Hydrogen
Hydrogen is the so-called clean fuel of the future. This is because it does not generate CO2 when it burns, so it seems the straight forward solution for decarbonisation. Additionally, in recent years, many countries have announced ambitious initiatives and visions to utilize renewable hydrogen as an energy carrier and achieve the greenhouse gas emission targets following the Paris Agreement.
Today, hydrogen is primarily used to produce chemical products. The global demand for hydrogen has tripled since 1975, moreover 96% of its demand comes from the chemical industry. Therefore, if focus required, the specific sector to develop and deploy hydrogen should be the chemical industry as the largest hydrogen consumer, rather than focusing on hydrogen across the transport sector and existing gas distribution and transportation networks in first place. Nevertheless, we should not underestimate the economic opportunities the localized production and usage of H2 may bring along.
Hydrogen is used as feedstock for ammonia and methanol production, which covers the 70% of its current usage. In other processes like refineries, it is used in reforming to upgrade the hydrocarbons.
When it comes to manufacture H2 the state of the art process is steam reforming, usually from methane (or other light hydrocarbons obtained from natural gas, oil or coal). Meaning, hydrogen is generally produced via syngas processes from fossil feedstocks. This is the infamous grey hydrogen.
“Yet, today, hydrogen represents a modest fraction of the global and EU energy mix, and is still largely produced from fossil fuels, notably from natural gas or from coal, resulting in the release of 70 to 100 million tonnes CO2 annually in the EU. ”
Displacing the carbon source with biomass is an alternative used in the biorefineries. On the other hand, producing hydrogen from renewable electricity coupled with water electrolysis, the so-called green hydrogen, is what we would consider the holy grail, but it requires the ramp up of renewable electricity capacity. The latter needs to increase vastly in order to produce enough energy to meet both, the world’s growing electric needs and to convert water into hydrogen to power industrial applications. The production of hydrogen via power-to-gas (PtG) may become economically favourable in the next decade (important note here, it takes six to eight times as much energy to make hydrogen from water than from natural gas or oil) . In addition, even when this step is achieved, the energy efficiency challenge of the electrolysis process needs to be taken into consideration. According to experts, AEM (anion exchange membrane) electrolysis could make the production of hydrogen from renewable electricity feasible on a large scale.
This overview won’t be complete if the other shade of hydrogen is not mentioned. Blue hydrogen encompasses the used of fossil fuels combined with carbon capture technologies, I am not entering in details here as CCUS will be addressed in a future publication, as part of the array of decarbonisation solutions.
Hydrogen is the backbone of Europe’s energy transition. From the Fit for 55 package to support the growth in the European Union's hydrogen economy, we can extract that the 50% target on the share of renewable hydrogen consumption is a game changer for industry. Which for the chemical industry means derived fuels such as ammonia or methanol, must be produced using renewable electricity. On one hand, this will drive renewable hydrogen costs down and make it competitive with fossil-fuel alternatives much sooner than previously projected. On the other hand, the industry argues that this unprecedented push should also be accompanied with dedicated support instruments to create the necessary confidence to make bold decarbonisation choices without undermining its competitiveness.
A remarkable advantage to back up the development of renewable hydrogen is the existence since 2008 of a public-private partnership under the Fuel Cells and Hydrogen Joint Undertaking (FCH JU). Under this umbrella the partners come together to plan and support research and development (R&D) activities. This well-organized synergistic mechanism allows for a successful coordination with other EU funding schemes. If we have a look at the statistics of the proposals received for the first large-scale call of the Innovation Fund in October 2020, about a third of all received proposal is related to hydrogen. In addition, in my opinion this is a very powerful approach and serves as benchmark for other areas that require fast development in order to achieve decarbonisation.
