbon hydrogen is produced annually, and much of that is created using fossil fuels, and the resulting carbon is then captured).
Spain is also making great strides with production and in 2020 unveiled its plans to become a major hydrogen producer. The goal was set to produce 4 gigawatts of green hydrogen annually by 2030, but it has already exceeded this four times and has plans for more production facilities.
Cost is still an issue. About 60 percent of the cost of green hydrogen is the cost of the renewable energy used to produce it, Percy says, so as renewable energy gets cheaper, hydrogen will too. The cost of electrolyser technology is another major component of the relatively high price of hydrogen, but Mowill says electrolysers are becoming more efficient. There is also the logistics of storage, compression and transport, which further increases the price of a green hydrogen molecule.
But as the hydrogen star rises, these costs will inevitably come down, Percy says. “If you look at what happened with solar power, both solar and battery systems were down by 80 percent in about 10 years,” he says. He predicts the same will happen to hydrogen once it finds more solid technological ground. “The tests that are going on now are really important for the industry to learn,” he says. “While it’s a pilot scale today, five years from now they’ll probably be ready for something bigger.”
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