Warming Thoughts© #9, “Hydrogen: Hype, or Hope?” Part 1
CEO, Electron Storage, Inc.
Introduction:
A decade ago, a friend of mine, Lindsay Leveen wrote: ‘Hydrogen - Hope or Hype? A Primer on Energy and Sustainability’. A decade before that President Bush announced a Hydrogen Fuel Initiative, and leaping forward 20 years to 2022, the IRA bill provided tens of billions of dollars in incentives for “clean” hydrogen production and the hydrogen transition. Why? and why did it take so long? Is it the key to our hopes for decarbonization, a lot of hype, or something else? How should we think about this physically simple but very complex element of our energy transition plans?
Breathless announcements of a new hydrogen powered plane engine (Airbus), $8 billion hydrogen hub proposals in Oregon and Washington, or some electrolyzer breakthrough (everywhere, but particularly in Europe) are on every news aggregator site. Hope.
This year the Artemis space launch was delayed for months due to a hydrogen leak and Trever Milton, whose Nikola hydrogen fuel cell trucks were to revolutionize industry, got convicted of securities fraud. 98% of hydrogen production is from natural gas and coal, spewing massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. Hydrogen fuel cell cars are MIA. Hype.
Meanwhile, without hydrogen you don’t get ammonia, and without ammonia-based nitrogen fertilizer, according to Vaclav Smil in ‘The Way the World Really Works’ the earth can’t support more than 4 billion people. Half of us starve without hydrogen. Without hydrogen you also can’t efficiently take the sulfur out of crude oil, and you get much poorer yields of usable hydrocarbons from refining and plastic production.
Hydrogen is Hype, it is Hope, and it is Real, an absolutely vital $145 billion industry—-all at the same time. To fulfill its hope the hydrogen industry has to undergo several massive transitions or it will remain hype. We will examine them.
Hydrogen Basics:
Hydrogen is 90% of the matter in the universe, .14% of the earth’s crust, and only 0.00005% of the atmosphere. But the four most common elements in living tissue are carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, in that order (plants get their hydrogen from water not nitrogen fertilizer). When it comes to energy, gasoline (which is actually a mix of hydrocarbons—note the name for all the petrochemicals---hydro, not from water, but from hydrogen, and carbon is approximately C8H18. Diesel is C12H23 and methane CH4. Hydrogen is intimately involved with high energy combustion, and long chain polymers, inside and outside of living things. It is one of the truly essential elements of modern life, and indeed of life itself.
At standard temperatures and pressure, it is ridiculously light (it is the simplest element with one proton and one electron) and there isn’t enough there there to provide real energy. 1,000 liters, one cubic meter, of air weights 1,225 grams, but the same volume of Hydrogen, 82 grams.
The energy content of a cubic meter of natural gas when burned with oxygen is 10.6 KWH (around the same as a liter of diesel), a cubic meter of hydrogen only 3 KWH.
On a weight basis hydrogen gas has an energy content of 33.33 KWh/KG, around 3x the energy in natural gas per KG. Hence the repeated refrain about hydrogen being the most energy dense fuel. To be useful it has to be massively compressed, usually to 5,000 or 10,000 PSI for transportation uses. Your BBQ LPG tank is at 130 PSI, little more than your bicycle tire, a compressed natural gas cylinder, 3,500 PSI.
Why the billions for hydrogen?
The Hype is that hydrogen is an all-purpose fuel for burning and energy and electrical production that can provide the ultimate clean burning fuel. You can produce hydrogen from water and renewable electricity, and it emits only water when burned—Wow! What is not to like?
It could, for example, flow through the natural gas pipeline network and into homes to produce heat. It could replace the massive fossil fuel furnaces that provide heat for concrete production, chemical and refineries, central heating systems, and steel production. It could be rapidly fueled into vehicles, much more rapidly than recharging a battery, and produce only water vapor out the exhaust. Hydrogen is the only thing that makes sense for long distance trucks (we are told) and massive off-road vehicles — batteries are just too heavy. Hydrogen is also touted as an energy dense fuel for airplanes, as on a weight basis it is 2.5x denser than kerosene jet fuel.
Hydrogen can be burned for heat in an open flame, in a gas turbine, or in an internal combustion engine[1] and it can be converted directly to electricity with a fuel cell. It is a way to store excess energy from solar or wind. The idea of using renewable energy to produce a fuel out of water, store it, and then power many things cleanly is fabulous. (Fabulous until you examine the energy losses along the chain and the capital costs, both of which we will discuss in more detail.)
We are in desperate need of ways to transfer energy, energy carriers, which hydrogen is. Natural gas pipelines and oil pipelines carry vast amounts of energy and are much more energy dense than electrical lines and can carry vast amounts of energy long distance without losses with remarkable safety and are largely invisible underground. Hydrogen is a gas and can go in a pipeline, hence it could be used to transfer energy from the sunny southeast to the freezing northeast. We need ways to transfer energy from the sunny deserts of Australia north to Japan. Hydrogen is hyped to be part of the solution---and it may be, but probably as ammonia as we will also discuss.
Less sexy, but more critically, we are currently producing a lot of hydrogen and the current processes produce a LOT of CO2, close to 10 kg of CO2 for every kg of hydrogen. But even that figure doesn’t include the energy needed for compression and transportation. On a global basis, around 60 million tons of hydrogen are produced, so hydrogen production contributes more than half a gigaton of CO2 emissions. Part of the hype, and an immediate market, is the replacement of existing hydrogen production with cleaner methods.
If we can pull off a transition to clean hydrogen production and use, we have, claim the hydrogen boosters, solved most of the key problems of the energy transition. In part 2 we will start to go through the multiple transitions that would be necessary to make that happen and talk more about the fundamental characteristics of hydrogen that make it likely that the booster will explode before it reaches orbit.
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[1] Yes, it can work in a surprisingly unmodified internal combustion engine with the right controls. I funded a Crown Vic that ran on gasoline, or natural gas, or hydrogen. But starting is lot nicer if you start it with a mix of natural gas and hydrogen rather than hydrogen alone. We need a large gas cylinder in the front seat to go 10 miles on hydrogen. The compressed natural gas cylinder fit nicely in the trunk.