"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 

Coal-fired pollution killing 800 a year in Oz

 From The Brisbane Times

Air pollution from Australia’s ageing coal-fired power stations kills around 800 people each year and spreads hundreds of kilometres from regional plants into major cities, new research finds.

This national death toll is twice as high as the number of smoke inhalation deaths in the recent catastrophic bushfire season, and eight times greater than the average annual casualties from all natural disasters, according to a new report from Greenpeace Australia.

This is the first time the national health impacts of burning coal for electricity have been scientifically assessed, its authors say.

Some of these symptoms come from cross-state pollution, with about 20 percent of cases occurring in states and territories that are not home to the power station that is the source of the emissions.

The Greenpeace study modelled how much pollution from coal power stations could be expected in certain areas, based on observed meteorological conditions, reported pollutant emissions and electricity generation.

Existing health studies were then used to calculate how many additional deaths occur with this increased pollution. For mortality, this included deaths due to heart disease, cardiopulmonary disease, lung cancer, lower respiratory infections and stroke.

Report co-author Professor Hilary Bambrick, an environmental epidemiologist, said power plant air pollution had caused Australians to die and suffer from preventable diseases for decades: "Governments must come up with a plan to replace our ageing and unreliable coal burning power stations with clean energy solutions as quickly as possible."

New research recently published in the Medical Journal of Australia found unborn babies whose mothers were exposed to smoke from the Hazelwood coal mine fire are at greater risk of respiratory infections in early childhood, despite not directly inhaling the pollution.

Naturally, electricity generators have pooh-poohed this conclusion.  I live near (30 kms away) from one of Victoria's brown-coal power stations and I have to tell you when the wind is from the power station, the pollution is indescribable.  The estimate of 800 deaths compares with 1,145 deaths on the road in 2018.

East coast pollution with an easterly wind

Victorian pollution with a westerly wind