Essay by Eric Worrall
“… we will not sanction a project without securing an off-take agreement.”.
Aramco Weighs LNG Exports as Hydrogen Talks Prove Tough
May 11, 2023
Aramco weighs LNG exports as hydrogen talks prove tough.
Saudi Aramco is weighing exports of liquefied natural gas instead of blue hydrogen, as talks with potential buyers of the latter fuel prove tough.
…
Yet existing technology means blue hydrogen could cost the equivalent of around $250 a barrel of oil, Aramco’s chief executive officer said.
Amin Nasser, for blue hydrogen said on a call with analysts:
It is very difficult to identify any off-take agreement in Europe.
“Even the customers in Japan and Korea are waiting for government incentives. Until they get these incentives, it’ll be costly for them to pursue that blue hydrogen.”
…
“This is a very expensive program,” Nasser said. “It’s a lot of capital and you need customers. So we will not sanction a project without securing an off-take agreement.”
…
Read more: https://hydrogen-central.com/aramco-weighs-lng-exports-hydrogen-talks-prove-tough/
Blue hydrogen is produced from fossil fuel, but the CO2 is supposed to be buried via carbon sequestration.
I wish our politicians were smart enough to wait until there is an actual demand for product, before blowing billions of taxpayer dollars on building infrastructure to produce hydrogen which nobody genuinely wants.
As for the Saudis, I suspect they will eventually embrace the low risk option of exporting low cost natural gas to countries with hydrogen programmes, so those who claim to support the hydrogen economy can also carry the financial risk of building the infrastructure.
The Saudi position seems crystal clear and rational. It’s tough to justify building expensive climate friendly hydrogen facilities, when despite all the noisy hype, nobody genuinely wants the product.
I attended a university presentation on hydrogen energy about 30 years ago. I asked them where the hydrogen mines were. It was obvious that they wanted some engineer to endorse their ideas so that they could go to government for funding. Sadly, the engineering assistant prof. who brought them in, was still wet behind the ears, and couldn’t see the thermodynamic problems.
Any uranium mine will work.
Put it in a high temperature gas reactor to efficiently produce H2. Combine H2 with carbon and you get liquid transportation fuel.
H2 is very dangerous to handle because it detonates.
Laying aside the cost-effectiveness of producing blue hydrogen itself, I question whether there will ever be any demand for blue hydrogen that has to be shipped long distances. Shipping liquid hydrogen adds a huge additional cost to an already-expensive product. Maybe you could ship it as blue ammonia, but you’d be better off steam reforming and sequestering emissions near the place of use.
Saudis are long in crude but not natgas. Doubt they will become a big LNG exporter. Most of what they produce is used for flash distillation of fresh water and chemicals.
It makes a lot of sense to use it as much as possible close to home, run their country on the stuff if possible, and ship out the conveniently dense oil as much as possible.
It’s not what the Saudi’s produce that matters, the political fencing match is what matters.
We are way beyond the concept of CO2 and fossil fuels. We are now in a global game for political power grabs.
Enviro-mental-nuts have been saving the world forever.
They save the spotted owl by banning forestry, fuel clearance and any resource development, and countless owls, other wildlife and people then died in uncontrolled wildfires.
They protected natural spaces by paving them over with solar farms and wind parks,
They are protecting wales with deafening wind park construction noise and dangerous shipping traffic.
They are controlling the climate by fiddling with computer models that have no basis in reality.
And now they bring us the Hindenburg strategy for energy systems. I wonder how that will pan out.
Those of us looking at this with our realists hat on ask a simple question. If hydrogen is being produced from natural gas and the CO2 captured. why not just use the natural gas to create electricity directly why involve the hydrogen step?
Some might suggest the need for clean motive energy is what is being progressed. Well OK but again where does hydrogen come into play? It would be just as effective to use natural gas and stop burning coal if CO2 reduction was the main objective. The motive energy demand and CO2 evolution from fossil fuel burn in vehicles released to atmosphere would be a small emission, compared to the growing coal burn world wide that natural gas could replace.
We might also remember CO2 is a good thing to release for obvious reasons so why the crazy expensive ideas involving hydrogen. We simply do not need the complexity hydrogen brings into play
“It would be just as effective to use natural gas and stop
burning coal if CO2 reduction was the main objective.”
_____________________________________
Please stop making suggestions on how the
Climate Crusade can achieve their objectives.
The two letter word “IF” doesn’t convey the
message that their objective is false.
You’ll go crazy trying to figure out why climate nazis do what they do; it’s not based on facts or reason.
Part of it is that so many have been mind controlled in a frenzy reaction at any thought of “Big Oil” existences..
nor the danger. “Hindenburg Strategy” has a nice ring to it!
As I recall, hydrogen fueled cars were being talked up a storm back in the 70s, driven by panic over rising crude oil prices from the Middle East.
But while the basic functionality was demonstrated, the market couldn’t see enough benefit to offset the cost of change, so the whole idea fizzed.
“Those who ignore the lessons of history are bound to repeat them.”
Just sayin’ . . .
GM’s Project Driveway
Not only is hydrogen dangerous due to its propensity to leak from any container (especially if compressed), it lacks energy density, you’d have to pull a trailer load of it to get the range of a tank of gas.
Not to mention the energy used to produce, compress, store, transport and deliver what doesn’t escape along the way will consume more energy than will ever be returned when it is burned as “fuel.”
Hydrogen is not and energy SOURCE, it is an energy SINK.
The concept of ‘blue’ hydrogen is steam reformation of methane plus CCS of the resulting CO2. Saudis say very expensive, so will only play with OPM, none of which is yet forthcoming.
There are also just 3 teensy technical problems (likely why no OPM has yet materialized).
Shirley all these considerations have been thoroughly thought through (how’s that for alliteration?).
Or not (as usual) . . .
(Once again Tim Blair’s sage observation comes to mind –
nothing ‘green’ ever works properly)
Don’t call me Shirley.
Production of reinforced carbon-carbon materials (used in the erstwhile Space Shuttle’s nose cap and wing leading edges, and in solid propellant rocket nozzles) involves placing a part layup of carbon fibers in a furnace, and pumping in methane at high temperature. The methane “cokes”, depositing carbon into the part’s fiber interstitial structure. The freed hydrogen is vented to the atmosphere, and burned off. The point being that one doesn’t need to use steam reforming, or ever produce carbon dioxide, in order to get hydrogen from methane. The carbon will be left behind as a solid, often in a useful form. I don’t have any data on how much energy return there would be from such a process, but it is definitely possible to produce blue hydrogen and have nothing at the end except for hydrogen and solid carbon that is easily removed from the environment.
If a mole (16 g) of methane (the main component in natural gas) is burned, it produces 1 mole (44 g) of CO2 and 2 moles (36 g) of water vapor.
Steam-methane reforming is the most widely used process for producing hydrogen, which is used in refineries for desulfurizing distillate fuels. In this process, 1 mole (16 g) of methane reacts with 2 moles of steam (36 g) to form 1 mole (44 g) of CO2 and 4 moles (8 g) of hydrogen gas.
If the 4 moles of hydrogen are then burned, they produce 4 moles (72 g) of water vapor.
So, combining steam-methane reforming with burning hydrogen still results in 1 mole (44 g) of CO2 and a net 2 moles (4 moles from burning hydrogen – 2 moles input to the reformer) of water vapor, which is the same result as simply burning the natural gas.
The problem with steam-methane reforming is that the first reaction requires temperatures above 1200 F, and not all of that heat is recoverable in terms of generating steam. This means that steam-methane reforming plus burning hydrogen yields less net energy than simply burning the natural gas, and does NOT change net CO2 emissions.
So the Saudis are simply being smart here. They will sell the natural gas to whomever is willing to pay the price, and it’s the customer’s choice as to whether to burn it directly or waste energy converting it to hydrogen. Caveat emptor!
Besides, for the same energy yield, it is much cheaper to send natural gas through a pipeline (less compression needed, smaller pipes) than hydrogen, which also tends to make metals more brittle (need for expensive high-alloy materials) with a higher tendency to leak.
Usually it also takes the equivalent amount of natural gas to heat the reformers to the disociation temperature so that has to be added to your numbers.
Sound, fact based reasoning that is not just unarguably logical but also rooted in common sense. Therefore, no political party will give you a hearing.
My local news station reported on a clean energy plant coming to Michigan to produce hydrogen. I sent them a email asking if anyone in news room took chemistry because of what you rightly point out.
I don’t think they take chemistry.
Pure hydrogen use will never, and I repeat, never be used and never was or is the objective.
If it is to be used it will be mixed with natural gas, at minuscule values, I’m not a scientist/engineer so I don’t understand how it will be done, only that it will be done, and called ‘clean’ energy.
The game isn’t ‘the science’, it’s now ‘the politics’.
We know climate change is BS, they know climate change is BS.
Time for ‘sceptics’ to wake up.
Nothing is too costly when Biden and Jenn have banned the use of the word cost from the equations. Call it tax credits instead.
Investments is the new chode word.
“This year is gonna be the year hydrogen becomes a mainstream power source,” said every hydrogen advocate for the last 25 years.
It goes back further. I quoted Jules Verne in the intro to my essay ‘Hydrogen Hype’ in ebook Blowing Smoke.
Did the Edsel run on hydrogen – is that what went wrong
Correction: There is nothing “climate friendly” about hydrogen facilities.
Especially when one considers that there are three choices for transportation: 1) condense the water vapor (WV) and store on-board, allowing the weight to increase and decreasing the mileage; 2) condense the WV and drip onto the pavement, increasing the slipperiness, especially in the Winter; 3) vent to the atmosphere, increasing the relative humidity and heat index for cities already experiencing the Urban Heat Island effect in the Summer, and encouraging rime ice in the Winter.
1) b) provide an onboard fountain
Useless French “CEA” (“Commissariat à l’énergie atomique“), the nuclear institute (~ US dept of energy), is now nuclear+useless energy sources (“Commissariat à l’énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives“) and wastes even more time with useless sea currents, wave energy and more recently hydrogen (= all the new useless fads).
https://liten.cea.fr/cea-tech/liten/english/Pages/Strategic-research/Grid-flexibility-solutions/Hydrogen-Vector.aspx
Not that CEA was ever good at innovating in fission either, or defending the nuke industry…
It is almost set in concrete yet none of you are talking about it! Australia is on the path to becoming the world’s first Green Energy Superpower. /s
Twiggy Forest seems to have convinced our government that he is the man to get them there with ‘green’ hydrogen. They are already talking about where these hubs will be and the Hunter Valley is one of them. Two billion dollars has been bandied about to help him kick it of and of course the usual subsidies from the necessary renewables would apply too. And being a miner puts him in a sweet spot to sell more of whatever he digs out of the ground that China will need to build his renewables.
Our government is taking energy advice from a mining magnate? What could go wrong? But then they still have Tim Flannery and his outfit giving them sage advice too.
I know this is just one issue but it is pretty damn pitiful when the Saudis make more sense than the US government. What a disgrace.
Arabs have been making sense long before the US government was ever a thing !!
Arabs gave birth to civilisation as we know it.
The first words were written by Arabs and in Babylon 4,000 years ago King Hammurabi was the first to write down the law.
Before Christ, Arab empires stretched from Europe to India.
And during the Dark Ages, while the West was suspicious of all learning, the Arabs were making breakthroughs in maths and astronomy.
Avicenna (980-1037) wrote his Canon of Medicine which remained a standard textbook into the twentieth century.
The US government is not there to make sense; …
it’s there to make money for the few & control the plebs.
Allow me:
Research the shit out of stuff by all means, just leave the pie in the sky at home.
There are plenty of billionaires who can fund that research. Shouldn’t be taxpayers.
It sounds something like a repeat of the push to adopt electric vehicles. Neither governments nor manufacturers had any evidence of a strong demand for them; yet the former didn’t hesitate to set aside millions in tax dollars to provide subsidies for them only to find that they’re selling far too slowly to be profitable. In fact, Ford alone has conceded that it lost $2.1 billion on its EV business last year, double its losses in 2021 and is on track for another $3 billion of losses this year. Now the producers are simply using their profits from sales of conventional cars to prop up EV production, but how long will they willing to do this if the vehicles are overpriced in the first place? The hydrogen story is resonating in much the same way.
In 1973 the “Scientific American” magazine had an issue dedicated to the “Hydrogen Economy” that’s how long this has been kicking around