THIS POST IS A PRESENTATION OF THE NEW GREEN HYDROGEN ACTIVISM IN THE SETTLED SCIENCE

PART-1: THE CASE FOR GREEN HYDROGEN

SOURCE#1: BLOOMBERG: LINK: http://BLOOMBERG.COM (edited by the blogger)

Solar panels and wind turbines can’t clean up everything. Making steel requires higher temperatures than electric furnaces can deliver. This is why the new climate action plan of climate science requires a role for green hydrogen in curbing industrial emissions and for powering cars, trucks and ships. Green hydrogen is free of CO2 emissions. But meeting the ambitious plans being made for it means building a giant industry from scratch.

Why do we need to do this? Green hydrogen burns hot and clean. Replacing the fossil fuels in furnaces that reach 1,500C with hydrogen gas could make a big dent in the 20% of global carbon dioxide emissions that now come from this industry. In steelmaking, hydrogen could replace the coal that’s now used to heat and purify iron ore. The byproduct is water vapor rather than CO2. And while batteries currently dominate the field of electric vehicles, some companies are betting that hydrogen-powered fuel cells will be a better choice than batteries for heavy vehicles, such as trucks, ships and airplanes.

What is green hydrogen? For hydrogen to be green, the electricity used in the electrolysis process must be renewable energy. In the fossil fuel economy, hydrogen is made from natural gas, a processs with CO2 emissions. In contrast, green hydrogen processes emit H2O instead of CO2. Making green hydrogen cost higher by $2.50 to $4.50 per kg. This cost needs to fall below $1 per kg to to compete with traditional hydrogen from natural gas. It is projected that this cost target will be met by 2030 based on the assumption of a an unrealistic expansion of electrolyzer capacity at a time when the world’s generators and grids are strained to keep up with demand from newly electrified vehicles. Also, hydrogen must be compressed or mixed with natural gas to send through a pipeline or chilled to a liquid state to be transported by ship. These are costly complications that make it impossible for this process to compete with the natural gas process for making hydrogen. The proposition on the table is that this additional cost is the cost of the climate action needed to save the planet.

Who’s leading on green hydrogen goals?
The European Union has set the most ambitious goal: building electrolyzers that are capable of converting 40 gigawatts of renewable electricity into hydrogen by 2030. It’s made hydrogen a central component of its Green Deal plan, envisaging as much as 470 billion euros ($560 billion) of public and private investments by 2050 in the hope of kickstarting a global hydrogen market. Germany has declared that green hydrogen will play a central role in transforming the country’s industrial base as it moves to zero emissions by 2045. China plans to have a million vehicles powered by hydrogen fuel cells on its roads by the end of 2030. The value of its hydrogen production could reach 1 trillion yuan ($155 billion) by 2025, according to the China Hydrogen Alliance. Australia will invest $214 million to speed development of four hydrogen hubs with 26 gigawatts of capacity. Japan, where Toyota Motor Corp. has invested heavily in fuel cell technology, is the world leader in hydrogen refueling stations, while South Korea is building fueling and other infrastructure in six cities where it hopes to make hydrogen the main energy source by 2025. The U.S. has set a goal of reducing the cost of green hydrogen by 80% by 2030. Industry groups, including some fossil-fuel companies, are pushing for tax credits for hydrogen production and for subsidies for converting natural gas pipelines to transport hydrogen.

GREEN HYDROGEN PROJECTS ON THE DRAWING BOARD
Royal Dutch Shell Plc is leading a consortium developing a project to produce up to 10 gigawatts of green hydrogen by 2040. Germany’s RWE AG, together with 26 other companies, plans to set up electrolysis units in the North Sea with 10 gigawatts of capacity by 2035. European’s Airbus SE is working on designs for hydrogen-powered aircraft.

SOURCE: LINDE ENGINEERING: LINK: https://www.linde-engineering.com/ THE MANY PATHS TO HYDROGEN

Traditional steam reforming processes for hydrogen production generate CO2 emissions. The conversion of this process to a non-CO2 emission process on an industrial scale to produce Green Hydroen is proposed as an important element in climate action.Green hydrogen (H2) is obtained either by steam reforming or by splitting water with electrolysis with the electricity needed generated from renewable sources. Linde is one of the world’s leading suppliers of photon exchange membrane electrolyzer technology which means that our customers can rely on us for end-to-end, integrated green hydrogen solutions.

Steam reforming initially produces a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. We use cryogenic processes to remove CO2. Pressure swing adsorption plants are used to obtain H2 from hydrogen-rich synthesis gases or refinery and petrochemical gases. We have also developed an alternative hybrid process where we combine membrane and pressure swing adsorption technologies for new-found levels of flexibility and efficiency in the production of green hydrogen. This system can also be used to remove or recover carbon dioxide from process gas streams at synthesis gas plants. CO2 can also be recovered from the flue gas of hydrogen plants by Post Combustion Capture. The use of low-energy coil-wound heat exchangers makes this a particularly economical gas purification method. Where needed, the captured CO2 can be used for enhanced oil recovery (EOR) or fed into a purification or liquefaction plant to enable other uses. Linde can also offer synthesis plants for the production of ammonia (NH3) or methanol (CH3OH) converting the produced hydrogen and nitrogen, respectively syngas stream. These products may be called green ammonia or green methanol if green hydrogen is utilized as a feedstock. Cryogenic plants are used to liquefy hydrogen so it can be transported and stored efficiently. They cool the volatile gas down to minus 253 degrees Celsius to create liquefied hydrogen (LH2). This process increases the density of the gas. In addition, we offer turbocompressors for hydrogen and LH2 pumps. We supply this equipment as part of integrated offerings for our customers’ hydrogen rojects.

SOURCE: TOPSOE: LINK: http://INFO.TOPSOE.COM

The energy industry is looking to build attractive business cases for low-carbon fuels and chemicals. To achieve this, a crucial point is the ability to produce green hydrogen from electrolysis of water with no carbon emissions at a competitive price. Green hydrogen is produced by electrolysis. This process uses electrical power to split water and produce hydrogen. In the case of green hydrogen, the electricity comes from renewable sources such as wind turbines, solar panels, or hydropower. The electrolysis process emits no carbon or harmful substances. Less than 0.1% of the hydrogen produced today comes from water electrolysis because most of it comes from natural gas, a fossil fuel withh CO2 emssions.. Now, as the availability of renewable electricity is increasing and the cost goes down, interest in green hydrogen is booming because we can use renewable electrcity to generate green hydrogen. Topsoe offers the most efficient form of electrolysis today. Topsoe has chosen to focus on the most efficient electrolysis technology available today. Our high-temperature SOEC – solid oxide electrolyzer cell – deliver up to 30% more green hydrogen from the same amount of renewable electricity, compared to standard technologies like PEM and alkaline electrolysis. The superior efficiency stems from the fact that the SOEC works at temperatures above 700 degrees Celsius, which sets it apart from standard electrolysis technologies.SOEC-1. We deliver the SOEC electrolysis unit as a stand-alone unit with power and gas connections. Our modular design allows for flexibility in plant size. The facility is fully automated with a user-friendly interface.

SOURCE: GREENTECH MEDIA: LINK: GREENTECHMEDIA.COM

So, What Exactly Is Green Hydrogen? For a colorless gas, hydrogen gets described in very colorful terms. A new GTM series helps explain the weird and wonderful world of clean energy. Companies and industry groups often join together to promote their products. Far more unusual was the step taken last month by 10 major European energy companies and two of the continent’s top renewable industry bodies, which joined up to launch a campaign touting a product that none of them actually sell. That product is renewable or “green” hydrogen. And while it’s not a central concern today for those companies all see green hydrogen playing a vital role in achieving deep decarbonization of the energy system. Interest in green hydrogen is skyrocketing among major oil and gas firms. Europe is planning to make hydrogen a big part of its trillion-dollar Green Deal package, with an EU-wide green hydrogen strategy expected to be published in July. Some industrial processes and heavy transport will have to run on gas. And that gas of the future is green hydrogen. It is completely clean. It will be affordable with renewables being so cheap now. So, What Exactly Is Green Hydrogen? Most of the gas that is already widely used as an industrial chemical is either brown, if it’s made through the gasification of coal or lignite; or gray, if it is made through steam methane reformation, which typically uses natural gas as the feedstock. Neither of these processes is exactly carbon-friendly.A purportedly cleaner option is known as blue hydrogen, where the gas is produced by steam methane reformation but the emissions are curtailed using carbon capture and storage. This process could roughly halve the amount of carbon produced, but it’s still far from emissions-free. Green hydrogen, in contrast, could almost eliminate emissions by using renewable energy — increasingly abundant and often generated at less-than-ideal times — to power the electrolysis of water. A more recent addition to the hydrogen-production palette is turquoise. This is produced by breaking methane down into hydrogen and solid carbon using a process called pyrolysis. Turquoise hydrogen might seem relatively low in terms of emissions because the carbon can either be buried or used for industrial processes such as steelmaking or battery manufacturing, so it doesn’t escape into the atmosphere. However, recent research shows turquoise hydrogen is actually likely to be no more carbon-free than the blue variety, owing to emissions from the natural-gas supplies and process heat required. How do you make green hydrogen? With electrolysis, all you need to produce large amounts of hydrogen is water, a big electrolyzer and plentiful supplies of electricity. If the electricity comes from renewable sources such as wind, solar or hydro, then the hydrogen is effectively green; the only carbon emissions are from those embodied in the generation infrastructure. The challenge right now is that big electrolyzers are in short supply, and plentiful supplies of renewable electricity still come at a significant price. Compared to more established production processes, electrolysis is very expensive, so the market for electrolyzers has been small. And while renewable energy production is now sizable enough to cause duck curves in California and grid problems in Germany, overproduction is a relatively recent development. Most energy markets still have a need for plenty of renewables just to serve the grid.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION

#1: THE CHEAP AND EASY WAY TO MAKE HYDROGEN IS FROM NATURAL GAS BUT THE PROBLEM WITH THE CHEAP AND EASY IS THE FOSSIL FUEL EMISSIONS FROM THE PROCESS. AS A RESULT THE CHEAP AND EASY IS NOT ACCEPTABLE NOR POSSIBLE IN THE CLIMATE CHANGE ERA.

#2: IT WAS THEREFORE NECESSARY TO INVENT EXPENSIVE AND DIFFICULT PROCESSES FOR MAKING HYDROGEN WITHOUT FOSSIL FUEL EMISSIONS. WHAT IS PROPOSED IS THAT ELECTRICITY FROM RENEWABLE ENERGY SUCH AS WIND AND SOLAR CAN USED IN AN ELECTROLYSIS PROCESS THAT CAN SPLIT OUT THE HYDROGEN FROM WATER AND OTHER NON-FOSSIL FUEL FLUIDS. THE PROCESS HAS BEEN DEMONSTRATED BUT AT 5 TIMES THE COST PER KG OF HYDROGEN THAN THE NATURAL GAS PROCESS. HOWEVER, GIVEN THE CLIMATE CHANGE EMEGENCY, THE COST MUST BE BORNE AND THE PLANET MUST BE SAVED.

#3: IN ADDITION TO THE COST ISSUE, YET ANOTHER CONSIDERATION FOR THE ELECROLYSIS OF WATER WITH RENEWABLE ENERGY IS THE ENERGY COVERSION EFFICIENCY. BRIEFLY, THE EFFICIENCY IS VERY LOW SO THAT IN THE CONVERSION OF ELECTRICITY TO HYDROGEN AND THEN LATER FOR THE HYDROGEN TO DELIVER THAT SAME ENERGY AS ELECTRICITY, ALMOST 70% OF THE ENERGY IS LOST TO ENERGY CONVERSION INEFFICIENCY SO THAT LESS THAN 30% OF THE ENERGY IS DELIVERED. THIS DRAMATIC ENERGY LOSS TAKES THE BUZZ OUT OF THE GREEN HYDROGEN BUZZ.

#4: LASTLY, ALL THAT STRONG AND EXCITING LANGUAGE ABOUT “GREEN HYDROGEN” OVERLOOKS AND SIDESTEPS THE VERY WEIRD ISSUE THAT THERE IS NO GREEN HYDROGEN AVAILABLE FOR DELIVERY. IT IS THOUGHT THAT THEY MAY BE ABLE TO PROVIDE THIS EXCITING NEW “GREEN” TECHNOLOGY ABOUT A DECADE FROM NOW AT SOME TIME AFTER 2030. BOTTOM LINE: WE DON’T REALLY HAVE GREEN HYDROGEN BUT MAYBE WE WILL IN ABOUT A DECADE.

#4: THE COST AND EFFICIENCY ISSUES NOTWITHSTANDING, THE GREEN HYDROGEN MOVEMENT IS A MUCH NEEDED HEROISM BOOST FOR THE CLIMATE MOVEMENT ALTHOUGH WE DON’T REALLY HAVE ANY YET.

CONWAY TWITTY EXPLAINS