EU's renewable hydrogen plan needs a 'reality check'
- Reference: 1721370733
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2024/07/19/eu_renewable_hydrogen_audit/
- Source link:
Hydrogen can be used to make electricity without producing carbon dioxide when expended. It can also be used in the steel production process, replacing coal. The gas is therefore of considerable interest as the world transitions away from fossil fuels.
The element is usually isolated using electrolysis – passing an electric current through water – which separates hydrogen and oxygen. But if the electricity used to conduct electrolysis is not sourced from renewables, hydrogen is obviously not carbon neutral.
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Figuring out how to obtain "green" hydrogen at scale is thus the focus of many scientific and industrial minds. In 2020 the European Union created a Hydrogen strategy, updated it two years later, and made the element part of its plan to achieve its 2050 zero CO 2 target,
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The ECA conducted and audit of the progress of that plan, and on Tuesday [4]published its findings.
The news wasn't great as the audit found numerous problems. Among them:
A lack of robust analyses before setting production and import targets, which were not realistic and therefore likely won't be achieved;
No target price for hydrogen was set;
EU member states have their own targets and plans, which don't always align with the bloc's ambitions;
Development of production capacity has been slow, because investors are uncertain of demand, which in turn makes would-be users of hydrogen wary.
Other issues included bureaucratic intrigue, which saw the European Commission (EC) fail to follow up a report authored by the European Clean Hydrogen Alliance – a body it had established. People who attended Alliance roundtables emerged uncertain about what they were required to do, resulting in "general slowdown in activity."
[5]Legendary Glastonbury farm using bovine excreta power plant adds graphene boffinry
[6]Mitsubishi Heavy Industries bets big on small turbines for datacenters
[7]Japan to test datacenter powered by reused hydrogen fuel cells
[8]England's village green hydrogen dream in tatters
Infrastructure worries
Just how many electrolyzers will be needed to achieve Europe's hydrogen dreams is also unknown, and hard to calculate.
The audit considered the cost of hydrogen storage and pipelines, noting Germany alone has assessed its costs at €19.8 billion (£17 billion, $22 billion). The audit suggests other projects and nations have set unrealistically low budgets.
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The ECA concluded it's time for a "reality check." For one thing, four years have elapsed since the publication of the Hydrogen strategy, and improvements to technology mean previous assumptions may no longer be accurate.
The court therefore suggested a set of recommendations to be completed between mid-2025 and mid-2026, which boil down to the EU updating its targets to be "ambitious but realistic," establishing a roadmap that member states are required to follow, and monitoring members' plans and progress.
Implementing these changes will be up to the EC and individual member states of the EU. Although there are substantial structural issues at play, the audit did note that the original plan actually had "good first results" – which may indicate that the whole project for green hydrogen isn't doomed. ®
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[4] https://www.eca.europa.eu/en/publications/SR-2024-11
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/11/cow_manure_graphene/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/29/mhi_datacenter_generator_strategy/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/03/japan_to_test_datacenter_powered/
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[10] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: you can't cheat with physics
Batteries are an energy vector too. Yet they are ubiquitous. Hydrogen leaks and is unstable - but hydrogen can be combined with carbon and some other additives to create green natural gas or green light fuel, including aircraft worthy fuel. There already exists vast infrastructure and methods for moving and storing natural gas and petroleum which could be usable by their green-hydrogen related replacements.
You can't cheat costs though - and green hydrogen products are still too expensive. Not unlike wind energy used to be. It's certainly worth continuing R&D and modest scale usage experiments to progress the tech. Maybe the problems mentioned in this article are exactly due to the fact that its still too expensive to go big, and the money would better be spent on R&D.
Re: you can't cheat with physics
No, as Zolko says, the physics are dead against it.
Hydrocarbons produced from renewable energy, preferably without electrolysis, are possible and with a bit more R&D can probably be produced in Europe at costs close enough to world market prices plus a risk premium. Better still would be closed-loop systems that produce in the summer and burn in the winter where the nominal price wouldn't matter at all.
Re: you can't cheat with physics
The explosive bit is solvable….see Toyota’s Mirai hydrogen car which works, is basically fine (no more than “adequate” though), and road-safe certified by the usual authorities.
The leaky issue is worse. The hydrogen embrittlement issue is still worse again.
But worst of all, is that fundamental thermodynamics says you lose 13% of primary energy compressing and liquefying the hydrogen for transport. In the 50th millennium, we would *still* throw away 13% of primary energy. It’s literally the maximally inefficient hydrocarbon for transporting energy, containing zero carbons.
As a working fluid, it doesn’t matter how much carbon it has; put them in synthetically on one side, absorbing CO2, release it on the other.
Hydrogen is the classic “Silicon Valley reinventing the train”. If you want a technology like this, we literally already have the thermodynamically-optimal version for decades: biofuel. I’m not even a biofuel supporter. But biofuel is the technology that hydrogen would grow up to be, after fifty years and trillions of dollars of R&D. Hydrogen is *mental*.
Don't you just love administrative caution ?
" A lack of robust analyses before setting production and import targets, which were not realistic and therefore likely won't be achieved "
Likely won't be achieved.
Likely .
The initial analysis is flawed and unrealistic, but achieving unrealistic targets just might still be possible, maybe, in an alternate universe.
I understand that you need to not ruffle any feathers too much, but if initial analysis is wrong, the chance that results will not be achieved is a bit stronger than likely .
As in won't happen .
Re: Don't you just love administrative caution ?
Not ruffling feathers is precisely how we get into this kind of mess - ad nauseam. Rip the feathers out and if the bird does not flee, gut it roast it and eat it.
new fools gold and less useful
Said beter than I can say it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIVmSewHqMY
"The element is usually isolated using electrolysis – passing an electric current through water – which separates hydrogen and oxygen."
Oh, no it isn't! Extracting hydrogen through electrolysis is incredibly inefficient, which is why most hydrogen is manufactured through the steam reforming of oil refinery off gases. In a bid to extract the most from their huge investment in oil extraction and refining, the oil industry is putting significant money and effort into lobbying for hydrogen over electricity and batteries.
Another problem with hydrogen is that however it is manufactured, it has to be stored and transported to the point of use - and this uses a lot more energy (and costs more) than simply putting electricity into a cable distribution network and/or batteries.
Than there's the safety issues. The explosion at the Sandvika hydrogen filling station in Norway prompted the company operating this station to close all it's hydrogen filling stations in Norway and Germany. Toyota subsequently withdrew their hydrogen vehicles from the Norwegian market.
TL;DR
Electricity -> Hydrogen -> Transport -> Electricity -> Use
is incredibly inefficient and expensive, compared with
Electricity -> Cables & batteries -> Use
Not
Obviously the author implied statement in the context of green hydrogen, which by definition is not made from oil and gas.
Regardless of the existence of green hydrogen - Hydrogen is used in industrial processes. Nearly all hydrogen consumed in the United States is used by industry for refining petroleum, treating metals, producing fertilizer and other chemicals, and processing foods. U.S. petroleum refineries use hydrogen to lower the sulfur content of fuels.
Does it make sense to claim that modest scale green hydrogen R&D, including mixing into present hydrogen uses is a lie or immoral? Green electricity is mixed with electricity from coal and natural gas - is that a lie or immoral? What other way is there to do practical R&D?
Surely there are crazy stupid government in pushing for change. For example enough 7500 dollar EV subsides which doesn't expand the EV usage as much as encouraging a few people to buy EV SUVs instead of EV sedans. Did you know only 5% of EV batteries are being recycled? The rest are landfilled or stockpiled indefinitely. There is some cost to that and its not being counted.
The Good vs Evil stereotyping is not helpful.
Electricity -> Hydrogen -> Transport -> Electricity -> Use
is incredibly inefficient and expensive, compared with
Electricity -> Cables & batteries -> Use
It is, but that might portray that the grid and batteries don't have much in the way of losses. In the UK there's about 13.9% losses on electricity across transmission and distribution networks. And batteries then lose around a further 10% between energy supplied and energy abstracted.
In what way?
" [hydrogen] can also be used in the steel production process, replacing coal "
To heat furnaces, possibly. But we'll still need carbon to create carbon steel. And there's a condition known as "hydrogen embrittlement" that seriously compromises steel. So we'll need at least strict segregation between the heating mechanism and the melt. So there'll have to be a compete redesign and replacement of all blast furnaces and associated equipment, which will be both expensive and disruptive to achieve. And BTW, if the hydrogen is created by electrolysis, why not instead use the electricity directly to heat the furnaces?
The true costs?
are that it is a scam put out by the Oil/Gas lobbyists. They don't want 'Green H2' or 'Green anything'. In their eyes, the only true H2 is Their H2.
As a fuel for road vehicles, it is a failure. It might work for rail or shipping but nowt else. It is just too expensive and too hard to store without losses.
you can't cheat with physics
No amount of EU or other laws will prevent that 1) hydrogen is no energy source, it's an energy vector, and 2) a very bad one because it leaks through the smallest of holes or cracks and is highly explosive in the atmosphere's oxygen. There might be some niche use-cases but it will never be used in large quantities because of physics.