In November 2019, the Australian government released its national hydrogen strategy. In a statement released on the 23rd of December 2020, Dr. Finkel, the chief scientist for Australia, plays an important role in advising on the science around his country’s transition to sustainable energy.

He says, “we are truly at the dawn of a new industry that could contribute to jobs, export income, energy storage, and vitally global emissions reductions.”

In early 2021 a 300 million dollar project was announced for Western Australia, bringing large-scale hydrogen production powered by wind and solar to that region.

Sounds great, but, like all energy technologies, hydrogen has its advantages and its disadvantages. Not least of which is the possibility of fossil fuel companies muscling in on the action and cheating on carbon emission regulations in an effort to lower prices and gain unfair market advantage.

So is Australia ready to lead the world in such a disruptive energy technology and set a clear path to navigate the pitfalls?

What is Green Hydrogen Used For?

Hydrogen extracted from hydrocarbons in a process called steam reforming is already widely used to produce ammonia for nitrogen fertilizers and the production of other chemicals. Oil refineries add hydrogen to heavy oil to produce transport fuels, and methanol can be produced to separate hydrogen from fossil fuel.

All those processes produce carbon dioxide, so it’s fair to say that historically, hydrogen has never really been regarded as a low carbon contributor to the energy transition. 

That legacy industry has resulted in a lot of experience in handling hydrogen, which is a highly explosive and quite corrosive element.

How Safe is Hydrogen?

Hydrogen pipelines have been operating without incident over hundreds of miles in many countries for decades. And there’s also a very long and safe track record of transporting hydrogen by road haulage in specialized vehicles.

Why is Hydrogen a Good Fuel? 

Hydrogen offers many potential benefits, both as a direct fuel and as an energy carrier for long-term storage. It seems increasingly unlikely to surpass battery electricity for domestic vehicles. Still, it is proven to be a great solution for larger commercial vehicles like trucks, ships, trains, and even airplanes.

What is The End Product of Hydrogen Fuel Cells?

The only byproduct of a hydrogen fuel cell is water. Compressed hydrogen canisters can be shipped easily by road and rail and where the geography allows.

It may be possible to store enormous quantities of hydrogen in salt caverns, providing almost instantly available energy to boost and stabilize grid electricity during the long winter months, when solar and wind power is least effective.

So how do we get the hydrogen without the CO2 emission problem? Well, scientists and governments have been discussing the possibility of producing hydrogen via electrolysis using renewable energy since the early 1970s, but until recently, the costs have been quite prohibitive.

Is Hydrogen Fuel Cost-effective?

As Dr. Frankel explained in a recent paper called “hydrogen for Australia’s future,.” The drivers behind the interest in hydrogen are a 100 fold reduction in the price of solar electricity in the past four decades, coupled with Japan’s commitment to be a long-term, large-scale customer for hydrogen produced through low emission methods.

Frankel says Japan currently imports 94 percent of its energy in the form of fossil fuels. For them to reduce their emissions, the government and industry have put ambitious hydrogen uptake targets at the heart of a comprehensive energy transition plan.

But he also warns his fellow Aussies we’re not alone in this race. Norway, Brunei, and Saudi Arabia are all boosting their credentials as future hydrogen suppliers. So he says this is the time for Australia to stake its claim as a supplier of choice. Not just to Japan, but other nations like South Korea, hungry for 21st-century fuel.

And let’s not forget that other countries like the United Kingdom, Germany, and the United States are also actively pursuing hydrogen as a significant addition to their low or zero-emissions energy policies. 

And, of course, our global economies and industries are currently driven by more or less unchanged capitalism, which means all those countries will be working hard to achieve market dominance. So why does Australia think it might have the edge?

In an August 2018 report published by the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, their CEO tells us, “If Australia can tap into the abundant wind and solar resources to produce hydrogen using renewable energy, we could export hydrogen at large scale.” 

The report points out that Australia has a significant advantage for exporting to Japan and across Asia due to what Frisch next says:

• Our ideal location
• Excellent renewable energy resources
• Well-established energy trading relationships
• Experience in large-scale energy infrastructure construction

And, crucially, as well as providing a boost to the Aussie economy, a new hydrogen industry would provide a much-needed lifeline to many regional communities because hydrogen production facilities are likely to be in the more remote areas.

The Arena report finds that Australian hydrogen exports could potentially contribute 1.7 billion dollars to the economy every year and provide nearly three thousand jobs by 2030.

That’s where this new 300 million dollar project comes in. It’s called the Aerosmith hydrogen project, and it will be built in a place called Dong Gaara, a small town about 320 kilometers north of Perth. 

In an interview with the online website Renew Economy, a spokesman for infinite blue energy said the facility would produce about 25 tons of green hydrogen every day.

This will be via electrolysis of water-powered entirely by renewable energy supplied from about 85 megawatts of solar power, supplemented by 75 megawatts of wind generation capacity.

That on-site supply of wind and solar is the key to lowering the cost of renewable hydrogen production at Australian facilities. Works on the project are expected to commence by the middle of the year, with the first production plan for the final quarter of 2020. 

Ultimately Infinite Blue energy hopes to see the integration of large-scale electricity storage and generation using hydrogen that could offer 24/7 supplies of power.

The company already has plans for a follow-up project that will have the capacity to produce as much as 75 tons of renewable hydrogen a day. Ultimately, they hope to have many similar projects established across Western Australia.

The country’s highly respected Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, or CSIRO, has produced a national hydrogen roadmap that expects the demand for renewable hydrogen import by Asian nations to reach 3.8 million tons by 2030. 

It’s thought that between 10 and 20 percent of Japanese and Korean hydrogen demand could be met by Australian exports, with a mid-case forecast of 500,000 tons per annum by 2030

Is Green Hydrogen Viable?

A report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance Group calculates that renewable hydrogen could be produced for between 0.70 cents and $160 per kilo in most parts of the world before 2050. That makes it competitive with natural gas in many parts of the world and cheaper than producing hydrogen from natural gas or coal, with carbon capture and storage.

As industry and press quite understandably focus their attention on reducing co2 emissions, a key challenge for standard hydrogen electrons is sometimes overlooked, and that’s the fact that it requires enormous quantities of purified water to work properly. 

Water scarcity is a major problem in places like Australia and California, where green hydrogen electrolysis is being so enthusiastically pursued. Such innovations like this one from Stanford University could be transformational.

That appears to have overcome the issue of anode corrosion from the chloride in saltwater. Increasingly effective working time of the anode from about 12 hours to more than a thousand hours. 

That means that, in the future, the water required for hydrogen electrolysis could be drawn directly from our oceans. That’s the technology we’ll take a closer look at later in the year.

Despite all that, though, Arena still published this infographic illustrating how they see the near and medium-term transitional future of hydrogen production, remaining a combination of green hydrogen and hydrogen derived from hydrocarbons with carbon capture and storage.

So how can we be sure that CO2 emissions will be reduced by adding hydrogen into our energy mix? Let’s go back to Australia’s chief scientist Alan Finkel to give us a steer on that one. 

He says, “if hydrogen is produced from either coal or natural gas, using best practice, carbon capture and storage generally referred to as CCS, then the amount of carbon dioxide generated is very small. Less than 0.8 kilograms of carbon dioxide is emitted for every kilogram of hydrogen produced. 

But since carbon dioxide is left behind as a residual part of the hydrogen production process, there is no additional step and little added cost for its extraction.

And because the gas mixture at the output of the process is at a much higher pressure than flue gases, carbon dioxide extraction is more energy-efficient, and it’s much easier to store.

What is The Best Way to Store Hydrogen?

Finkle assures his readers that energy importing countries have been explicit that their interest is in clean hydrogen. He says that thanks to Geoscience Australia’s online CCS assessment tool, numerous known suitable CCS reservoirs are available across the country.

Australia is developing a credible certificate of origin scheme, ensuring the clean credentials of every kilogram of hydrogen bought and sold can be verified, providing an effective mechanism to deter dishonest practices.

Fink includes that the idea of fossil fuel companies promising to implement CCS for their hydrogen production facilities, only to later renege on their commitment, is unfounded.

I’ll let you draw your conclusions from those comments. Still, it’s not hard to see why some environmental groups worried that relying on carbon capture and storage provides a potential loophole that the fossil fuel producers could exploit.

CCS is not so far been a success story in the United States. for example, there are very few full-scale working examples of CCS technologies. The only economically viable ones seem to be the ones that use CCS for CO2 under pressure in the untapped underground seems to get at previously inaccessible oil reserves in a process known as enhanced oil recovery.

Those companies enjoy the grotesque bonus of government subsidy for implementing a low carbon technology while growing their profits from the extra oil the captured co2 gas allows them to extract. There is nothing straightforward in the wonderful world of energy resources, as I’ve said on many occasions. 

There’s no doubt that energy storage is the key to a successful transition to a sustainable future, but if creating that storage also creates secondary, almost hidden carbon dioxide emissions.

In that case, we will have failed to move away from our collective delusion that we can stay on a business-as-usual trajectory and still have any hope of survival as a species, much past the end of this century.

Human beings are remarkably innovative, though. New carbon-free ways to store energy are being developed all over the world, all the time. 2020 is shaping up to be a pivotal year for these technologies. And we’ll, be taking a look at many of them in more detail as we go through the rest of the year.

Table Of Content

• How Safe is Hydrogen?
• What is Green Hydrogen Used For?
• Is Green Hydrogen Viable?
• Why is Hydrogen a Good Fuel?
• Is Hydrogen Fuel Cost-effective?
• What is The Best Way to Store Hydrogen?
• What is The End Product of Hydrogen Fuel Cells?