Posted on 02/15/2024 4:55:31 AM PST by MtnClimber
This post reports on two new instances of people applying a little critical thinking to the issue of using so-called “green” hydrogen as an essential piece of a future de-carbonized energy system. This is a subject that I have previously addressed, here in a post of June 13, 2022, and here again in my energy storage Report of December 1, 2022.
The two new pieces covered in this post are (1) a February 1 Report for the Manhattan Institute by Jonathan Lesser titled “Green Hydrogen: A Multibillion-Dollar Energy Boondoggle,”, and (2) a February 13 article in the Washington Examiner by Steve Goreham titled “Can the government create a green hydrogen fuel industry?”
If you think that a “de-carbonized” energy system is some kind of urgent priority for humanity, and you put your mind to how to achieve that, it won’t take you long to realize that hydrogen is the only way to get there. OK, there’s nuclear, but environmentalists and regulators have nuclear completely blocked. That means that to be carbon-free, most electricity must come from the wind and sun, and in turn that means need for energy storage far beyond the capabilities of any batteries. Hydrogen is the one and only remaining solution.
And not just any hydrogen. Only “green” hydrogen will do — that is, hydrogen that is itself produced by some carbon-free process. The alternative is to get your hydrogen the way almost all hydrogen is produced today: you “reform” methane (CH4), separating out the hydrogen and discarding the carbon as CO2 into the atmosphere. But this process has the same CO2 emissions as if you just burned the methane (aka natural gas) in a power plant to get your energy in the first place. If the entire goal is de-carbonization, that is clearly not allowed.
Over at the government, their minds move slowly, but they have recently figured out that keeping their energy transition fantasy alive can only be accomplished with vast amounts of green hydrogen. And so they have undertaken to address the issue in the only way they know, which is to throw oodles of taxpayer funding at it. This piece from JPT on October 24, 2023 covers the government’s latest big announcement:
US President Joe Biden and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm announced that seven regional clean hydrogen hubs have been selected to receive $7 billion in Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funding in an effort to accelerate the domestic market for low-cost, clean hydrogen. The seven selected regional clean hydrogen hubs are expected to catalyze more than $40 billion in private investment and create tens of thousands of jobs, bringing the total public and private investment in hydrogen hubs to nearly $50 billion.
Note that the government’s big initiative came just about a year after the two Manhattan Contrarian pieces in 2022 explaining why this could never be done economically. But anyway, now that the government funds are flowing, and so-called “infrastructure” is getting built, others are starting to look at whether this makes any sense.
Of the two new pieces covered here, Lesser’s is far the longer and more detailed. He goes through a careful look at all the elements of trying to produce this green hydrogen stuff — building the electrolysis facility, operating and maintaining the facility, buying electricity from wind and solar producers, transmitting the wind/solar electricity to the site of electrolysis, and compressing the hydrogen into a form ready for transit somewhere to be used — and puts assumed cost figures on each piece of the process. He comes up with a total cost range of $2.74 to $5.35 per kg of hydrogen produced. Here is Lesser’s chart:
Note that Lesser comes up with even higher figures of $3.62 to $8.85 per kg of hydrogen if he further adds costs of battery storage of electricity to make it so that the electrolyzers can run all the time and not be dependent on the intermittency of wind and sun. Green hydrogen advocates would dispute whether this is necessary, so let’s leave it out for now. Even without this additional cost, we are at $2.74 to $5.35 per kg for the hydrogen.
Since a kg of hydrogen is good for about 33.3 kwh, that would mean something in the range of 8.3 to 16.2 cents per kwh just for the fuel, without yet considering any cost to get the fuel to a power plant to be burned.
I would comment that some of Lesser’s assumptions are very low, and by “low” I mean favorable to the economic viability of this green hydrogen. Most notably, he has an assumption of an unsubsidized cost of 4 cents per kwh for the wind/solar-generated electricity. Crazy. Here in New York, off-shore wind developers who had bid last year for contracts at about $90-100/MWH (i.e., 9 - 10 cents per kwh) have recently reneged and demanded prices in the range of $150-160/MWH, or 15-16 cents per kwh. If the recent New York demands represent the real cost of wind/solar electricity, then you can multiply Lesser’s figure for the electricity input to produce a kg of hydrogen by 4, adding about $6 per kg, bringing the total cost of a kg to around $9 - 11, instead of Lesser’s $2.74 - 5.35. In cents/kwh that would be about 18 additional cents per kwh, in either the high or low scenario; instead of a range of about 8 to 16 cents, it would be 24 to 32 cents per kwh to make the green hydrogen.
Goreham does not give us such a detailed calculation, but his bottom line is about the same (including a more realistic cost for the wind/solar electricity):
Hydrogen feedstock made from natural gas or coal is inexpensive, with a cost as low as $1 per kilogram. . . . To produce a kilogram of hydrogen by electrolysis, electricity alone costs $3 to $6 per kilogram, resulting in a total cost of at least $5 per kilogram. This makes hydrogen from electrolysis more than five times as expensive as hydrogen made from natural gas or coal.
Goreham’s “at least $5 per kg” for green hydrogen is actually well below Lesser’s figure after we adjust for the cost of electricity from wind and solar generation.
Note that, as I reported on January 12, recent bids in the UK for producing green hydrogen using electricity from off-shore wind came in at about $306/MWH, or 30.6 cents per kwh. Using the conversion factor of 33.3 kwh/kg of hydrogen would make this the equivalent of over $10 per kg of hydrogen.
We won’t really know how much this green hydrogen stuff actually costs until there are some real facilities up and running. But whether it is ten times as expensive as the stuff produced from natural gas, or only five times as expensive, doesn’t really matter. It is uneconomic, and nothing is going to change that. Nobody will ever buy it or use it without government mandates or subsidies or both.
Goreham’s conclusion:
[G]overnments now want to create a new hydrogen fuel industry using market intervention, mandates, and massive subsidies. But physics and economics strongly oppose the development of a green hydrogen fuel industry. Get ready for a spectacular failure of these government-sponsored efforts.
The costs will increase. Expect 20% for the Big Guy.
Manhattan Contrarian ping
Hydrogen is not a fuel source. Hydrogen is an energy storage medium like a battery. The only place where Hydrogen makes sense (and it ain’t much sense) is as a load leveler for Solar and Wind farms.
Create and store Hydrogen during peak Solar or Wind production, burn Hydrogen in generators during low or no Wind or Solar production.
But as a fuel for automobiles, it’s a non-starter.
Thermodynamics be damned!
And ignore the atmospheric water vapor emissions...
Hydrogen is carbon-free and so cool, we have to give it a chance.
Maybe someone will try to challenge the laws of thermodynamics at the Supreme Court. Then we could get clean, cheap hydrogen.
Hydrogen is quite common in Earth crust, but all of it is tied in water, hydrocarbon compounds and many minerals. In order to get pure hydrogen, it has to be manufactured by quite expensive methods. Especially the green ones use more energy that it ultimately delivers.
There is no free hydrogen on the Earth!
There is a lot of hydrogen in Sun!
Maybe we could make a pipeline from there!😜
If anyone is old enough to remember the movie “Our Man Flint” with James Coburn, I have a vision of the three “Scientist” who are trying to control the world through the weather when I hear the so called ‘Scientist’ who are prostitutes for the Eco Terrorism that is rampant in our governments. Sir Issac Newton is rolling in his grave that these cretins call themselves Scientists.
The carbon dioxide scam is growing like a cancer despite efforts to counter it with the facts. Green hydrogen is the most egregious version of its metastatic spread.
It is well worth reading the whole article.
It’s those damn Laws of Thermodynamics.
We need to repeal them, pronto!.....................
Alkaline fuel cells are the only sort of cell using hydrogren fuel I’m aware of. (NASA has used them to power satillites and space capsules.) And those require oxygen to create a reaction that produces water, heat, and electricity. I saw a demonstration in an old film where one was used to power a car. Water was a waste product shown trickling out of what would normally be an ICE exhaust pipe.
But I think even those require the hydrogen and oxygen to be liquified via cryogenics to be efficient enough to power something like a car...? And I don’t see something like that being safe enough for street use.
I’m sure there’s a retired engineer out there that can straighten out my limited knowledge of the subject.
This is the era of Taylor Swift Science.
It sounds good, it looks good, but it has absolutely no basis in long term effect......................
Quite similar to:
Burn some coal or other hydrocarbon to produce electricity. Call the electricity "zero emission." Expect the rubes won't figure this out for a while.
Quite similar to:
Burn some coal and other hydrocarbons in massive amounts to produce any darn thing you want in Chine. Call China "a emerging economy." Expect the rubes won't figure this out for a while.
Quite similar to: Buy our "carbon credit" paper and pretend to trade it, as you lose money. Expect the rubes won't figure this out for a while.
Tell the rubes who virtuous they are if they play along, and only glue themselves to streets and buildings and art in museums, and cause traffic jams because they "care" about the earth. And then drive home in their gasoline engine cars.
...Or even a working one!😀
Carbon is everywhere, even coming from our exhaled breath, our cremated or decomposing bodies after death, from every mammal, volcanoes, everywhere.
This is the ultimate straw man fallacy. It has been proven to be bogus but that doesn’t stop the climate cults. Oh no, they will never stop “saving the planet” from, well, nothing.
Now if they really want to do some good, find a way to stop Greta farts, otherwise known as Gretathane. Gretathane is emitted from every lame climate cultist on the planet. Fix that, fix the planet. Heeeeeeeee!
I can just see them all rounded up, placed is a sealed dome-like structure with machines filtering the air by separating Gretathane from O2 and CO2. Billions, maybe Trillions could be wastefully spent on these domes just like with the Green Energy movement. We could call these dome-filled climate freaks “dome heads” or something equally fun.
Hell, apply the same analysis to Menton’s assumed “green” wind and solar. I don’t see any of the devices used to extract these being made by “green” processes. They don’t have impressive operational lifetimes.
A “green” windmill is made out of wood. Is that Don Quixote I see in the distance?
As for nuclear, I would like to humbly submit that if we produce nuclear waste so that we can dry our clothes in electric dryers or buzz about in EVs, then we are lunatics.
It would be great if we could developer some cheaper energy source like Fusion or giant super efficient solar cell farms out west.
But not on burning coal, Fission etc
Adoption of hydrogen on a large scale — let’s say as a transportation fuel — would require that we find some dramatically cheaper way to produce pure hydrogen.
Ok, I got that.
Would I bet against someday finding a cost effective way to produce hydrogen?
No.
Might it be a good alternative if we succeeded in finding a solution?
Yes, of course.
By all means, let’s support continued research in this area. We can do that without jumping off the cliff in pursuit of some green fantasy project. Research, yes. Massive subsidies for premature adoption, no.
If someone actually spotted a unicorn in the wild, the enviros would pivot within 15 minutes to insistence on a 100 percent unicorn fart fueled economy by 2050. Fantasy wish fulfillment leads to magical thinking. The left is now engaged in a systematic revolt against the reality principle on multiple fronts; this is the political problem. But as long as we keep the cost effectiveness calculus in place, hydrogen technologies should continue to be researched.
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