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.
Note if we go down this path I’m start a hydrogen refueling company with refueling sites across the USA.
The name will be Hindenburg Refueling……..
If it fails the companies dem owners contribute (launder) a huge amount to the dems and go bankrupt after laundering a LOT of the money to themselves and their pals.
Either way, dems win $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$!
I’ve got pipe sitting on location trying to get some Sun and heat to get rid of hydrogen embrittlement. It’s a tiny molecule/atom, very active, and worms its way into metal easily, greatly reducing its strength.
The engineering that would be required to make a consumer engine that doesn’t cost $1mmm and lasts is immense.
Unicorn farts? I’m holding out for Rainbow Stew.
1) So called "green" hydrogen ain't green even if produced with solar or wind when you think about what goes into making solar panels and wind turbines. IMHO, hydro power is about the only thing that's truly energy harnessing with little pollution impact. And even that is under attack by the left. And in right-controlled states hydro power is probably about as utilized as it can get (i.e. I can't think of anywhere else in my home state of Alabama to build a dam).
2) Anything done at the grid level with intermittent energy sources is beyond stupid. Even with green hydrogen touted as a storage medium to smooth out the "duck curve", it's still not dependable enough.
3) The only areas where hydrogen or solar or wind make sense is if it's decentralized (for your own home or your own business) to make yourself a bit more self-reliant on energy so that the government overlords have less control over you and your finances with their warmageddon cult energy policies.
4) So if you are thinking about hydrogen storage in a decentralized manner, fine. I get that. Just know that the return trip efficiency of kWh used to run the electrolyzer, store hydrogen even as a gas (without extra kWh to cool it as a liquid), then later use that hydrogen gas to power a fuel cell to give you kWh when needed --- all of that has a horrible efficiency rate. The best I've seen IIRC is 40% of kWh retrieved from the fuel cell for every kWh used by the electrolyzer (a 60% loss). But with my battery storage I have only a 9.8% loss. (In year 2023 I charged my batteries a total of 12.0667 mWh, and discharged them a total of 10.8805 mWh, for a loss of 1.1862 mWh. That means of all the power used to charge them during the days, with some loss of power during the charge, some loss holding the charge for a few hours until night, then some more loss pulling the charge from the batteries when my electrical panels needed power, I had on average a 90.2% throughput. To get that same total 10.8805 mWh from hydrogen storage with only 40% throughput I would have had to use a lot more than 12.0667 mWh generating the hydrogen, when means I would have had to spend a lot more on solar panels to generate that power and use up a lot more space for those panels.)
I think unicorn farts are a better bet.
I would be tempted to go with pixie dust, but the pixies are smart enough to stay in hiding so the greenies can’t round them up and put them in slave labor camps.
Unicorns are too innocent and trusting to think of such things.
Ping
“OK, there’s nuclear, but environmentalists and regulators have nuclear completely blocked. That means that to be carbon-free, most electricity must come from ...”
Environmentalists and regulators will lose out to the technical reality that nuclear is the cleanest non-intermittent source of electrical power.
Until the fusion dream comes true.
A ways back when looking into hydrogen as a fuel, I recall a design that manufactured hydrogen on site using nothing but water and a nominal amount of electricity.
If the electricity was from hydro power, there would be zero carbon impact.
Even if coal was used to produce the electricity, it would be a minor impact since the amount of electricity used would be nominal.
If I spent the time, I could find it, but I’m not going to. You can find it for yourselves.
My memory calls BULLSHIRT on this article.
Any such resistence is designed in the same way as the lies against nuclear, by the same people and for the same reasons. Climate protection was never an issue.
You get less power from burning hydrogen than the power required to generate hydrogen from water using electrolysis. The loss in energy is inefficiency in the process and entropy. If it was economical then someone would be doing it by now.
The left will shut down fusion power when the time comes. There will be some ec0-concern so they can continue to tear down Western Civilization which is their true goal.
one of these so-called “green hydrogen” outfits in Boulder County, AquaHydrex, just went tits-up when they had used up all of their government grant money ... just for grins, i looked at their website (which now no longer exists): it was covered with lots of pretty pics and buzz-wordy sciencey-sounding happy talk, but when you drilled down you found out they were using “magic” hydrolysis, the same process your high school chemistry teacher used to make small explosions to get your attention (well, the same process without the “magic” part) ...
“You get less power from burning hydrogen than the power required to generate hydrogen from water using electrolysis.”
the Democrats really need to repeal those pesky Laws of Thermodynamics ... [the German Nazis actually tried that by outlawing “Jewish Physics”, which worked until their Jap allies were blown to kingdom come with atomic bombs based on “Jewish Physics”]
“The left will shut down fusion power when the time comes.”
I’d think not unless the fusion process has environmentally harmful side effects.
Countering the ‘left’ are people like me that want reliable electric power and fuel for our cars.
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