Dear reader, since we uploaded this dossier on the potential of hydrogen as a global energy carrier just two months ago there have been several major new developments in Australia.
It includes a successful demonstration of CSIRO's new 'membrane technology' that paves the way to transport hydrogen as liquid ammonia and then efficiently recover pure hydrogen at the point of use. According to CSIRO, it used the so produced hydrogen in a test ride with two commercially available fuel cells cars. The technology will now be increased in scale and deployed in several larger-scale demonstrations, in Australia and abroad.
Australia's chief scientist has now also thrown his weight behind the emerging energy carrier, saying that hydrogen's time has come.... read full editorial note
The comeback of hydrogen
After a decade in the shadow of batteries, hydrogen is poised to become a global energy carrier
If we looked for the most significant technology stories of the past couple of years, hydrogen as an energy carrier may well be one of them.
There were no specific earth shattering breakthroughs.
But after a decade of being pushed aside by rapid technology advances in batteries, hydrogen is back on the radar for policy makers, and in the news in Australia and abroad.
Australia catching the wave
In Australia, this was recently underscored in the 2018-19 federal budget, which included $50.8 million for a pilot of the Hydrogen Energy Supply Chain project. Co-funded by the Australian and Victorian Governments the project will convert Victorian brown coal into hydrogen for export to Japan.
The project could be a first step in developing a viable hydrogen industry in Australia, and follows a series of recent domestic developments that include (recent update indicated in red):
August 2018: A CSIRO roadmap finds that an economically sustainable hydrogen industry could soon become a reality in Australia;
August 2018: A briefing paper for the COAG Council by the Hydrogen Strategy Group finds that Australia is well placed to capture an emerging hydrogen export market and associated benefits in the domestic economy;
August 2018: The CSIRO reports on the successful refuelling of fuel cell vehicles using a novel 'membrane technology' to supply hydrogen;
April 2018: the Australian Governmentannounced it would support a new Future Fuels Cooperative Research Centre with $26.25 million, with a further $64.6 million in cash and in-kind funding pledged by CRC participants. The main focus of the centre's program will be on adapting existing infrastructure, such as natural gas pipelines, to deploy hydrogen.
2017/2018: Western Australian firm Hazer Group Ltdcommenced a pre-pilot plant facility in which it trials its new technology that uses iron ore and natural gas to produce hydrogen, while converting the natural gas carbon into synthetic graphite for the lithium-ion battery market.
December 2017: the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) announced a $20 million commitment towards early stage projects exploring ways to export renewable energy stored as hydrogen.
November 2017: the CSIROannounced a new Future Science Platform focused on hydrogen as a potential way to store and export renewable energy.
October 2017: the CSIRO released an Oil and Gas Roadmap, which proposes to diversify the industry into higher value products, identifying hydrogen as a potential future pillar.
September 2017: the former South Australian Governmentreleased a hydrogen roadmap, outlining steps for the state to become a sustainable producer and consumer of hydrogen. It includes a plan for six hydrogen buses to be use in the capital's metro.
August 2017: the Victorian Governmentannounced it would contribute $1 million towards the establishment of Australia's first commercial scale hydrogen fueling station; the supplied hydrogen will be produced from 100% renewable energy using an on-site solar plant and grid-sourced wind power. By 2020, the $9.37 million project by the Moreland City Council and hydrogen utility company H2U will fuel 12 waste collection vehicles.
April 2017: the CSIROannounced a $3.4 million two-year project to commercialise its new membrane reactor technology through which hydrogen can be transported in form of ammonia. The innovation could potentially fill the current gap in the chain of hydrogen production, distribution and delivery.
March 2018: the South Australian $150 million Renewable Technology Fundawarded a grant to French company Neoen to explore the potential of a 50 megawatt renewable hydrogen production facility; it would be the largest co-located wind, solar, battery and hydrogen production facility in the world, producing up to 25,000 kg of hydrogen per day.
Hydrogen catching on globally
Internationally, the launch of the Hydrogen Council at the 2017 World Economic Forum in Davos was a key event highlighting the growing momentum around the globe.
The council is a broad coalition of multinational industry heavyweights that will leverage considerable lobbying power to steer policy development as the world's economies transition to low-carbon energy use.
Significantly, the council is not only backed by car manufacturers, but also includes major global energy companies such as Shell, Statoil, China Energy, and JXTG Nippon Oil & Energy Corporation. It is a sign that industry is now more widely recognising the potential of hydrogen as an energy carrier across global energy systems, and beyond the narrow focus on cars.
"It’s a real strategic shift,” according to the council's secretary general, Pierre-Etienne Franc from Air Liquide SA, who believes that the decade 2020 to 2030 will be for hydrogen what the 1990s were for solar and wind.
Being 'clean' and 'versatile' are the two main features that make the hydrogen fuel option attractive, as was also highlighted in a 2015 report by the International Energy Agency (IEA). The report also pointed out that hydrogen can be produced "from any regionally prevalent primary energy source, and can be effectively transformed into any form of energy for diverse end-use applications." Importantly, with its "low-carbon footprint" it has the potential to facilitate significant reductions in energy-related CO2.
A key to this will be that hydrogen is a suitable medium to store large amounts of renewable energy over long periods of time, and then could also be used to transport the energy, for example to remote areas with little access to the power grid.
In November last year, the Hydrogen Council's Hydrogen, scaling up report detailed a vision for hydrogen to become a US$2.5 trillion business by 2050, and then to account for around 20% of the energy consumed across the globe each year. While this would require large-scale hydrogen initiatives and investment (around $25 billion each year over the next decade), it could reduce yearly CO2 emissions by an estimated six gigatonnes compared to today's levels - a significant step towards meeting the two-degree limit to global temperature rises under the 2015 Paris Agreement.
It's not just about cars
Transport is a major focus area, and the council outlines a scenario in which around 400 million cars, 15-20 million trucks and 5 million buses run on hydrogen by 2050. Environmental benefits could also be achieved by increasingly using hydrogen instead of carbon-based reducing agents (natural gas or coal) in industries processes such as iron-making.
But the most significant benefits will stem from hydrogen as a fuel to heat and power residential and commercial buildings (according to the IEA the sector accounts for more than half of global final energy consumption and a third of global energy-related CO2 emissions).
Success is linked to fuel cells
Hydrogen can be directly used in combustion engines or boiler applications.
However, its market penetration is intricately linked to the development of fuel cell technologies. Accordingly, many of the companies involved in the Hydrogen Council are heavily invested in developing this technology that can efficiently generate electric power and heat by 'burning' hydrogen with oxygen to generate water.
Fuel Cells::
Basic concepts of fuel cells have been around for some time, with the first 'gas battery' producing electricity from hydrogen invented by Welsh lawyer turned scientist William Grove in 1839, and by the late 50s, researchers were exploring several types of fuels cells, including solid oxide fuel cells (SOFC) and proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFC).
SOFCs can use a range of fuels, including methane, but require high operating temperatures and are therefore more often considered for stationary applications. By contrast, PEMFCs require pure hydrogen fuel, but can also operate at lower temperatures, and are widely used in smaller residential heating systems as well as fuel cell vehicles.
There are several other types, including the Alkaline Fuel Cell and the Phosphoric Fuel Cell, and they all vary in chemical design and potential areas of application. However, they also share distinct advantages that include:
the potentially pollution free production of electricity and heat;
a high efficiency in generating electricity (between 40% to 60%), which is even higher (reaching more than 85%) when waste heat is also used in co-generation applications;
the continuous generation of electricity as long as external fuel is provided;
a high density of energy per volume and mass;
in vehicle applications fast refuelling times and, compared to batteries, and a greater range (due to long operating times at lower weight); and
less impact on environment than batteries, which contain hazardous chemicals that cannot be disposed of in landfill.
They include car manufacturers such as Toyota, Honda and Hyundai which
are betting on the success of fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs), and that hydrogen will become a major global fuel. Toyota is not even including battery electric cars (BEV) as part of its car development program, which is also in line with the Japanese Government's agenda to make hydrogen fuel a pillar of its energy system, and to establish a 'Hydrogen Society' by 2020, in time for the Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics.
Firms in other parts of the world, such as Daimler, Audi and the BMW Group, are also committed to the technology, but their main focus remains on batteries, and on hybrids which can use both energy sources. Daimler, for example is just preparing the mass production of a hybrid fuel cell-battery powered SUV, the Mercedes-Benz GLC F-Cell fuel cell SUV.
Fuel cells do have some distinct advantages over batteries, notably a much higher energy-density, and that their operating time can be increased by simply supplying more hydrogen. It means that to increase the range of a fuel cell powered care it only needs a bigger hydrogen storage tank, which adds little to the vehicle's mass. With batteries, however, a greater range requires adding heavy battery plates.
From a consumer's perspective, a very important point is also that hydrogen tanks can be refilled within seconds. By contrast, despite recent technology advances, batteries still need significant time to recharge.
Consumers have nevertheless been reluctant to adopt FCEVs.
Honda's concept fuel cell car, the FCX Clarity, became commercially available in Japan, California and Europe in 2008, and Toyota's Mirai entered the Japanese and US market end of 2014. Yet, to date just a few thousand have been sold.
FCEVs: some negatives but incredibly dumb?
One of the reasons behind the slow market uptake is the still high production costs of fuel cells.
FCEVs are therefore considerably more expensive than cars with a conventional internal combustion engine (ICE), and also BEVs.
Meanwhile, hydrogen fuel costs make running an FCEV much more expensive than a BEV.
Consumers may also consider that the process of producing hydrogen, transporting it to its point of use and then converting it into usable electricity is a fairly complex and less efficient process compared to batteries, and there are doubts about which option has better environmental credentials.
(Whether BEVs are less greenhouse gas intensive than FCEVs depends on the primary sources of energy. For example, power generation in Australia involves a high percentage of coal, and FCEVs running on hydrogen produced from natural gas are likely to be a cleaner option.)
Perhaps the biggest hurdle for hydrogen is the lack of fueling infrastructure. It is often referred to as a chicken and egg problem: consumer interest in fuel cell cars hinges on having access to fueling stations, but to implement better access requires significant capital investment, which in turn is not put in place as long as consumer uptake is low.
The complexity of these barriers has led Tesla's chief executive officer Eon Musk to call fuel cell technology for cars an "incredibly dumb" alternative to using batteries. This is also in light of recent improvements in battery technology, such as Toshiba's Super Charge Lithium-ion Battery, which according to the company triples the driving range currently possible with conventional lithium-ion batteries, and reduces the required charging time to just a few minutes.
According to the survey, executives in the industry believe that there will be no single solitary 'drivetrain technology'. Instead they project a split market by 2040, with 26% BEVs, 25% FCEVs, 25% ICEs, and 24% hybrids.
Other recent outlooks on the future fuel cells have also been positive, including a 2017 report by Global Market Insights, which suggests that the global fuel cell market could reach $6 billion by 2024 .
Nevertheless, the economic success of hydrogen and fuel cell technologies is far from certain, as pointed out in the IEA report. Most are still in the early stages of commercialisation and currently struggle to compete with alternative technologies, including other low-carbon options.
It is also clear that significant investment by governments will be required to overcome the hurdles facing the technology.
Japan leads the H2 world
To date, only a few economies have implemented a long-term policy strategy, most notably Japan, which is significantly boosting its hydrogen fuel infrastructure. Japan’s government has also heavily invested in the development of micro combined heat and power (micro-CHP) fuel cell units for powering and heating residential homes and small industrial buildings.
In 2009, Japan put in place the most successful fuel cell commercialisation program to date, the ENE-FARM program. Subsidised by the government, and involving gas companies (Tokyo Gas and Osaka Gas), technology firms (Panasonic, Toshiba) and the automotive joint venture Eneo, the project deployed a total of around 150,000 micro-CHP units to residential homes by 2015.
In 2016, Japan's Government released a strategic roadmap for the "dramatic expansion of hydrogen utilisation". It also aims to significantly ramp up the dissemination of micro-CHP with a target of 5.3 million units delivered to households by 2030.
Decentralising power generation
Notably, the economic and environmental benefits of the technology are not solely tied to hydrogen produced from renewable energy. This is important as fossil fuels are expected to dominate energy consumption across the globe for the foreseeable future.
Micro-CHP systems, such as from Panasonic, locally convert ('reform') natural gas to hydrogen, which then feeds into fuel cells to co-generate electricity and heat. The efficiency of this process is much higher (up to 95%) than can be achieved in centralised power plants (up to 60%), while it also avoids the losses occurring in the transmission of electricity through the grid (5-10%).
Japan is a clear technology leader, but other global regions are catching up. In Europe, the Ene.field project last year concluded the largest to date demonstration of micro-CHP fuel cell technology in Europe. Funded by the European Union, the study deployed more than 1000 stationary fuel cell systems across the EU between 2012 and 2017. According to the project’s report, the technology is market ready and could deliver important system wide efficiency and decarbonisation benefits, potentially reducing carbon emissions by 32 million tonnes of CO2 in 2030, while also reducing infrastructure and operational costs for the energy system.
Delivery through the pipeline
Deploying micro-CHP fuel cell systems may also prepare the ground for the eventual replacement of natural gas with hydrogen that is produced from renewable sources.
Ideally, hydrogen would then be delivered through existing natural gas pipeline systems, although this is not trivial. For example, the energy content per volume of hydrogen is only a third that of natural gas. It means that to deliver the same amount of energy to homes a higher pressure is required to move the gas at increased flow rate. Also, the existing gas distribution network uses a variety of materials, some of which are affected by hydrogen "embrittlement", a form of corrosion that can lead to cracks.
Adapting the system may still be possible.
In the UK, the government funded H21 Leeds City Gate feasibility study found that in Leeds, one of the country’s largest cities, converting the existing natural gas network to 100% hydrogen would be technically feasible and economically viable, and could be a step towards creating a hydrogen economy in the UK.
However, the UK study still focusses on hydrogen being centrally produced through 'steam reforming' of natural gas, dismissing renewably produced hydrogen as too expensive.
Developments in Australia, however, explore this as a potential option.
Australia exporting renewable energy?
Last year, the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) announced a trial of a new high-efficiency water electrolyser from NSW-based firm AquaHydrex.
According to the company, its innovation could make it commercially attractive to produce hydrogen from renewable power. Funded with $5 million from ARENA, AquaHydrex project is now establishing an electrolyser pilot plant which will inject the produced hydrogen into the South Australian gas grid at a level (5-10%) that is safe to supplement natural gas without any need to modify pipelines or end-user appliances.
This so called "power-to-gas" technology could complement other forms of energy storage and delivery, mainly batteries and pumped hydro, which both are dominating the current discussion about how to efficiently store excess renewable energy.
A major plus of these storage options is that they have a very high 'round-trip efficiency', with more than 80% of the renewable energy originally produced potentially then delivered to the consumer.
By comparison, the process of hydrogen production, transport, and conversion to electricity has a 'round-trip efficiency' of only around 40%, as much of the source energy is lost in the split (electrolyses) of water into its components oxygen and hydrogen.
Improving the electrolysis efficiency is therefore a subject of intense research.
However, a 2015 study led by Stanford University found that if the low energy cost of the materials required to store hydrogen are taken into account, it is already competitive with batteries for certain applications, such as storing 'overgeneration' from wind turbines.
Longer lasting storage with fluid potential
And for longer-term storage and the long-distance transport of renewable energy, hydrogen offers compelling advantages over batteries or pumped hydro technology.
Batteries lose charge over time, and they are difficult to scale up. Also, their low energy density makes them unsuitable for the shipment of larger amounts of energy. Similar limitations apply to pumped hydro.
By contrast, hydrogen production and storage can easily be up-scaled by just increasing the size of the hydrogen storage tank, and hydrogen storage systems have very little energy 'leakage'.
Of course, hydrogen, very much like natural gas, is a highly flammable gas, and this currently presents a challenge for transporting larger amounts to overseas markets. But according to recent research by the CSIRO, it may be possible, as with natural gas, to tame the dangerous handling properties of hydrogen by converting it into a fluid.
The basis to this is the so-called Haber-Bosch process, in which hydrogen reacts with nitrogen, a gas abundantly present in the air, producing ammonia. The process has been around for more than a century and is widely applied in the fertiliser industry.
For some time, ammonia has been looked at as a potential intermediate energy carrier. It is conveniently kept and transported as a fluid that has a very high density of bound hydrogen, much higher than pure hydrogen.
The problem has been, though, how to set the hydrogen free again at the site of use. At higher temperatures, ammonia decomposes into nitrogen and hydrogen, but to make the process efficient it requires special catalysts, and then hydrogen still needs to be recovered pure enough to be usable in fuel cells.
Last year, CSIROannounced that it may have solved these challenges by developing a thin metal membrane through which only hydrogen can pass. With a two year $3.4 million project CSIRO is currently commercialising the technology.
The agency has also established a Hydrogen Energy Systems Future Science Platform, one of eight such initiatives through which CSIRO is investing in areas with opportunities for new industries in Australia.
It is a demonstration of confidence that hydrogen will become a major component of the global energy mix in the future - and potentially set off a renewable energy export industry in the country.
Dear reader, since we uploaded this dossier on the potential of hydrogen as a global energy carrier just two months ago there have been several major new developments in Australia.
It includes a successful demonstration of CSIRO's new 'membrane technology' that paves the way to transport hydrogen as liquid ammonia and then efficiently recover pure hydrogen at the point of use. According to CSIRO, it used the so produced hydrogen in a test ride with two commercially available fuel cells cars. The technology will now be increased in scale and deployed in several larger-scale demonstrations, in Australia and abroad.
Australia's chief scientist has now also thrown his weight behind the emerging energy carrier, saying that hydrogen's time has come.
Dr Alan Finkel chaired a Hydrogen Strategy Group that prepared a briefing paper for the COAG Energy Council in which it outlines the potential of a hydrogen industry for Australia.
Presenting the paper to the ministers, Dr Finkel said that while Australia has all the necessary resources to make hydrogen at scale, it never has been commercially viable. "Now, the economics are changing," he said.
This is because of the falling costs for renewable energy and Japan's commitment to establish a sustainable hydrogen economy, which could make it a reliable buyer of hydrogen made in Australia.
A recent report from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) prepared by ACIL Allen Consulting forecasts that with the right policy settings Australian hydrogen exports could contribute $1.7 billion per year to the economy by 2030.
The report identified four countries - Japan, China, the Republic of Korea and Singapore - as prospective markets.
But according to Dr Finkel, there are competitors emerging, with Norway, Brunei and Saudi Arabia all boosting their credentials as future hydrogen suppliers.
Following the report of the Hydrogen Strategy Group, the CSIRO released a National Hydrogen Roadmap outlining a strategy for an economically sustainable hydrogen industry in Australia.
It canvasses hydrogen as a major new export opportunity for Australia, while it also points out persistent barriers such as a lack of supporting infrastructure, and the cost of hydrogen supply.
However, a key finding of the report is that an appropriate policy framework could create a 'market pull' for hydrogen, with investment in infrastructure then likely to follow. In or around 2025, clean hydrogen could then be cost-competitive with existing industrial feedstocks such as natural gas, and energy carriers such as batteries in many applications.
These developments in just the past two months underscore the main thrust of our dossier below: the momentum for hydrogen as an emerging global energy carrier.
