This post reports on two new instances of people applying a little critical thinking to the issue of using so-called “green” hydrogen as an essential piece of a future de-carbonized energy system. This is a subject that I have previously addressed, here in a post of June 13, 2022, and here again in my energy storage Report of December 1, 2022.
The two new pieces covered in this post are (1) a February 1 Report for the Manhattan Institute by Jonathan Lesser titled “Green Hydrogen: A Multibillion-Dollar Energy Boondoggle,”, and (2) a February 13 article in the Washington Examiner by Steve Goreham titled “Can the government create a green hydrogen fuel industry?”
If you think that a “de-carbonized” energy system is some kind of urgent priority for humanity, and you put your mind to how to achieve that, it won’t take you long to realize that hydrogen is the only way to get there. OK, there’s nuclear, but environmentalists and regulators have nuclear completely blocked. That means that to be carbon-free, most electricity must come from the wind and sun, and in turn that means need for energy storage far beyond the capabilities of any batteries. Hydrogen is the one and only remaining solution.
And not just any hydrogen. Only “green” hydrogen will do — that is, hydrogen that is itself produced by some carbon-free process. The alternative is to get your hydrogen the way almost all hydrogen is produced today: you “reform” methane (CH4), separating out the hydrogen and discarding the carbon as CO2 into the atmosphere. But this process has the same CO2 emissions as if you just burned the methane (aka natural gas) in a power plant to get your energy in the first place. If the entire goal is de-carbonization, that is clearly not allowed.
Over at the government, their minds move slowly, but they have recently figured out that keeping their energy transition fantasy alive can only be accomplished with vast amounts of green hydrogen. And so they have undertaken to address the issue in the only way they know, which is to throw oodles of taxpayer funding at it. This piece from JPT on October 24, 2023 covers the government’s latest big announcement:
US President Joe Biden and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm announced that seven regional clean hydrogen hubs have been selected to receive $7 billion in Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funding in an effort to accelerate the domestic market for low-cost, clean hydrogen. The seven selected regional clean hydrogen hubs are expected to catalyze more than $40 billion in private investment and create tens of thousands of jobs, bringing the total public and private investment in hydrogen hubs to nearly $50 billion.
Note that the government’s big initiative came just about a year after the two Manhattan Contrarian pieces in 2022 explaining why this could never be done economically. But anyway, now that the government funds are flowing, and so-called “infrastructure” is getting built, others are starting to look at whether this makes any sense.
Of the two new pieces covered here, Lesser’s is far the longer and more detailed. He goes through a careful look at all the elements of trying to produce this green hydrogen stuff — building the electrolysis facility, operating and maintaining the facility, buying electricity from wind and solar producers, transmitting the wind/solar electricity to the site of electrolysis, and compressing the hydrogen into a form ready for transit somewhere to be used — and puts assumed cost figures on each piece of the process. He comes up with a total cost range of $2.74 to $5.35 per kg of hydrogen produced. Here is Lesser’s chart:
Note that Lesser comes up with even higher figures of $3.62 to $8.85 per kg of hydrogen if he further adds costs of battery storage of electricity to make it so that the electrolyzers can run all the time and not be dependent on the intermittency of wind and sun. Green hydrogen advocates would dispute whether this is necessary, so let’s leave it out for now. Even without this additional cost, we are at $2.74 to $5.35 per kg for the hydrogen.
Since a kg of hydrogen is good for about 33.3 kwh, that would mean something in the range of 8.3 to 16.2 cents per kwh just for the fuel, without yet considering any cost to get the fuel to a power plant to be burned.
I would comment that some of Lesser’s assumptions are very low, and by “low” I mean favorable to the economic viability of this green hydrogen. Most notably, he has an assumption of an unsubsidized cost of 4 cents per kwh for the wind/solar-generated electricity. Crazy. Here in New York, off-shore wind developers who had bid last year for contracts at about $90-100/MWH (i.e., 9 – 10 cents per kwh) have recently reneged and demanded prices in the range of $150-160/MWH, or 15-16 cents per kwh. If the recent New York demands represent the real cost of wind/solar electricity, then you can multiply Lesser’s figure for the electricity input to produce a kg of hydrogen by 4, adding about $6 per kg, bringing the total cost of a kg to around $9 – 11, instead of Lesser’s $2.74 – 5.35. In cents/kwh that would be about 18 additional cents per kwh, in either the high or low scenario; instead of a range of about 8 to 16 cents, it would be 24 to 32 cents per kwh to make the green hydrogen.
Goreham does not give us such a detailed calculation, but his bottom line is about the same (including a more realistic cost for the wind/solar electricity):
Hydrogen feedstock made from natural gas or coal is inexpensive, with a cost as low as $1 per kilogram. . . . To produce a kilogram of hydrogen by electrolysis, electricity alone costs $3 to $6 per kilogram, resulting in a total cost of at least $5 per kilogram. This makes hydrogen from electrolysis more than five times as expensive as hydrogen made from natural gas or coal.
Goreham’s “at least $5 per kg” for green hydrogen is actually well below Lesser’s figure after we adjust for the cost of electricity from wind and solar generation.
Note that, as I reported on January 12, recent bids in the UK for producing green hydrogen using electricity from off-shore wind came in at about $306/MWH, or 30.6 cents per kwh. Using the conversion factor of 33.3 kwh/kg of hydrogen would make this the equivalent of over $10 per kg of hydrogen.
We won’t really know how much this green hydrogen stuff actually costs until there are some real facilities up and running. But whether it is ten times as expensive as the stuff produced from natural gas, or only five times as expensive, doesn’t really matter. It is uneconomic, and nothing is going to change that. Nobody will ever buy it or use it without government mandates or subsidies or both.
Goreham’s conclusion:
[G]overnments now want to create a new hydrogen fuel industry using market intervention, mandates, and massive subsidies. But physics and economics strongly oppose the development of a green hydrogen fuel industry. Get ready for a spectacular failure of these government-sponsored efforts.
Hydrogen is extremely explosive when oxygen is available and burns with an invisible flame so IR goggles need to be used to see the flame.
Might as well use dynamite to store the energy.
Hydrogen will collapse after an explosion of two shows people how dangerous it is when oxygen is available.
Hydrogen cannot be stored long enough to be a useful fuel! That problem alone renders it not the world’s next energy source. Another green pipe dream, just as bad as grid-scale batteries, of which there are none and will not be anytime in the foreseeable future.
Hydrogen leaks out of virtually everything, smallest molecule of all, squeeze it and it goes away. Liquify it and spend money on keeping it liquid, it will still boil off and go away. Put it in a salt dome, it will find its way out.
To say nothing of its invisible flame, low energy density, and the ridiculous inefficiency of electrolysis. And, where do we get all the water anyway? Sea water will not work, the salt plates out all over everything. Fresh water from lakes and rivers, sure, design that system and cost it out.
When people’s energy bills rise tremendously and the light and heat go out, politicians get voted out. Look at what happened in Texas after 2021.
Stop with the hydrogen already…
Moon
As Plimer (2023) points out…
“Compared to all other energy sources, hydrogen is the most efficient fuel but it comes with insurmountable problems. Hydrogen was tried as a fuel in the 19th and 20th Centuries and failed. Hydrogen must be manufactured and cannot be mined. Because it is too expensive to make and uses more energy than it will ever produce, the numbers just don’t add up. Hydrogen must be stored as liquid hydrogen at 700 times atmospheric pressure and at minus 253 degrees Celsius. A huge amount of energy is needed to create these conditions. Hydrogen is such a small molecule that it diffuses through solid steel, especially at high pressure, and stored hydrogen leaks out very quickly. As soon as hydrogen diffuses through steel, the steel is greatly weakened. Hydrogen is super explosive. If you want to take a risk with a catastrophic explosion, play with hydrogen. We’ve only known this since 1766 AD.” (Plimer, I. 2023. The Little Green Book 3. Connor Court Publishing. Australia)
So, it is beyond belief that our governments bypass those who are knowledgeable and choose to carry on wasting massive amounts of taxpayer’s money in order to attain an unreachable goal of Net Zero.
A couple of often overlooked points regarding hydrogen. Firstly not all hydrogen is the same! There are two spin isomers Orthohydrogen and Parahydrogen with differing energetic states. Electrolysis has a tendency to produce disproportionately high amounts of Para much of which subsequently drops down to Ortho releasing heat. This process is accelerated by increasing pressure or reducing temperature. Secondly hydrogen displays an unusual Joule-Thomson effect where its temperature increases on expansion.
Both the above effects are quite small but are effectively concentrated at throttling points. Heating up hydrogen at or just before likely point of combustion really is not a good idea!
Apologies one and all ….got my ortho and para the wrong way around! Typing in too much of a hurry!
But this misses the point. When discussing such things it is inevitable that all proposed energy sources are very expensive to start off with. A classic example is the conversion of sea water to potable water. The process today is massively cheaper than previously. So it is with hydrogen based energy – even now. Ammonia based energy (Toyota is currently bringing this out) – could well overtake hydrogen for a while.