While it has advantages, says Michael Liebreich, a Bloomberg New Energy Finance analyst in the UK and a green hydrogen sceptic, “it displays an equally impressive list of disadvantages”.
“It does not occur in nature so it requires energy to separate,” Liebreich writes in the first of a pair of recent essays for BloombergNEF. “Its storage requires compression to 700 times atmospheric pressure, refrigeration to -253C… It carries one quarter the energy per unit volume of natural gas… It can embrittle metal, it escapes through the tiniest leaks and yes, it really is explosive.”
Some green hydrogen projects are learning this the hard way. An energy consortium in Australia recently received environmental regulatory approval for a scheme to pipe hydrogen from a site near Pilbara in western Australia to Singapore. The scheme involved 1,600 large wind turbines and 30 square miles of solar panels to run a 23-gigawatt electrolysis factory to create its green hydrogen. But the facility, called the Asian Renewable Energy Hub, changed tack after recognising the difficulties of liquidising hydrogen and transporting it over such long distances, ABC News reported. Instead, the facility now plans to export ammonia, a more stable gas, instead.
In spite of problems such as these, Liebreich writes, green hydrogen still “holds a vice-like grip over the imaginations of techno-optimists”.
Ben Gallagher, an energy analyst at Wood McKenzie who studies green hydrogen, says the fuel is so new that its future remains unclear. “No one has any true idea what is going on here,” he says. “It’s speculation at this point. Right now, it’s difficult to view this as the new oil. However, it could make up an important part of the overall fuel mix.”
But for proponents, the prospect of green hydrogen is too tantalising to ignore. If manufactured with renewable energy, it’s CO2-free. Moreover, using renewable energy to create the fuel can help solve the problem of intermittency that plagues wind and solar power, and so it is essentially efficient storage. When demand for renewables is low, during the spring and fall, excess electricity could be used to power the electrolysis that is needed to split hydrogen and oxygen molecules. Then the hydrogen can be stored or sent down a pipeline.
Across Europe, the Middle East and Asia, more countries and companies are embracing this fuel. The US lags behind because other forms of energy, such as natural gas, are currently much cheaper, but several new projects are getting underway, including a green hydrogen power plant in Utah that will replace two aging coal-fired plants and produce electricity for southern California and Nevada, as well as for use within Utah.
