Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The Sydney Morning Herald thinks Australia’s Scott Morrison is making a big mistake, ignoring the imminent collapse in fossil fuel prices due to low cost green hydrogen.
Crunch time looming for Morrison on climate as the world looks to Australia to act
By Marian Wilkinson
July 12, 2021 — 8.02am…
Since last December, Scott Morrison has crab-walked towards a net zero by 2050 target. But he is coming under serious pressure from Australia’s most important allies to put up a credible 2030 target in Glasgow. Morrison has been unwilling to do that.
Morrison’s determination to stick to Australia’s weak, increasingly implausible 2030 target was thrust into the international spotlight at Biden’s climate summit in April. The prime minister was one of 40 world leaders, including Xi Jinping, who attended the virtual gathering. It was designed to vault the United States into a leadership role in the global climate negotiations, and in his opening remarks Biden made it absolutely clear he wanted deep global emissions cuts by 2030. “This is the decade we must make decisions that will avoid the worst consequences of a climate crisis,” Biden said. “We must try to keep the Earth’s temperature to an increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius.”
…
“It’s difficult to imagine the United States winning the long-term strategic competition with China if we cannot lead the renewable energy revolution,” Blinken told reporters. “Right now, we’re falling behind. China is the largest producer and exporter of solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, electric vehicles. It holds nearly a third of the world’s renewable energy patents. If we don’t catch up, America will miss the chance to shape the world’s climate future in a way that reflects our interests and values, and we’ll lose out on countless jobs for the American people.”
…
Australia risks being overrun in this clean energy race. If green hydrogen becomes competitive with natural gas by the end of the decade, the oil and gas industry will react by slashing prices, and Australian liquefied natural gas prices will plummet. As Fortescue Metals’ chairman Twiggy Forrest put it colourfully in his Boyer lecture, the result will be “like a knife fight in a telephone box”.
For now, the Morrison government is making a strategic bet that the energy transformation won’t happen this fast. It does not believe that China, let alone India, will be able to radically shift course this decade. This will put the 1.5 Celsius plans out of reach and curb the enthusiasm in developed countries for ambitious targets to cut emissions.
…
Read more: https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/crunch-time-looming-for-morrison-on-climate-as-the-world-looks-to-australia-to-act-20210706-p587dc.html
Natural gas – you poke a hole in the ground and capture the gas which gushes out.
Green hydrogen, you build expensive solar arrays, use uncompetitively expensive electricity to crack water, capture and compress the hydrogen. Or you use steam reforming, in which water mixed with coal or natural gas is heated and pressurised so much it burns, releasing vast quantities of CO2 which somehow have to be sequestered.
And then there is the difficulty of actually handling pure hydrogen – the cost of containing a gas with molecules so small, only high spec pipes can contain it, the risk of handling a gas which ignites easily over an extraordinary range of conditions, the danger of working with a gas whose flame burns so hot it is all but invisible.
I’m guessing we might have to wait a little longer than 2030, for green hydrogen to become price competitive.
”Crunch time looming for Morrison on climate as the world looks to Australia to act”
Crunch time will come for whoever is in power in 2174
The hydrogen revolution – the Scientology of energy.
Not to mention a method of transporting energy with a gas which has a terrible specific energy…..
Where can I view the green Hydrogen and green Renewable Energy electricity?
Did you know that EV technology resulted from a Nano Technology experiment that went wrong?
Now for the same money you get a small car instead of a large four wheel drive that can only under perfect conditions be driven half the distance or less before needing a recharge.
‘If’. Not ‘When’. Answer: never?
Unimaginably cheap energy might make it viable, like if someone figures out a way to sell affordable mass produced fusion reactors in Walmart. But then, why bother with chemical combustion of hydrogen?
While the article is about Australian politics and hydrogen fuel, most of the commenters here have chosen write about the problems of hydrogen as a fuel. What they are missing is that hydrogen is being safely used as vehicle fuel everyday in Southern California.
Does hydrogen as fuel have problems? Yes. Is it expensive? Yes. But let’s say the warmistas get their way (God forbid) and we have to move away from hydrocarbon fueled vehicles. Which is a better choice: electric or hydrogen?
Considering all the problems with EV’s that have been brought up here at WUWT, I think a good argument could be made for hydrogen fueled vehicles. I would like to see a more level playing field, without all the government assistance going to electric vehicles. Let the free market choose the winner.
A free market has already chosen. Answer: liquid septanes, branched octanes, and n-heptanes refined from crude oil. Highest energy density in a safe substrate to fuel modern transporation of all size scales.
If.
If my Auntie had balls she would be my uncle…..
These miraculous solar panels and windmills are going to generate enough power to manufacture themselves. It goes without saying that they’re also going to power our electricity grids 24 by 7. In their spare time they will generate an excess of green hydrogen to do everything else.
Hydrogen is a road to nowhere
Surely it’s easier to make hydrogen from natural gas. /joke
cheap and available green hydrogen huh?
roflmao!
even the “sperts” on the abc hydrogen promo special recently HAD TO ADMIT they have ZERO working systems outside small demo setups and making them let alone getting them working is years and many billions at least away
The Climate Kanuckleheads love to fantasize about “green” energy being “competitive with”, and even “cheaper than” fossil fuels. What they fail to mention is that the only way this could happen is that a huge carbon tax is placed on fossil fuels, likely along with huge subsidies for “green energy”. They then compound their error with highly dangerous and impractical “green” hydrogen. You really can’t fix Stupid.
Thus, a Walter Williams lesson: If any product becomes “competitive”, prices will fall due to competition —- except in socialist controlled states. In the socialist state, prices will increase and shortages will occur.
If.
JF
if we could only find dilitium crystals
if we could only put wormholes into the interior of stars
if we could just harness all the “dark energy” laying around.
I suggest a perusal of science fiction literature would be as useful as trying to make hydrogen a viable energy transport agent.
We just need to re-brand carbon as the obvious way to stabilize hydrogen for delivering energy in convenient forms, like methane, propane, and higher molecular weight hydrocarbons. Nature showed us how. There are natural deposits of these molecules for now, and in the future when we run low we can make them using non-carbon energy sources like nuclear power.
If gas (petrol) was free, the price at the pump wouldn’t plummet as most of it is tax.
Having generated high quality directional energy such as electricity , the last thing you want to do is convert it, directly or indirectly, into random non directional energy such as heat only to convert it back again: a highly inefficient process.
This is the kind of INSANE waste of energy resources that only makes sense unhinged, traumatised ecolos.
Environmentalists used to insist we stop wasting energy ( and everything thing else ), now they are insisting that we waste as much as we can !!!
They have seriously lost the plot.
“If green hydrogen becomes competitive … ”
What a big “if” !!!
(In Portuguese we have a dictum that is also a kind of tong-twister: “Se cá nevasse fazia-se cá ski”. Roughly translated: if this were a snowy country we could go around skiing)
So it’s BAD for “green” energy to become competitive?
also if pigs develop wings massive flocks of sky pigs could lower the Earth’s albedo
None of which China is actually using itself. The more the rest of the world converts to these unreliable and expensive technologies the more likely China will predominate. That’s why they export so much of it.
Having spent a fair amount of time around steam reforming for methanol, hydrogen and ammonia plants, I feel the author shortchanges the CO2 issue. The CO2 from the steam reforming operation is contained in the process and can easily be isolated for whatever process. The equal amount of CO2 generated from the fuel used to drive the reformers is flue gas and like power plants recapture will be a difficult and energy intensive operation.
“If green hydrogen becomes competitive … gas prices will plummet”
And, “When we perfect Fusion our energy problems will be over. “
In other words: you actually burn coal and natural gas but only use the hydrogen portion of the natural gas to do anything useful. What a laugh such as scheme is.