The DEFR Follies -- Cost Of Hydrogen Storage

Here in New York we have our own unique and special acronym for how we think we are going to make our future emissions-free electrical grid work with predominantly wind and solar generation. The acronym is DEFR — the “Dispatchable Emissions-Free Resource.” When the sun goes down and the wind stops blowing in the dead of winter, we will crank up the DEFR to keep us all warm and cozy. There will of course be zero carbon emissions, because by definition the DEFR is “emissions-free.”

Unfortunately nobody is quite sure what this DEFR might be. There are only a few options. Nuclear could work, but in New York it is completely blocked by regulatory obstruction and the certainty of decades of litigation. Batteries are wildly too expensive and physically not up to the job. That leaves many green energy advocates grasping at hydrogen as the last remaining option. Granted, we don’t yet have any meaningful production of hydrogen from carbon-free sources. But it seems so simple: just use wind and solar generators to run electrolyzers to make hydrogen from water; then store the hydrogen in some big caverns, and burn it when you need it. No carbon is involved. Problem solved!

I’ve had a few posts over the past couple of years commenting on some of the many issues that make this “green” hydrogen fantasy infeasible. This post from June 2022 noted that the cost of making hydrogen from water is unlikely ever to fall below, or even close to, the cost of getting new natural gas out of the ground; this post from August 2024 discussed numerous other problems with hydrogen, like its lower energy density compared to natural gas, and the prospective need for a whole new infrastructure of pipelines, power plants, delivery trucks and consumer appliances.

Now comes along a new study focusing on a different piece of the costs of using hydrogen as a main energy source for the economy. The issue is the cost of storing the hydrogen from the time of its production until it is needed for use. The new study appeared in the scientific journal Joule on October 8 with the title “Carbon abatement costs of green hydrogen across end-use sectors.” (The link goes just to a lengthy introduction and abstract. You’ll need to pay $35 to get the whole article, but the introduction at the link tells you what you need to know.)

Perhaps most significant about this new study is the authors. They are Roxana Shafiee and Daniel Schrag, both of whom work at Harvard and have impeccable climate cult credentials, including multiple appointments at various Harvard sub-schools and institutes (Harvard University Center for the Environment, Harvard Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs — you get the idea). These are not people who can be dismissed as “climate deniers.”

Shafiee and Schrag correctly recognize that the cost of producing hydrogen from water is just a piece, and possibly a small piece, of the cost of getting useful hydrogen to a consumer at point of use. They criticize green hydrogen enthusiasts for paying insufficient attention to other costs, and particularly to the costs of “storage and distribution”:

Hydrogen generated via electrolysis using renewable energy (green hydrogen) has gained prominence as a potential strategy in decarbonizing hard-to-abate sectors of the economy, in which electrification is technically challenging or prohibitively expensive. Many governments have set policy targets and, in some cases, financial incentives for green hydrogen production, with the expectation that production costs will fall rapidly in the coming decades, providing low-cost carbon abatement opportunities across many sectors. Yet, many recent analyses do not consider the storage and distribution costs of delivering green hydrogen to different sectors or how these costs may vary across end uses.

So Shafiee and Schrag set out to correct those deficiencies. To their credit, S&S have figured out that the costs of distribution and storage infrastructure are highly dependent on how intensely that infrastructure is used. (As far as I can determine, not one of the thousands of people in the vast New York energy regulatory bureaucracies has yet figured out this simple principle.) The more often the storage gets cycled, the lower the charge for each unit of energy stored and then used. S&S note that some sectors, particularly industries like petrochemicals and steel, can cycle hydrogen storage many times per month, thus driving down costs. Unfortunately, the same does not apply to the power sector:

Although low costs of hydrogen storage and distribution (<$1/kgH2) are possible through economies of scale, this requires high utilization of storage and distribution infrastructure, which is not applicable to all end-use sectors. If storage and distribution infrastructure is used at a low rate, costs increase significantly. Salt cavern storage costs increase from less than $0.50/kgH2 to $6/kgH2, on average, if stores are cycled fewer than 10 times per year, for example, in the context of seasonal changes in demand (e.g., heating or electricity generation).

That’s right: hydrogen produced and stored for purposes of home heating only gets cycled once per year at most. To understand the significance of the costs cited, recall that the energy-equivalence conversion factor from $/kgH2 to $/MMBTU (the units in which natural gas prices are customarily quoted) is 8. $6/kgH2 converts to $48/MMBTU. And that’s just for the intra-year storage. Meanwhile, the current price for Henry Hub natural gas is $3.06/MMBTU, and most of it does not need to be stored for any significant period because it gets produced roughly as needed to meet demand.

So kudos to S&S for figuring out that cost of storage for hydrogen is a big and unrecognized issue. But unfortunately, they only go as far as considering intra-year storage. There is also a huge issue of multi-year storage if green hydrogen is to become the backup for a grid powered mostly by wind and sun. In a post on September 28, 2023, I covered a Report then just out from Britain’s Royal Society dealing with issues of long-term energy storage to back up wind and solar generators. The Royal Society had collected weather data for Britain for some 37 years, which had revealed that there are worst-case wind and sun “droughts,” comparable to rain droughts, that may occur only once every 20 years or more. A storage solution to back up wind and solar electricity generation without fossil fuel back-up needs to cover these worst-case droughts.

The Royal Society Report includes the following graph of potentially needed withdrawals from storage to cover these worst case droughts:

The graph shows that of the storage needed for full back-up over the 37 year period of data, fully half would only have been called on twice, and about a quarter would only have been called on once. Perhaps S&S should go back to their laptops to figure out how much salt cavern storage costs per unit of energy stored when it only gets called on once in 37 years. If storage that gets cycled once per year costs $6/kgH2, does storage that gets cycled once per 37 years cost $222/kgH2? The blended cost — between the storage that gets cycled once per year and the rarely-used part that gets cycled only once every 10 or 20 or even 37 years — would look to be around $100/kgH2, equivalent to $800/MMBTU of natural gas. That’s more than 250 times the current price of natural gas, and of course is only the cost of storage. The cost of actually producing the hydrogen would be additional.

I understand that there are people moving forward on setting up some of this hydrogen infrastructure, funded with government subsidies. It’s almost impossible to imagine how much subsidies it would take to make such a system fully functional. It will never happen.

Hydrogen is probably the worst way possible to store energy. It only exists because it keeps the business as usual of energy companies selling a product from centralized or commodity controlled processes.

https://natron.energy/our-technology

The future is distributed generation and storage. Shipping container sized batteries that are not lithium and can work from -40C to 100+C while doing 50,000 cycles and 10C plus discharge and charge rates are the way forward. It’s buy low sell high on the electron market. With virtually unlimited cycle life you can buy power in the middle of the night when the wind is howling for $20 a megawatt hour or less and then in the afternoon sell it back for $150 to as high as 2000 at peak peak times.

These people have figured out long term storage as in months not hours. Also shipping container sized batteries cheap too. They are metal oxide and water based. Not as energy dense as LFP but when you can stack shipping container sized batteries boxes cheap wins.

https://www.alsym.com/

The cost for sodium and aqueous cells are much lower than lithium and no supply chain issues they use common elements like sodium,iron,aluminum,manganese which are all 100% recycleable. Mine once use many.

The key metric is LCOS in $/MWh with super long cycle lives that plunges once it’s under $50 MWh you are now the cheapest form of dispatchable power anywhere that’s combined cycle turbine prices. Nukes are in the $90-175 range, coal is well above $100 now even before the scrubbers needed to not even meet natgas level emissions. Solar during the day hits $15 and wind at night is sometimes negative in Texas so $0 but usually in the $20-30 range. Having sub $50 storage means you buy $15-30 solar and wind when it’s available and sell back at $75 or more during the day you are still cheaper than nukes or coal and on par with combined cycle turbines in the $90 range. Added benefit is individual companies and co-ops can buy power banks and use arbitrage opportunities to save huge amounts of money on power costs. Buy directly from the grid op like ERCOT at night or mid day solar peak cheap then use the on-site packs when the grid prices move upwards due to demand. From the companies side the packs handle the peaks and valleys of their demands while only buying when the price is low. Add-on on-site panels or turbines if in a windy it sunny place for even cheaper power. Panels can do $10 MWh on site it’s the ups downs and night that matters. Having a megawatt sized batteries on-site means that doesn’t matter anymore.

Partially true about the land use. My home and steel building generate more power then they use just with panels on the roofs. In sunny Texas you don’t need more square footage than your home footprint of your home is large enough and doesn’t have trees blocking the view South. I have powerwalls and can go off grid with a flip of a breaker. About to add in a 10kw turbine since winds in North Texas plains tend to blow hard when the sun is not out right now at 30 meters it’s blowing 12mph that’s above the cut in speed for a small turbine without optimized blades for sub 8meters per second I still would be getting 3kw right now from that 10kw turbine. The wind will blow like this all night we just had a front come through woods from the northwest all night for sure. That’s 30 more kWh to put either in the powerwalls or sell to ERCOT. With optimized blades I could be close to 6kw right now while lowering the cut out speed to 14m/s which is only a few percent of the winds we ever see here in a continuous basis literally hours per year above that wind speed. I drool for Natron cells they make a 100kWh refrigerator sized pack for $100kw in capex I’ll buy it tomorrow. They are targeting $20kw not 100. They only sell to large commercial now but eventually they will have a gigafactory that will supply small business sized packs I’ll use my LLC to get one or two.

I am already independent, with solar panels and a system large enough to export power vs what my home uses. The Tesla already eats electrons from those same panels. No need for hydrogen at all. I can flip a switch to be off grid. Next up is a 10kw turbine on a 30 meter monopole.when the sun is down the wind in the plains tends to howl especially when storms come through and for days afterwards.

My Tesla is already cheaper than the Volvo it sits next to. Batteries are only getting cheaper and better in lifespan. Sodium ion/sulfur/solid state are changing the game. Very soon refrigerator sized powerwalls with a weeks worth of power in them will be economic for upper middle class people. Two days worth is already in upper middle class reach. The grid will be for backup or to sell power too not a source for a good chunk of larger home owners in sunny and or windy places. Add in a plug in hybrid with 50-100 miles range and most people would only go to pump twice per year for that 600 mile trip to grandma’s everything else in the suburbs is closer than 100 miles per day use.

Hydrogen is for rockets, drones and maybe aircraft the hypersonic kind that need the cryo temps to not melt the engines off of. Everything else once you have 150wh/kg power density or higher you electrify not hydrogen it. Sodium sulfur solid state just hit 1000wh/kg at the cell level that’s 6.6 times LFP lithium that sends a model S sized vehicle 360 miles. You could with cells like that make a 1000+ mile EV with half the weight of LFP cells.

Plus you get 4 to 6 miles per kWh.or 0.25kwh per mile in a model 3.

Hydrogen takes 52kWh to make a kg of it via electrolysis. On kg of H2 has the same LHV as a gallon of gasoline. So a hybrid that gets 60mpg would go 60 miles on 1kg burning that h2. That’s 0.82 kWh per mile and you didn’t compress that yet you need 9% of the energy content of H2 to compress it to 200bar for storage.

So 250wh per mile for an EV directly or 820wh/mi for a hybrid not including a 9% compression penalty. The numbers get worse for a regular ICE just burning hydrogen at 25mpg fleet average. You could use fuelcells loaded with platinum to get 80 miles per kg maybe 100 for a very small FC car. That’s still no where near as efficient use of electrons vs just putting them into a ion cells pack.

Hydrogen is only better than electrofuels that take 3kg of hydrogen plus one kg of co2 to make one unit of hydrocarbon liquids. It’s hideously wasteful to go that route like Audi is doing as pure greenwashing. Once you do the math EVs as second law machines will always be more efficient than first law machines.

The only liquid fuels that make any sense are biofuels made with waste mass. To be used for things like aircraft which must have the energy density of liquid fuels. Personal vehicles with 250wh/kg cells can go 600 miles that’s farther than anyone can drive or should drive in a single sitting. Before a 10C six min charge with fast chargers. Truckers are only allowed 8 hours for a reason. Even at 75mph you just hit the 8 hour limit of mental endurance for safe driving at 600 miles.

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