Essay by Eric Worrall
Energy of the future? Even a $28.3 million grant from the West Australian Government company was not enough to push the project over the line.
Australian green hydrogen project scrapped due to transport costs, pumped hydro on hold
Giles Parkinson 26 July 2023
Canadian gas giant Atco says it has scrapped plans for one of the first commercial scale green hydrogen projects in Australia, despite strong funding support from the government’s renewable agency, and has also put a proposed pumped hydro project in NSW on hold.
Atco had planned to build a 10MW green hydrogen electrolyser next to Bright Energy’s 180MW Warradarge wind farm in Western Australia (pictured above), fuelling the plant with renewable energy and producing 4.3 tonnes of green hydrogen a year.
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But Atco’s $53 million Clean Energy Innovation Park – also known as the Mid West project – has been scrapped because it would involve trucking the hydrogen to points where it can be injected into the gas network.
Atco has now decided that this is not viable and says it will relinquish the $28.3 million grant promised by ARENA.
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Atco says it is still confident green hydrogen can be delivered, but says it needs to be located closer to heavy industry where the green hydrogen can be used.
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Read more: https://reneweconomy.com.au/australian-green-hydrogen-project-scrapped-due-to-transport-costs-pumped-hydro-on-hold/
This cancellation casts a long shadow over Australia’s alleged renewable hydrogen revolution.
Renewable projects need vast acreages of cheap land, but major gas pipelines are rarely built to the middle of nowhere.
So unless Aussie governments are prepared to sweeten the pot even further, pour ridiculous sums of money into building hydrogen ready pipelines between proposed hydrogen parks and the rest of the gas network, why would anyone proceed with green hydrogen projects which even with subsidies are struggling to be commercially viable?
Even funnier, if Aussie governments do pour money into building a pipe network, all that extra public spending will drive up inflationary pressures, which will in turn drive up interest rates and the cost of borrowing money to fund major projects.
Either way, Aussie green energy enthusiasts lose.
The only remaining questions, why didn’t Atco instead choose to store their hydrogen, instead of piping the hydrogen, and use the hydrogen as energy storage, to “firm” electricity output from the Warradage Wind Farm? Or alternatively, they could have converted the hydrogen to green Ammonia, which is much easier to store or transport than green hydrogen?
I think we all know the answer to those questions.
You want hydrogen energy? How about natural gas? Four H atoms per one C atom.
Nat gas BAD…today Vic govt announces NO new homes will be allowed.. to connect to gas in this stae
aka state of disaster
4.3 tonnes per year? That sounds off in the decimal place
I don’t know, it is very light.
which weighs more: a ton of feathers or a ton of coal?
Cute.
If you include the containers, it’s the feathers.
I checked Atco’s web site and it appears that the 4.3 tonnes per year is correct. Currently “green hydrogen” brings about $10/kg so that’s $43,000 worth per year. Not a very good return on a $28 million investment. I can see why they pulled the plug.
No something wrong there, but it was probably written by a journo!
10 MW would produce a lot more than that, but the price would be very high. Adding it to natural gas is simply greenwashing. I suspect that the company can sell its electricity to the grid for more money on average, and trucking gaseous hydrogen would be very expensive as a truck full compressed to 3000 psi would hardly carry 0.5 tonnes. The cost of compressing the gas is high, but making it liquid to carry more hydrogen is extremely expensive and at about -240C lossy too.
I found this link that claims 4.0 tonnes per day.
https://www.agig.com.au/media-release—atco-and-agig-for-green-hydrogen-production
4 tonnes per day sounds about right.
I would have thought one of our resident retired engineers would do the numbers and come up with a pretty good estimate of production based on the power usage.
yeah it’s 4.29T/day. 10MW*365*24=87,600MWh / 56MWh/T H2 = 1564T/yr =4.29T/day.
I think you’re right. 4.3 tonnes of hydrogen would yield 169 GWh combustion heat energy, which is not negligible. It’s also impossible for a 10 MW electrolyzer. It would require the electrolyzer to operate 16,900 hours per year, or nearly twice as many hours as there are in a year.
“Nothing ‘green’ ever works properly”.
Tim Blair.
Tim Blair,
Yes, that truism needs to sit alongside “There is no such thing as a free lunch.”
Geoff S
Climate changing- “the ongoing process by which the world’s multiple idiocies are becoming one giant, useless force.”
https://www.dutchnews.nl/2023/07/coastguard-stop-cooling-stricken-cargo-ship-amid-capsize-fears/
Dutch shipping organisation KVNR has also called for tougher rules for the transport of electric cars by boat. The fire is thought to have started in one of the small number of electric vehicles on board.
(and luckily not under an apartment block or in your garage.)
I don’t know how this electric car problem is going to be fixed.
The more EV’s we incorporate into the mix, the greater the danger of catastrophic fires.
We need a battery that doesn’t catch fire like this.
no we do not, we just need to run our ICE cars without all the bullshit.
Although they are not EV cars the London Fire Brigade has been reported to responding to e-bike/e-scooter fires every other day and at least 12 people have died in such fires since 2020 in the UK.
Thanks Mike, but do you have references for the total numbers.
I have seen several articles on individual fires, but no amalgamation of the totals.
Of course the MSM would not want to advertise the problems with the preferred new tech.
as an (amusing ?) aside on battery fires – I wonder how many people in combat robotics have EV’s? Battery fires are a BIG deal – safety bags (designed for this purpose) when charging are required and there are procedured in place to deal with the fires if they occur at an event. And all agree, you can’t extinguish it. Put it in a bucket of sand and cover it.
now imagine airplanes doing the crematorium trick
https://www.faa.gov/hazmat/resources/lithium_batteries/incidents
Just a matter of time.
Look at the number of incidents. I think I can remember only 2 incidents, 1 ecig and 1 phone, reported on the news.
Have you thought about interislander ferries, ie between north island and south island new zealand carrying multlple number of cars.
Not sure I would be happy to see an EV car loading up ahead of me.
What about vehicle ferries between england and europe, how long do they take to get to opposite port.
I fear we are going to have a major disaster with loss of life before anyone takes any notice.
OR are the insurance co’s going to solve the problem for us, like in parts of Australia now, You cannot insure your house for floods or cyclones, totally out of reach financially.
High rise apartment buildings too. My in-laws lived in a prestigious building with rows of expensive EVs charging in the underground parking area. A fire with one of them would likely take down the entire building. It’s a matter of “when” it happens, not “if”.
That’s because “renewables” aren’t…renewable.
Agreed I just call them “Unreliables”
Hopefully that means Twiggy will concentrate on his Iron Ore business, and stop going off into fantasy land.
Seems like a small project with little prospect for success from the beginning but they were hoping for subsidies and virtue signaling and they must have been clueless from the beginning – what did they think they were going to do with the gas if there were no pipelines near by?
Since they didn’t plan the electrolyser at the other end of the wind farm’s powerline, close to civilization and it’s customers, it really shows this project was designed by the company’s marketing people and not the engineers and accountants – though it’s possible the accountants were hoping for more handouts from idiot govts.
Wind power is a diffuse energy source and the generated power has to be collected and converted, losing energy along the way. It is this only really feasible to send around 50 miles. Perhaps their and farm was already built in a stupid place, in the middle of nowhere.
Gas in Australia is ever so muddled.
Today the government of Victoria, where I live, has decreed that no gas connections are allowed for new homes, starting 1 Jan 2024. They must have known that hydrogen is a non-starter, otherwise they would have allowed new pipes to new homes, for future hydrogen.
meanwhile, methane contionues to be domonised despite the van Wingaarden & Happer papers showing that its low concentration, its low residence time in the atmosphere and its low capture of photons for warming combine to make it a greenhouse gas with no greenhouse.
This has all become even sillier. The suggested motivation of governments is looking increasingly correct. It is for control of people, not for the satisfaction of science. You can turn off electricity via multiple smart meters, but you cannot turn off gas with dumb meters.
Challenge the Victorian government to show it has power to fiddle with gas (some owned by the Commonwealth) and your home (owned by you and your bank).
Geoff S.
“meanwhile, methane contionues to be domonised despite the van Wingaarden & Happer papers showing that its low concentration, its low residence time in the atmosphere and its low capture of photons for warming combine to make it a greenhouse gas with no greenhouse.”
This needs to be said more often.
Methane is a non-issue when it comes to human-caused climate change or any kind of climate change, and it is easily demonstrated. So one has to wonder why the alarmists continue to try to demonize methane. The alarmists are essentially trying to take food out of our mouths for no good reason, with their attacks on methane. They are divorced from reality.
Because it has absolutely nothing to do with climate, but everything to do with controlling the population.
until we find a sane person and get them in and andrOOZE out, were screwed
Without an effective constitution the government does what it damned well pleases. With the Supreme Court’s recent habit of slapping down Federal government agencies’ congressional overreach, the U.S. is showing the value of having one.
Australia following the U.K.?
“”UK Government Abandons Plans to Replace Gas Boilers with Hydrogen””
https://bnn.network/breaking-news/uk-government-abandons-plans-to-replace-gas-boilers-with-hydrogen-concerns-over-cost-safety-and-fossil-fuel-reliance/
A trend?!
News just in…
“”Britain should not obsess about cutting its carbon emissions, Sir Tony Blair said yesterday.””
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/tony-blair-warns-britain-cant-stop-climate-change-alone-ex-pm-suggests-costly-green-policies-are-futile-when-uks-emissions-are-dwarfed-by-chinas-as-he-makes-break-with-labour-policy/ar-AA1erXZW
Surely this is not the same Sir Tony Bliar, virtue signaller extraordinaire, WEF Globalist, expert in illegal wars, that is speaking the blindingly bleeding obvious – has he had a frontal lobotomy?
Is he planning a return to politics….is he heading for the lifeboats on the SS Woke Blx which, day by day, appears to be “going down by the bow”?
Is this a world first – he says something that is true, believable and on point?
The Blair who told drivers to get a cleaner (CO2) diesel…
“If you’ve been the registered keeper of a diesel car or van in England or Wales that was made between around 2009 and 2020, you may be eligible to join a group legal claim over emissions….”
It would seem our Tony has had a Damascene conversion.
Ed Miliband will be apoplectic!
I can hear him snorting!
I don’t think he would know what that word means!
Please tell more, as this would represent a huge leap in technology I am not aware of. Last I checked, we have absolutely no material available that can contain hydrogen, the smallest atom, that just seeps past molecules and makes everything brittle and patently unsuitable for pressurised application.
But it all matter little, anyway, the purpose of the project was fulfilled:
Eff the gas plant, has all the expert consultants and their non-profits and NGOs been paid? Have all the experts been patted on the back and given shiny little baubles with their accomplishment engraved at the bottom?
Mission accomplished, it’s not like you can pipe (or truck) the shirt around anyway!
The government says this will save you money!!
Victoria bans gas connections in new homes from 2024
But you can still have LPG gas if you want…
The key questions on Victoria’s 2024 gas changes answered
oops, sorry didn’t see you post, so put this as a story tip. !
LPG is running around 130 for a 100(maybe only 80kg now?) tank
for cooking thats a decent few months supply , for water heating..no idea never run one but instant h w heaters would prob be decent time.
for heating? nope I remember using a 100kg bottle every 6weeks or so in a tiny heater in a caravan decades ago
and town gas and LPG bottled require refitting jets and bits for the appropriate setup
I am sure they considered a powerline as an alternative to a hydrogen pipeline. Maybe they wanted to scrap the project in the first place?
I think the project revolved around generation and transport, but all told, best refer to my earlier comment on grand-sounding institutions that exist merely to gather accolades for its flunkies.
Caterpillar has a hydrogen-burning genset on the market, but they seem to use a natural gas / hydrogen blend.
Using hydrogen-powered gensets to firm wind or solar seems a natural fit.
The numbers don’t work, and hydrogen is horrible stuff to store.
Using it where it’s produced would appear to be the best case scenario.
No you waste 80% of the input energy to the conversion since the conversion is only 20% efficient. As Eric said it is also very had to keep hydrogen in any kind of container as it is really good at leaking out.
I know the round trip conversion efficiency isn’t great*. Using excess electricity output of a wind or solar facility to electrolyse water for hydrogen, then using that hydrogen in a gas turbine or reciprocating engine genset to fill in some of the gaps seems more efficient than building a pipeline to send hydrogen somewhere else.
If governments are going to insist on overbuild of wind / solar instead of fission, there are going to be periods of over-production, as well as under=production, Electrolysis, big tanks and hydrogen fuelled generators seems a better bet than batteries.
[*] from memory, the 20% comes from 60% efficiency of electrolysis and 30% efficiency of combustion. 40% to 50% combustion efficiency is closer to the mark, but it’s still very lossy.
You are forgetting the energy used to compress the stored hydrogen. That knocks the heck out of the efficiency
Fair enough.
Static usage on-site may not need anywhere near as high a pressure as mobile use, but it’s still a loss.
Do you have a breakdown of the losses?
How to waste what little electricity wind produces.
Use it manufacture green hydrogen with up to 50% losses for the same energy output as direct electricity, thereby depriving households and businesses of an essential supply.
Would the last person leaving Australia please put the lights out.
Oh! Never mind…….
as much as i hate tax$ wasted yet again
i LOVE the continuing run of utter fails that might? just might…wake a few idiots up
story tip…
Victoria (Australia) goes full idiocy. !
Australian State Bans Gas to New Homes – Australian Climate Madness
You could spend trillions of taxpayers cash on greenwashing and never reach net zero………….oh wait a minute, we have
Even funnier? Lots of adjectives apply, but funny really isn’t one of them
Not necessary. You can’t beat natural gas.
And, now what? After all the money spent to no good end, what not very well thought out boondoggle will the greenies come up with to fleece more from the corporate morons? The investors should be livid about this one. And take a class action lawsuit to the companies for fiduciary irresponsibility.
I guess they will have to return to other grand failed ideas like massive solar concentrator projects for the photo ops.
Hydrogen still leads in the race for alternative souces. See Brilliantlightpower.com They get it direct from water or pumped into their Suncell where it undergoes catalytic conversion to hydrino with a massive release of energy.
The global search for cold fusiion didn’t succeed that way but did reveal validated anomalies world wide under a consistent set of conditions. It’s been like the old days of computer development when everyone shared.
The common factors were: Hydrogen, a metal, a plasma and an additional pumped voltage through the whole. Such combo even produced elements as well.
Mills with his Suncell is the most advanced and is at the presentation stage, organising production and sales. The units are expected to be of universal use for domestic, industrial, transport use. No grid is needed. I could fit 2x 11 Mw units in my sitting room. I expect to see a small unit about the size of an underbench fridge provide the electriicty for individual homes.
For those with an inquiring scientific mind the BOP website is a gem. There is a great amount of detail backing up the work.
I feel anything associated with cold fusion is total and complete BS.
Calling it “cold fusion” seems to have been a massive own goal.
Rebranding it Low Energy Nuclear Reaction (LENR) might have helped a bit 🙂
There did appear to be something there, but it appeared to be some sort of chemical reaction. That was donkey’s years ago, so there may be ongoing research.
Build new fossil fuel and nuclear generators and remove all wind and solar from the grid.