"Clean" brown coal hydrogen project a dud

From RenewEconomy

A proposed expansion of a controversial brown coal-to-hydrogen project in Victoria is under increasing pressure, with a new report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis finding that it’s likely an economic dud.

The Hydrogen Energy Supply Chain (HESC) is a project jointly run by the Australian and Japanese governments to take brown coal from the Latrobe Valley and produce liquid hydrogen to then ship to Japan.

The pilot project was completed last year, with just 2.6 tonnes of liquefied hydrogen delivered to Japan. Now HESC is moving towards commercialisation with a Green Innovation Fund grant from Japan of ¥220 billion (approximately AU$2.35 billion) to upscale to 30,000 to 40,000 tonnes of hydrogen a year.

Using coal to produce hydrogen is the most emissions-intensive way to do it, creating 18 to 20 times more CO2 than the amount of hydrogen produced.

If this isn’t sounding very ‘green’ to you, you’d be right. The project is classed as “clean” blue hydrogen only due to carbon capture and storage, which so far hasn’t worked in any meaningful way around the world. It is also not yet operational at the HESC site.

The report by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis notes that currently coal-based hydrogen is cheaper than renewable hydrogen. However, this won’t be the case for long.

“As renewable energy scales up, its costs are expected to fall, as are the costs of electrolysers used to produce the renewable hydrogen; so much so that by 2030, just when the HESC reaches full-scale production, it will be based on a more expensive technology,” Coal Sector Energy Finance Analyst Andrew Gorringe wrote in the report.

“HESC will struggle to prove commercially viable in the medium term as it competes with other suppliers of hydrogen beyond the initial short-term off-take agreement with Japan.”

The other problem the report highlights is just how far the hydrogen has to go to get from Victoria to Japan. Hydrogen – being the smallest element – is prone to large losses even in liquid form. The liquification process, where the hydrogen is cooled to -253 degrees, takes up over 30% of the energy of the hydrogen itself.

Plus the long shipping journey from Victoria to Japan also causes a large loss of hydrogen in the form of ‘boil off’.

“The hydrogen lost for boil-off and fuel use for propulsion for the 9,000km journey could be up to 40% of the cargo, and boil-off could be as high as 9 times that of the equivalent loss experienced in LNG shipping,” says the report.

See this, too : The Hydrogen Furphy 

Russia's invasion supercharges push to green fuel

 From a Twitter thread by Stephen Stapczynski

Green hydrogen is now cost-competitive with the fossil fuel-based product (gray hydrogen)

That cost parity wasn’t expected until around 2030. But surging gas prices shifted the calculus

About 93% of hydrogen producers, users and investors attending a BNEF roundtable last month said they expected the war to boost development of the green-hydrogen industry

To be sure, these green hydrogen and ammonia projects will take years to be realized and require an enormous increase in renewable sources, but the government support still gives private money the confidence to move in

Now, investment funds are joining governments/utilities to make hydrogen a viable substitute for fossil fuels

> Fortescue Metals plans a $50 billion supply chain project

> Norway’s Scatec building a $5 billion production plant

> Fund Hy24 earmarks $1.6 billion for infrastructure

The blue hydrogen scam

 As concern and even panic builds about global heating among hoi polloi, fossil fuel companies are inventing new ways to bamboozle the public.  Subsidies for coal, but called instead "capacity payments"; touchy-feely advertising to distract from what they're actually still doing, i.e., ramping up production of oil, gas and coal; and glitzy new initiatives which sound green as, but are really just extensions to their business model, and will allow/encourage emissions decades into the future.  

One of these is the fabled "hydrogen economy" which starts out by being about green hydrogen (hydrogen made by the electrolysis of water using electricity from renewables) but morphs into "grey hydrogen" which is about hydrogen made from natural gas, with the CO2 produced being released into the atmosphere, because "grey hydrogen" is much cheaper than green hydrogen.  To make this more palatable, the fossil fuel companies have concocted the idea of "blue hydrogen", which is grey hydrogen with the CO2 being pumped into underground storage.  Of course, this ignores the cost (and energy cost!) of compressing the CO2 and then transporting it to where it is to be buried.  

One Ozzie fossil fuel company shamefacedly admitted that their hydrogen breakthrough is really about grey hydrogen, which they call blue hydrogen because at some unspecified point in the future they'll start carbon capture and storage (CCS).  

The video below, from Just Have A Think, shreds the case for grey and blue hydrogen.

A carbon tax would put paid to all these subterfuges, which is why, of course, fossil fuel companies are so adamantly opposed to it.  

The other carbon boondoggle is the ammonia euphoria.  I'll talk about that in another piece.