Audioblog 13: Clean Hydrogen's Missing Trillions
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- Опубликовано: 13 июн 2024
- The 5th Hydrogen Energy Ministerial in Tokyo announced that by 2030, the world would produce and use 90 million tonnes of renewable and low-carbon hydrogen. Then, last year, the 6th Hydrogen Energy Ministerial not only reiterated the 90 million tonne target, but went further, promising that the overall market for hydrogen would grow to 150 million tonnes by 2030. All very exciting, and it helped to ensure that hydrogen was one of the hot topics at COP 28 in Dubai a few months later. But these targets are unachievable. The issue is simple: it's money. The biggest challenge facing low emission hydrogen is that it is expensive to produce, expensive to transport, expensive to store, expensive to distribute, and expensive to use. Whether you're switching existing users to clean hydrogen or pushing hydrogen into sectors where it's not currently used, it takes money - and lots of it.
In this week's episode of Cleaning Up, we find how much and how much more governments would have to spend for hydrogen to live up to its hype. This audio blog is adapted from a piece Michael wrote at the end of last year for BloombergNEF, entitled "Clean Hydrogen's Missing Trillions", which estimated that hitting the Hydrogen Energy Ministerial target of 90 million tonnes of clean energy by 2030 would require subsidies of at least $2.3 trillion to be on the table right now, while the actual figure at the end of last year was 1/10th of that. Although the figures have changed a bit since then, the message remains the same: the subsidy gap remains in the multiple trillions of dollars. It should not therefore be surprising that the news is full of projects being cancelled and delayed. In fact, that will be one of the main hydrogen stories through to 2030 and beyond.
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Links
Michael's December 2023 BloombergNEF piece - "Clean Hydrogen's Missing Trillions", on which this audio blog is based: about.bnef.com/blog/liebreich...
Michael's September 2023 BloombergNEF Piece - "The Five Horsemen of the Transition": about.bnef.com/blog/liebreich...
Michael's December 2022 BloombergNEF piece - "The Unbearable Lightness of Hydrogen": about.bnef.com/blog/liebreich...
The Chair's Summary of the 6th Hydrogen Energy Ministerial: hem-2023.nedo.go.jp/wp-conten...
The US National Petroleum Council Report - "Harnessing Hydrogen": harnessinghydrogen.npc.org
The PwC Report - "Navigating the Global Hydrogen Ecosystem": www.strategyand.pwc.com/de/en...
The IEA's 2023 Net Zero Roadmap: iea.blob.core.windows.net/ass...
The IEA's Global Hydrogen Review: iea.blob.core.windows.net/ass...
Related Episodes
Audioblog 11 - The Five Horsemen of the Transition: www.cleaningup.live/audioblog...
Audioblog 8- The Unbearable Lightness of Hydrogen: www.cleaningup.live/cleaning-... 
Наука
“The biggest challenge facing low-emission hydrogen is that it is expensive to produce, expensive to transport, expensive to store, expensive to distribute and expensive to use."
Before you buy in to any of the grandiose national or international 2030 targets for clean hydrogen, you need to listen to this.
TLDR, a realistic outcome will be somewhere around 10% of the figures being bandied around.
I wake up, open my computer, and I get a message that you replied to my message from last night. But then my internet cuts out for an hour, and when it's back, I see you have deleted the video, and reposted it. What happened? What was your reply?
Hi Scubongo, we spotted an error in the video, so we corrected and reposted it before thousands of people had watched it. I had penned a long answer to your post, sadly that disappeared too.
TLDR yes I'm excited about Hysata, they could point the way to 30% cheaper hydrogen, but a) that's not enough to make hydrogen competitive in most use cases (it's 10x too expensive, and listen from 10'04" for why that's going to be slow to change); and b) certainly won't help for 2030. Geologic hydrogen - if its exists and can be extracted might serve local power production or fertilisers, doesn't deal with the fact that hydrogen is expensive to transport, store, distribute and use. And I love tech and innovation but nothing about Hiiroc makes me change my long-term or 2030 view of the sector.
Look, you can't build a steam-powered car that wins a Formula 1 race. Hydrogen's economics and therefore its role in the global economy is going to be decided by its challenging physics, not by wishful thinking.
@@MLiebreich I guess that means the high efficiency [90%+] electrolysers, I was also going to ask about them. And white hydrogen too, but you've been banging on long enough that I know you say use H2 where produced and don't attempt to transport it!
@@MLiebreich Thank you for resending your reply!
I'm very excited about the natural hydrogen find in France. That's only around 300 km from Antwerp, and about 400 from Rotterdam, where we have the largest petrochemical cluster in the world. If we could replace our grey hydrogen with natural hydrogen, that would be a big win for the climate.
And we also have a dedicated hydrogen network here already for that petrochemical cluster. All that needs to happen is to connect it to the find in France, which could be more than 300 million tons. If that's true, it would be a godsend for Antwerp. Even if it's only 50 million tons.
And 300 Km is not too far to transport hydrogen through a pipe at a reasonable price.
About HIIROC: I really would love to learn more about their technology. I keep hoping you would invite them for your webcast. From what I know, it sounds amazing technology. Especially if they would use biogas instead of natural gas. Carbon negative hydrogen sounds too good to be true. That's why I hope you can invite them for a sit down one day.
Really looking forward to next year when the Hysata electrolyzer comes on the market.
Kind regards.
Thank you very much Michael for your great summary!
Thank you for your real world perspective on the hydrogen hype.
Hi Michael,
Yeah it’s tough.
My contention is that decarbonising has a cost and if we, as societies think we need to follow that path, we need to bear the cost.
Just focusing on the hard-to-abate sectors, where you need molecules, as electrons won't do the job:
How much does switching to green hydrogen in refining increase the cost of petrol and diesel ?.
Same for SAF. How much more on the air ticket ?
Idem for green steel. What is the increase in the cost of the square foot of building, or the shipping cost of one TEU with a green-steel newbuild ship, or our next green steel-made car ?.
Ditto for fertilizer. how much does switching to green fertilizer increase the cost of a ton of rice, soy, or other crops ?.
Are these cost increases unaffordable ?. I don’t think so. But if we want to transition on the cheap, we better just forget it.
Just a thought.
Thank you for those realistic numbers on hydrogen economy very interesting insights!