Electrolytic production of hydrogen

[kenneal - lagger]

I would have thought that the future of the car industry lies in small, batch production runs of light weight, non steel, battery powered cars with a top speed of about 50mph. And those cars would probably be mostly rental or car club cars. That would lead us to long distance buses, battery or fuel cell powered, or even trolley buses along motorways and main roads with trucks powered from the same overhead power lines for long distance and then battery or fuel cell powered of the main roads.

I can't see steel cars, even "green steel" cars, having a long term future. It requires a paradigm shift and the sooner that shift comes the better it will be for the environment.

[Mark]

'World first': Sheet glass produced with hydrogen at UK plant for first time:
https://www.investliverpool.com/news/wo ... ufacturer/

Another small step, but interestingly the article doesn't mention where the hydrogen came from.....
Was it 'Brown', 'Grey', 'Blue' or 'Green' ?

[adam2]

Brown hydrogen seems a fair assumption, in the absence of any claims otherwise.
Still an interesting development for the future.
If enough green hydrogen is to be produced for industry, we will need a lot more wind turbines.

We will need enough renewably generated electricity to meet all, or almost all, of our present electricity demand, AND still have enough left over to produce hydrogen.

[Mark]

World's biggest green hydrogen project announced for Kazakhstan:
https://newatlas.com/energy/worlds-bigg ... azakhstan/

Germany's Svevind has announced plans for a colossal green hydrogen project that will place some 45 gigawatts of wind and solar energy generation on the vast steppes of Kazakhstan to produce around three million tonnes of green hydrogen annually.

This project will utterly dwarf the biggest project currently in planning or underway; it boasts more than twice the production capacity of the Asian Renewable Energy Hub that's just been deemed "clearly unacceptable" by Australia's conservative environment minister, and it's projected to produce five times more than the Enegix Base One project in Brazil. The biggest green hydrogen plant in the world today, Air Liquide's facility in Canada, marshals just 20 MW of peak electrolyzing capability – this Svevind project plans to run a monstrous 30 GW of electrolyzers.

Borat 1 BoJo 0

[adam2]

Certainly impressive. It would make more sense to use the renewably generated electricity for general domestic and industrial purposes, instead of burning fossil fuel to produce that electricity.

If however the scale of this proposed plant is so great that existing domestic and industrial electricity demand can be fully met AND produce hydrogen, then the proposal has considerable merit.

Hydrogen cant be readily transported by tanker, but export by pipeline is a possibility, and as suggested, local use for energy intensive industry is attractive. Production of steel, glass, bricks and cement for example.

AFAIK hydrogen is not applicable to aluminium production, that is an electrolytic process that absolutely needs electricity.

I see a bright future for hydrogen produced by renewably generated electricity but ONLY AFTER other electricity demand is fully satisfied by renewably generated electricity.

It is POINTLESS to use electricity to generate hydrogen, whilst still burning natural gas to make electricity anywhere in the same country, or area.

[Mark]

Green hydrogen will be price-competitive by 2030:
https://www.ft.com/content/b5ee15fa-b9d ... 9bdcb9f379

InterContinental Energy, one of the largest developers and earliest investors in carbon-free “green hydrogen” projects, is forecasting that the cost of the fuel will be competitive by the end of the decade. Alicia Eastman, president of the company, says the scale of its coastal clean energy hubs, in countries like Australia and Oman, would demonstrate the fuel could be cost competitive in the coming years. Last month, BP took a 45 per cent stake in the Asian Renewable Energy Hub (AREH) in Western Australia that InterContinental Energy had first developed — thrusting the energy project into the spotlight.

BP will operate the AREH project as part of a move to accelerate its transition to renewable energy. It describes it as “one of the largest renewable and green hydrogen energy hubs in the world”. InterContinental will retain a 26.4 per cent stake. Eastman says the development of the site stemmed from an early belief that coastal sites would be key to making green energy that can be exported around the world.

Alicia Eastman, president at ICE
“We came from a place of thinking that the world needs more green electricity and the cheapest green electrons were at these coastal sites, with sun in the day and wind at night,” she explains. “Under those conditions, it becomes almost like baseload power, with very high utilisation rates unlike the intermittency of sun and wind alone.” InterContinental, which was set up in 2014, had initially targeted exporting green electricity by undersea cables but then saw the developing potential of hydrogen created from wind and solar. “We soon realised that there are a lot of industries that don’t need electrons — they actually need a fuel,” Eastman says. “A lot of people that need it are never going to be connected to a grid. So we really looked at hydrogen again.” The company, which has also attracted investment from Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, is looking to make hydrogen in the form of easily exportable ammonia, which can act as a solid-state carrier for the fuel. “Shipping can use it as a green fuel and countries like Japan can use it as a dual fuel in fossil fuel plants — that’s extremely efficient as we don’t need to crack ammonia back to hydrogen again,” she says.

The role of hydrogen is not limited to power generation. Eastman argues that, as well as heavy transport like trucks and buses, where there is already a nascent hydrogen role, passenger cars are likely to develop swiftly in certain regions. She argues that electric vehicles are suitable for many roles, but that a more readily transportable fuel like hydrogen will enjoy advantages — even if there are only a very small number of hydrogen fuel cell cars available today. “EVs are great in suburban America where everyone has the space to have charging infrastructure at home,” she says. “But, if you live in a city like London, you probably don’t have a garage or even a driveway.” Shipping is also adopting ammonia or hydrogen-powered vessels at a faster rate than initially expected. “Shipping really wants a green fuel and they’re really coalescing on the potential of ammonia,” Eastman says.

Continues....

[kenneal - lagger]

It might be monetarily and economically equal but until it is energetically equal we should only use it as an emergency fuel source or a fuel source for very specific situations where it can be shown to be energetically equal as well. We have made the mistake of only looking at economic comparisons over the years and that is what has got us into the mess that we are in with global warming and running out of resources. We should learn from history a bit more.