UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES
Engineers from UNSW Sydney have crunched the numbers on green hydrogen production costs to reveal that Australia is in prime position to take advantage of the green hydrogen revolution, with its great solar resource and potential for export.
The researchers identified the key factors required to reduce the cost of green hydrogen to become competitive with other methods of producing hydrogen using fossil fuels.
In a paper published today in Cell Reports Physical Science, the authors show how different factors affect the cost of producing green hydrogen by electrolysis using a dedicated solar system and using no additional power from the grid.
Without using electricity from the grid, which is predominantly supplied by fossil fuel electricity, this method produces hydrogen with nearly zero emissions. Being free of the grid also means such a system could be deployed in remote locations with good, year-long exposure to sunlight.
The researchers examined a range of parameters that could affect the final price of green hydrogen energy including the cost of electrolyser and solar photovoltaic (PV) systems, electrolyser efficiency, available sunlight and the size of the installations.
In thousands of calculations using randomly ascribed values for various parameters in different scenarios, the researchers found the cost of green hydrogen ranged from $US2.89 to $US4.67 per kilogram ($AUD4.04 to $AUD6.53). It was possible to get even lower than this, the researchers said, with proposed scenarios approaching $US2.50 per kilogram ($AUD3.50), at which point green hydrogen starts to become competitive with fossil fuel production.
WHY A RANGE OF PRICES?
Co-author Nathan Chang, who is a postdoctoral fellow with UNSW’s School of Photovoltaic Renewable Energy Engineering, says a common problem when trying to estimate the costs of developing technology is that calculations are based on assumptions that may only apply to certain situations or circumstances. This makes the results less relevant for other locations and doesn’t take into account that technology performance and costs improve over time.
“But here, rather than getting a single calculated number, we get a range of possible numbers,” he says.
“And each particular answer is a combination of a lot of possible input parameters.”
“For example, we have recent data on the cost of PV systems in Australia, but we know that in some countries, they pay much more for their systems. We also have seen that PV costs are reducing each year. So we put cost values both lower and higher into the model to see what would happen to the cost of hydrogen.
“So after plugging all these different values into our algorithm and getting a range of prices of hydrogen energy, we then said, ‘Okay, so there were some cases where we got closer to that $US2 ($AUD2.80) per kilogram figure. What was it about those cases that got it down so low?'”
Co-author Dr Rahman Daiyan, of ARC Training Centre for Global Hydrogen Economy and UNSW’s School of Chemical Engineering, says that when they examined the cases where the cost per kilogram approached US$2, certain parameters stood out.
“Capital costs of electrolysers and their efficiencies still dictate the viability of renewable hydrogen,” he says.
“One crucial way we could further decrease costs would be to use cheap transition metal-based catalysts in electrolysers. Not only are they cheaper, but they can even outperform catalysts currently in commercial use.
“Studies like these will provide inspiration and targets for researchers working in catalyst development.”
IT ALL ADDS UP
The system and cost simulation model itself was built by undergraduate student Jonathon Yates, who got the opportunity to work on the project through UNSW’s Taste of Research scholarship program.
“We used real weather data and worked out the optimum size of the PV system for each location,” he says.
“We then saw how this would change the economics in different locations around the world where solar-powered electrolysis is being considered.
“We knew that each location that would install such a system would be different – requiring different sizes and having to wear different costs of components. Combining these with weather variations means that some locations will have lower cost potential than others, which can indicate an export opportunity.”
He points to the example of Japan which does not have a great solar resource and where the size of the systems may be limited.
“So there is potentially a significant cost difference when compared to the spacious outback regions of Australia, which have plenty of sunlight,” says Mr Yates.
LOOKING AHEAD
The researchers say that it is not far-fetched to imagine large scale hydrogen energy plants becoming cheaper than fossil fuel ones in the next couple of decades.
“Because PV costs are reducing, it is changing the economics of solar hydrogen production,” says Dr Chang.
“In the past, the idea of a remote solar-driven electrolysis system was considered to be far too expensive. But the gap is reducing every year, and in some locations, there will be a cross-over point sooner rather than later.”
Dr Daiyan says: “With technology improvements in electrolyser efficiency, an expectation of lower costs of installing these types of systems, and governments and industry being willing to invest in larger systems to take advantage of economies of scale, this green technology is getting closer to being competitive with alternative fossil fuel production of hydrogen.”
Mr Yates says it is only a matter of time until green hydrogen becomes more economical than hydrogen produced from fossil fuel methods.
“When we recalculated the cost of hydrogen using other researchers’ projections of electrolyser and PV costs, it’s possible to see green hydrogen costs getting as low as US$2.20 per kg ($AUD3.08) by 2030, which is on par or cheaper than the cost of fossil-fuel produced hydrogen.
“As this happens, Australia, with its great solar resource, will be well placed to take advantage of this.”
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Didn’t spot anything about power factors in the piece. For instance, given PVs in a sunny clime could produce ‘x’ kWhrs of electrical power with which to create H2, how many kWhrs would the resultant H2 provide?
My wonderation is : What are they gonna do to actually utilise this abundant resource?
(Even before we get over the oft repeated claim that ‘sunshine and wind are free’)
Maybe, put it into an internal combustion engine.
But they’ve got horrendous efficiency, easily 65% of you energy is lost via the tail-pipe and engine cooling
Maybe put it through a Fuel Cell to make elektrikery and then drive an electric car
OK
Correct me if wrong but, I came to understand (aaaages ago) that any/all Fuel Cells require Platinum and there is simply not enough Platinum in The Known Universe to do that, let alone on Planet Earth..
Can we make it into ammonia maybe, or propane.
Acetylene packs a big punch but will melt your engine.
*There* is possibly The Solution= engines that run at high(er) temps
But *they* make lots of NOx – which in turn, because N is the Liebig Limter for all plant/bacterial Life on Earth, promotes Global Greening.
What’s not to like 😀
Show me how hydrogen can be dummy-proofed and I’ll consider its use as a source of energy.
Your comment brings to mind the driver visually checking the fuel filling using his cigarette lighter for light. Can anything be dummy-proofed?
A postdoc did a monte carlo analysis, wrote a paper for a trade rag. got a EurekaAlert! press release.
Big whoopi.
I feel for postdocs
UNSW is home to Andrew Blakers who has been producing zero carbon fantasies for Australia for a long time. I suspect he will prove to be involved in this one.
Meanwhile in the UK, National Grid has just produced its 2020 Future Energy Scenarios, which include the extreme assumptions necessary to pretend that net zero can be achieved by 2050. They don’t bother to estimate real costs, simply assuming that carbon taxes will be raised in order to enforce as necessary. They do offer an insight into green hydrogen made by wind power. They propose deep sea floating dedicated wind farms (in order to improve capacity factors) which first desalinate sea water before electrolysis, with hydrogen pipelines to shore. A no expense spared solution. They do admit that electrolysers can in practice expect an average utilisation of 15-24%. Which roughly means that the capital charge element is 4-7 times as great as for a continuous process. The real fantasy is that they expect over half of final energy consumption will be delivered as hydrogen.
https://www.nationalgrideso.com/future-energy/future-energy-scenarios/fes-2020-documents
Even with axis tracking solar, the best locations struggle to achieve better than 25% capacity factors. It’s very hard to see how intermittency isn’t going to kill the economics. Using part of the output via a battery is surely a very expensive way to smooth the solar output. Perhaps Blakers has in mind his extravagant claims about pumped storage as the alternative.
This is why I’m confused every time I see a WUWT headline:
Hydrogen Future Would Triple Energy Bills
OCTOBER 16, 2020
I couldn’t find a story that I heard not too long ago about why hydrogen is not a viable alternative.
I did a search for “why hydrogen is not a viable fuel” and found several articles on the topic.
While you might be able to find a way to use say solar or wind to produce the “zero emissions” hydrogen, how much toxic emissions does building those energy sources need?
Simple logic tells us “there is no such thing as a free lunch”.
An even better explanation is that I must have been confusing this blog with the Not A Lot of People Know That blog for the past several years. Now I have to figure out why I’ve been doing that. Am I having a “Biden Moment”? (copyright 2020 BlueCat57, I just made that catchphrase up. Do you think it will catch on?)
Of course, since my other comment hasn’t showed up yet, this one makes no sense at all. I can see the other comment in the WordPress app but not here? Deep breath. I’ll just move on instead of offering my opinion of the WordPress comment system.
Probably worth pointing out that 1kg of hydrogen provides about 120MJ, or 0.1136 MMBtu, so to convert prices from per kg to per MMBtu, multiply by about 9. So their cheapest forecast of USD 2.20/MMBtu works out at about $20/MMBtu. Not exactly competitive with Henry Hub at around $3/MMBtu. The use of unfamiliar units masks the reality.
Should of course read USD 2.20/kg equates to aboyt $20/MMBtu.
The headline makes it sound like they are offering a replacement for natural gas or other fossil fuel, but they are actually offering a replacement for hydrogen produced by fossil fuels, which is at around $2/kg. If they had an accurate title then they wouldn’t have got the press exposure. Welcome to the post-truth era.
As a Chemical Engineer often involved in process safety analyses, economic evaluations and logistics, I need to go on record saying:
I think hydrogen, even as a fuel source for electrochemical cell power supplies is a bad bet.
How about Mars, where there are no fossils?
Let’s get real (honest) about “no emissions” from green energy. Technically, yes, there are little or no “direct” emissions from green energy.
But when you include the emissions and environmental damage from creating green power sources, it’s more than using fossil fuels.
If we want to reduce emissions, we need more nuclear power. If the engineering, economic and other issues for mainlining hydrogen as a portable power source can truly be overcome, then nuclear is the best option for powering hydrogen production.
On the other, my relatives in Australia have duel-fuel automobiles that can use gasoline or natural gas. Natural gas is very clean burning. Why not use natural gas instead of hydrogen? From a practical point-of-view natural gas is the better choice. But it’s a fossil fuel and therefore unacceptable.
From the above article’s first sentence: “Engineers from UNSW Sydney have CRUNCHED the numbers . . .” (my all cap emphasis added for “crunched”)
It could not have been said better.
I should have stopped reading right then and there. My bad.
As a old chemist, I’ve always wanted to see an energy cheap means of producing hydrogen. It’s never going to be the leading source for our energy needs but it can help.
That article is a con job from the get go. Not many readers are going to pay attention to the fact they are using a price measured in weight (kg) when the world buys it’s fuel in volume (l or gal). That difference puts hydrogen fuel darn near 3x the cost of fuel in the US using their rosiest cost prediction.
Darrin, excellent point!
I’m wondering when the world will get around to pricing competing, transportable energy sources in the only apples-to-apples metric that matters: million BTU available/pound mass (or metric equivalent, MJ/kg).
So – there is abundant solar in the outback.
I thought it was supposed to be somewhat arid as well.
SO – How much liquid water does it take to make this wheel go around and where does that come from?
Since this depends on photovoltaics to capture solar energy and there are now some pretty good life-cycle analyses of such systems showing they may actually be net consumers rather than producers of power, I think I can safely put this modeling of hydrogen power in the back of the filing cabinet. Life-cycle analysis, of course, must include all the prospecting, mining, refining, and manufacturing of rare elements and high tech components; the manufacturing, delivery and installation of panels; the cost of affected lands and opportunity costs lost to other uses; the operation and maintenance of the devices; the declining efficiency and intermittency of electrical generation; any unintended secondary consequences of the technology such as habitat loss, land degradation and any adverse health effects from industrial byproducts; and finally all the costs of decommissioning and safely disposing of the devices at end of life. One might note when reviewing the list that there are many steps along the way that won’t and can’t happen without a big push from fossil fuels.
‘there are now some pretty good life-cycle analyses of such systems showing they may actually be net consumers rather than producers of power’
No there are not!
griff, remember when the same thing was said about ethanol? that it consumes 2-7 times as much as it yields? All you renewables (unreliables/ruinables) said, NO, better than gasoline! Now you all have figured out what Dr. Lintzen, MIT, told you decades ago, and you can’t get the skunk p%%% stopped. Did you see my posting earlier that hydrogen is at least twice as expensive as conventional hydrocarbon based? Hydrogen has a ethanol ring to it wouldn’t you say? Give it up.
https://renews.biz/63656/global-green-hydrogen-pipeline-tops-60gw/
‘The pipeline of planned 1MW-plus green hydrogen projects is over 60GW, according to research by Rystad Energy. The analysts said 87% of the projects are gigawatt-scale plants. Europe and Australia dominate the global pipeline, which includes 11 proposed electrolyser projects with a capacity of 1GW or more.'”
I note also renewable hydrogen power to gas plant in Eugene, Oregon; UK’s first hydrogen powered train,; use of hydrogen in Linz, austria steel plant; use of renewable hydrogen in Norway to produce ammonia; UK hydrogen powered plane; numerous projects injecting hydrogen into the natural gas grid and this:
https://www.rechargenews.com/transition/worlds-largest-floating-wind-farm-to-power-landmark-green-hydrogen-project/2-1-883061
Pointing out how much money people are planning to throw away on this, mostly taxpayer money, doesn’t disprove what is being said here, it just means there is no difference between this and other useless tech like solar and wind
Always a money loser
It would be interesting to see how much they are budgeting for maintenance of these solar panels, also what’s the expected lifespan they are using for their calculations.
Finally, what percentage of the hydrogen is lost between “manufacture” and consumption?
It is not true that the only waste product from hydrogen is water. That is true only if the engine operates in a pure oxygen environment. Our atmosphere is 79% nitrogen, so you will have things like nitric oxide released out the tail pipe.
You also have this reaction.
H2 + 3O2 + N2 —-> 2HNO3 (nitric acid)
Be careful what you wish for.
ferdberple
October 18, 2020 at 10:07 am
That’s a very interesting comment Fred…I had not seen this aspect mentioned before. It would seem to reduce the ‘green’ credentials of a hydrogen economy, even using their famous and much touted ‘green’ hydrogen.
Easily solved by adapting the space shuttle’s external fuel tank technology.
Just need two cryo storage tanks. What could possibly go wrong?
This type of electrolysis will be done in half-cells, anode and cathode, so H2(g) is produced in anode compartment while O2(g) is produced in cathode. The half-cells are usually separated with Nafion membranes. H2(g) can only be produced at the anode electrode surface and this reaction must compete with anions and their reactions at the anode surface. I would say the best one can do is 50% electrode efficiency depending on what electrode material is used. The efficiency will decrease with time as the anode surface wears or becomes poisoned. The water must be very pure because of the unwanted electrode reactions. The use of pure water will increase energy input because the water must become ionized prior to splitting. H+ production will occur and if Cl is present Cl2(g) will be produced as Cl -> Cl2(g) is preferred to H2(g) production from splitting H2O.
incomplete list of Issues: electrode life, membrane life, separation and storage of gas and availability of pure water. Calculations must also include the life cycle cost of the solar panels from “cradle to grave” for complete economic analysis.
This is just to start as we have not considered the cathode half-cell reactions and what to to with those unwanted reactions and products of electrolysis.
I have seen this game before claiming low cost hydrogen at $1.5- $2.00 by the Dept of Energy in the 1990s also. The game being played is, they are talking about uncompressed hydrogen.
I have evaluated retail hydrogen fuel cost for California for years. Compression cost for hydrogen (from my memory) is $4-5 per kg, refinery supplied hydrogen cost $2.00 kg at 250 psi. Adding $1 million dollar hydrogen stations (equipment & installation cost only) 180 k/day capacity all this ends at a retail price in California today at $13-15/kg. (Untaxed). This will never compete with retail gasoline or diesel.
Gary Yowell
Recovering Government Automotive Engineer
Leaving aside the merits of hydrogen as a transportable fuel and the current relative costs, on-site electrolysis at large-scale PV installations may be useful as a load levelling approach.
If PV installations had to provide a guaranteed level of electrical output over the full 24-hour period, any excess production could be used to produce H2 which could then be used to power an OCGT generator to make up the shortfall when PV production dropped below the contracted level.
The feasibility study / sensitivity analysis referenced in the article was conducted at a PV research facility, but the use of electrolysed H2 as a short-term storage medium is equally applicable to wind, which has a higher capacity factor but less predictability.
Wasn’t methane a no-brainer due to band width saturation caused by water in the atmosphere. Thus, if it’s the tundra, bogland or any burping or farting critter. Let it all out free of global warming concerns.
But- a proportion of methane in the atmosphere leaves for space. However, don’t know the proportion and if there is any non-linear function of concentration in this context. Methane is, for example, much appreciated by bacterie wherever they are. Or, maybe radiation increases the reactivity of methane as altitude increases?
Germany (the top wind and hydrogen promoter) has more wind and solar power than it can economically distribute and utilize. To perpetuate their “Energiewende” dream they need to put windy and sunny day excess wind and solar generation to use. They know battery storage and pumped storage is unworkable so hydrogen wins by default. Conservatives, such as the AfD, understand that the only feasible alternative to imported Russian natural gas is restarting their nukes. Once Merkel leaves (soon) doing so will be politically possible (IMHO). She should take her worthless hydrogen with her when she exits.
“…One crucial way we could further decrease costs would be to use cheap transition metal-based catalysts in electrolysers. Not only are they cheaper, but they can even outperform catalysts currently in commercial use…”
So people are not currently using the cheaper and better catalysts? Huh?
It’s called Hopium…
A hydrogen powered car.
FINALLY the dream of a flying car can be realized!
“Green Streamers” won’t just be birds!
From the University of NSW “School of Photovoltaic Renewable Energy Engineering.”
A group of hammers looking for nails, only. But that how government & NGO funding works.