Japan's New Hydrogen Project
techxplore.com
techxplore.com
In the short term, this also greenwashes Japan's energy situation at a glance, by shifting more of the emissions to Australia away from Japan compared to simply shipping solid coal around. It also keeps Australia's fossil fuel extraction sector going. Critics of hydrogen are right to point out that some of the most vocal proponents of hydrogen are fossil fuel producers, and that an overwhelming majority of today's hydrogen is produced from fossil carbon fuels.
In the long term, those who built out hydrogen infrastructure will be at an advantage if hydrogen production from electricity ever becomes economical, for two reasons:
First, if electricity is abundant, electricity will consequently capture a larger share of total energy consumption, leaving only those uses where electricity is impractical (e.g. airplanes, hypermobile vehicles, off-the-grid storage, long-distance transfer, open flames). Hydrogen presents a useful answer to many of the applications where electricity won't work well.
Second, momentary surplus electricity should be consumed in an electricity storage mechanism from which a portion of the input can be recovered, but most other electricity storage mechanisms are stationary installations that can only time-shift, but not space-shift. Hydrogen storage can be used to time-shift like any other, or space-shift to move it out of the source grid entirely.
Time shifting is the difficult part of the problem. "Space shifting" is pretty easy to solve by extending and interconnecting the grid. HVDC cables can move energy instantaneously, in much greater volumes, and with much higher efficiency than with hydrogen.
Here is one ambitious project to do exactly that:
Meanwhile hydrogen gives both space and time shifting. Yet also what I think is the biggest aspect: a competitive market.
Japan being poor in all resources must constantly maintain relations with their oil suppliers. Right now, and for the past 40-50 years this means Saudi Arabia. Before that it was the US.
Right now Japan may import most oil from Saudis, but thanks to the tradablity of oil they do buy from elsewhere. Most important: they can easily switch. Japan maintains enough slack in the supply line to fuel the country for half a year. Thus if the Saudis cut off japan today, they have 6 months to piece together new supply contracts.
Thus HVDC is nice, and part of the future, but it cannot replace the security aspect for Japan. Hydrogen promises so much for Japan.
Such 75% is wasted, but Japan already has the most expensive electricity in the world. So much so that fueling a BEV is not much cheaper than gasoline.
A hydrogen economy for Japan would mean energy security through diversified suppliers. It would allow Japan to stock pile energy.
All this plus: Japan's ministry of economics has been championing hydrogen tech for over a decade. Unlike the US this implies more than press releases. Japan has been maintaining a consistent policy of subsidizing fuel cell production and prioritization. Already Japan has the world's largest install base of fuel cell's for residential use.
If Hydrogen plays any part in the world's future energy mix then Japan wins big. The sorts of tech Hydrogen requires is surprisingly complex and diverse.
Did you know a hydrogen flame is invisible to the human eye? One can only imagine how dangerous that is, fire without flames. But fear not: Panasonic can supply hydrogen flame detecting cameras and alarm systems.
All else equal Hydrogen makes a flood of sense for Japan. Decades ago Japan pioneered liquid natural gas. Now they want to pioneer the hydrogen economy.
But are they really so resource poor?
Japan lies on the Pacific ring of fire and Izu–Bonin–Mariana Arc, giving it very significant geothermal energy potential. In fact, Japanese companies are leading suppliers of geothermal turbines globally! Yet they barely make use of their own domestic geothermal resources. If Iceland can power 25% of its grid with geothermal energy, and New Zealand 17%, why not Japan?
And what about wind? Like the UK, Japan is an island nation with a huge wind resource, both on and off-shore. The UK has almost 10,000 installed wind turbines with a capacity of over 20 GW, supplying 24% of all UK grid demand. Japan, on the other hand, barely has any. Why?
It seems like Japan is blinkered by hydrogen technology to the exclusion of all else!
Iceland never had an Onsen culture. Japan's easy geo spots are already all famous Onsen towns and tapped. Sure it happens, but geothermal cannot pull much weight.
As for wind: Japan is unique in being horrible for on shore wind with absurdly steep cliff of a shore line. The coast of Japan gets deep quick. While Europe gets to build their wind farms on bedrock Japan is only now experimenting with floating wind farms. Atleast that's what I've learned from talking with people involved with wind in Japan.
Thus Japan's renewable energy generation is going to be solar. As it happens I only a 300 panel solar power plant as an investment. For myself I want to see hydrogen become viable because it can serve to put a floor on electricity prices. Without a base demand nothing prevents my peak solar production getting sold for free. With a hydrogen economy, all else equa,l atleast I might get 1/4 of peek prices.
Let me phrase all this a different way: Japan hates oil. Oil is Japan's largest import. After 2011 Japan's trade balance went massively minus just because of extra energy imports. If Japan had an easy out, they would have taken it.
Which leads me to my original "resource poor" comment. Japan is the classic example of the inverse dutch-disease. Japan has nothing, so they only survive by building high value add industries. Anything less and the island starves.
At least one agency of Japan's government disagrees:
"The Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corp. estimates the country’s geothermal potential at 23,400 megawatts, putting it at No. 3 in the world... However, Japan has an installed geothermal capacity of only some 500 megawatts"
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2019/03/09/environment/unl...
One thing I do think people aren't seeing is the usefulness of hydrogen as a chemical feedstock.
If/when we move away from oil (oil wells potentially drying up over the next century) we need a good source of building block hydrocarbons for chemical production. Carbon is easy, hydrogen not so much.
It would be perfectly possible to space-shift by charging up batteries with Australian solar power, ship them to Japan and then ship back for recharge.
I assume that since it's not done, it's not currently practical.
However, we can think this through a bit: what is a battery? It's a pair of redox reactions, involving two electrodes and either one or two electrolytes. The electrolytes are usually liquids. That led to the concept of the "flow battery": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_battery
So, if the electrolytes can be stored in tanks separate from the electrodes, theoretically you could put the tanks on ships and cycle the electrolytes between countries.
I already know that for example aluminum is manufactured in Iceland. In a way it's an energy export.
Part 1, EU hydrogen supply: https://about.bnef.com/blog/liebreich-separating-hype-from-h...
Part 2, EU hydrogen demand: https://about.bnef.com/blog/liebreich-separating-hype-from-h...
And Spain is already focusing 800MW directly into fertilizer production (usually the hydrogen comes from natural gas): https://www.iberdrola.com/press-room/news/detail/iberdrola-f...
And as noted in the Part 1 article, China is making massive investments in hydrogen.
The US effort is orders of magnitude smaller than others efforts, about $50M/year: https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/h2scale
Our oil and gas sector is also far too focused on fracking, a business that wasn't making money even before the crash in oil prices that have refocused capital from companies like Exxon to extractors with super low costs in the Middle East.
The US is often viewed as being late to the party, but a big player when it finally arrives. However I fear that the business competition in the EU and China will be too strong for us unless we start focusing ping term investment in these areas soon. Every bit of news I see makes me feel like we are getting further and further behind, which will leave us far more strategically weak than if we don't have, for example, semiconductor fabs.
Now as to the reason why Japan has been investing, it's because the actual way Hydrogen is produced is from fossil fuels. It's done by taking methane and other hydrocarbons and pulling the hydrogen off and expelling the CO2 (ideally capturing it). This process is called steam reforming. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_reforming This is the sweet lie people aren't told when hydrogen is brought up. Japan happens to have extensive offshore methane clathrate deposits on the sea floor and if they can make a hydrogen economy happen then those clathrates may become economical to mine.
The big problem with hydrogen is that it currently is a smokescreen for a certain industry that has a ton of hydrogen attached to carbon atoms desperate to maintain relevance in the "green" energy revolution.
It is staring down a massive economic challenge as well, shared with any new five-year nuclear reactor project or similar cutting edge power generation scheme, is that solar/wind/storage is in the prime curve of double-digit improvements to various aspects of cost, scale, storage, performance every year.
BEVs are poised to undercut ICEs fundamentally in cost and simplicity. Solar/wind is about to drop under even natural gas in LCOE for even installed turbines. All of those have three year projections of continued double-digit percentage drops in cost and massive increases in scale.
Even worse for hydrogen, most of that is using existing infrastructure for transmission, so while charging stations need to be built out for EVs, it is far easier to do that than put in hydrogen storage / transport infrastructure.
So even if some hydrogen article targets a certain cost on the batteries / EVs / power transmission lines, in five years things will look completely different.
Maybe aviation?
A five year nuclear reactor project would be amazing! Most of them, outside of China at least, are more like 15 year projects these days.
I see this attitude often and I think it's detrimental. If 'blue' hydrogen (ie, extracting hydrogen from natural gas & storing the carbon) provides an economical stepping-stone toward a fully fossil-free energy system, why not take it? If the only comeback is reflexive disdain for incumbent technologies, give me a break.
Your points on battery vehicles vs hydrogen vehicles are in agreement with in the second Bloomberg article linked by the GP.
That's a PR phrase from the oil industry. The people who brought you "mild hybrids" and such.
Full electrics are getting cheaper each year. And bigger. The battery-powered Ford F150, Jeep Wrangler, Tesla's Cybertruck, and, of all things, the GMC Hummer, are all going to be out for 2022. That's going to totally change the way people look at electric vehicles.
Doesn't mean it's not true. I take your point that batteries are a better option for personal automotive applications. However, there are other applications where hydrogen does have advantages. In those cases, using 'blue' hydrogen (A) kick-starts the technology, because it is currently cheaper than 'green' hydrogen (B) is carbon-neutral if done correctly.
For instance, consider how a renewable-heavy grid relies on gas turbines to step in when there is a 'drought' in renewable production. Using 'blue' hydrogen to replace the natural gas for those turbines would immediately get a fully reliable, zero-carbon-emission grid. Then as renewable prices continue to fall, 'green' hydrogen can close the loop & eliminate fossil fuels altogether.
To be fair, in that instance the blue hydrogen would crowd out other battery investment, delaying cost reductions in actually renewable batteries.
If you're starting from electricity, a water to hydrogen to power system gets maybe a third or a half of that.[1]
[1] https://insideevs.com/news/406676/battery-electric-hydrogen-...
This is what's promised. In practice it turns into "extracting the hydrogen and dumping the CO2 into the atmosphere". There are very few operating CCS schemes.
To ensure that the fossil hydrogen is 'blue' and not 'grey,' we'd need carbon tax or some other legislative action.
Massive investments are by far are not an indication of a future success, nor can they influence it.
In this case, no amount of money can do anything about the thermodynamics of the process.
https://www.rechargenews.com/transition/low-cost-clean-hydro...
Would that massively change your interest?
Lithium-ion achieves a 80%+ efficiency from energy input to usage via an AC motor, or more if DC is usable. Hydrogen fuel cells only achieve 40-60% efficiency, and that’s just one step (converting it back from storage to electric energy, not even the motor itself). No matter how much is being invested, this can’t just be wished away and effects how expensive something is per kWh.
On top of that, there’s a massive Li-ion R&D and production train already under way that will be hard if not impossible to catch up with.
In short, right now it looks like this will only be useful for a few edge cases that battery electric can’t feasibly support.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonia_production
Japan is interested in it as fuel, despite the well known drawbacks, because Japan has such limited domestic energy resources.
"Western Australia’s multi-gigawatt green hydrogen giant edges forward"
https://www.pv-tech.org/news/western-australian-renewables-h...
https://www.fastcompany.com/90477609/this-startup-uses-mirro...
Right, so for short-term grid storage and automotive applications.
How about long-term storage, chemical feedstocks, air & sea transport? Those are huge, and batteries aren't a good match. There's still a place for hydrogen, just maybe not where people initially thought it would be.
There are several projects to make smaller hydrogen planes, but I suppose larger planes will always need liquid hydrocarbons. Considering that the very smallest planes will probably be battery-electric, hydrogen may end being squeezed from both ends of the market in the long term.
For long distance sea transport, ammonia is a big competitor.
Fundamentally speaking, hydrogen is not a good fuel. It's hard to handle and not very energy dense (volumetrically). What's good about it, is that we have relatively efficient ways to make it from electricity, and to convert it back to electricity. But it's possible that methods to produce/use other fuels could be almost as efficient over time.
Hydrogen will be very important in the next 3+ decades, but I can see it being made irrelevant again over time, by better batteries at one end, and better ways of making/using hydrocarbon fuels on the other.
Also California has funded a number of hydrogen fueling stations and the US has the most fuel cell vehicles on the road (almost all in California).
The US has seen hydrogen hype cycles before when George Bush called for a hydrogen highway in a State of the Union.
My point is that the US is not going to be left behind given significant investment over the last couple decades.
I have seen California's H2 station map and have caught glimpse of a few Mirai in the Bay Area.
However only a tiny fraction of the hydrogen stations were for electrolysis derived hydrogen.
Any money going to steam reformation or other fossil fuel based hydrogen is absolutely wasted investment. We need commitment to electrolyzers, and can't let the money go to dead technologies. I look forward to reading more about how this program operates.
On the other hand, there are a ton of sources of methane that society pretty much will always generate through agriculture or landfills. For example, BMW ran a pilot a few years ago running a large factory's forklifts on hydrogen sourced from biomethane from a local landfill[1]. Cost and technology improvements in areas like steam methane reformers and anaerobic digestion could drive costs down to the point where those facilities can actually gain meaningful adoption, and meaningfully, co-locate hydrogen sources near points of consumption, so you can worry less about the headache of transporting H2 molecules around.
Hydrogen is unlikely to wholesale compete with battery electric at this point, but it absolutely shines in certain niche performance applications. To me, aligning the supply chain to leverage those particular instances seems like the best way to work it into a green(er) energy portfolio.
For what it's worth, while in school, I did a 7-month co-op a few years ago working on next-gen R&D of PEM fuel cell stacks, so I generally consider myself fairly well versed on potentially out-of-date information.
[1] https://www.energy.gov/articles/garbage-power-out-south-caro...
I've seen this stated a few times in this thread, but read elsewhere that electrolysis of water currently has nearly identical efficiency to steam reforming of natural gas, in the 70-80% range, with a theoretical max that is significantly higher than for the steam reforming process. Factor in the huge CO2 expense of extracting hydrogen from fossil fuels and the ever-increasing abundance of cheap green electricity, and electrolysis looks like the right place to focus to me.
Does electrolysis research make sense in a region that is already short of freshwater and experiencing drought?
Would you say that the science of electrolysis of seawater is worth researching and investing further?
Hydrogen might be very useful for some applications that require high energy density (electrified aircraft, perhaps?), though maybe those use cases will be served by conventional liquid fuels that might be increasingly made using renewable energy inputs rather than made from fossil fuels.
I don't see much use for shipping hydrogen around, unless it's as a minor component of a synthetic mixture that replaces natural gas, but that's super speculative.
However for ammonia (fertilizer), steel, maybe shipping, there's few other options.
(And I'm super hopeful that we figure out how to build more wires in the US, probably by repurposing existing right of way. But I'm also skeptical that we will be able to fight NIMBYs for that...)
"The hydrogen will be produced and liquified in the Australian state of Victoria, where it will be extracted from a type of coal known as lignite."
"But every tonne of hydrogen produced from coal emits 20 tonnes of carbon dioxide, more than double the CO2 emissions created when hydrogen is produced from natural gas."
Oh.
If they're shipping hydrogen, it wouldn't be that hard to include a fuel cell and power the ship via hydrogen. It might not be cost-effective yet but it would be more environmentally friendly, and would likely simplify logistics.
Yup. It's a scam to keep Australia's coal industry going when the world needs it to close.
Currently it’s a byproduct of fossil fuels, and while you can produce it via electrolysis, it doesn’t seem like a super high efficiency conversion chain if you already have electricity.
As an energy storage medium it's terrible. It's inefficient to produce, relatively inefficient to use, very difficult to store, and inconvenient to transport. There's no reason to prefer it over lithium batteries except that it perpetuates the refinery -> distributor -> truck -> fuel station-> consumer model.
If we were to implement a carbon tax instead of picking winners, 'blue' hydrogen would come out ahead of 'green' hydrogen for at least the next decade, but hydrogen fuel cell vehicles would probably still loose out to batteries for most automotive applications.
Here's an open-access study from 2014 on various metal oxide nanoparticle catalysts for a solar hydrogen evolution reaction:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10562-014-1397-z
And a more recent one where TiO2, one of the cheapest safest nanoparticles, is used as the catalyst:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187853521...
The thing is, we cannot really predict the future and every possible use for EV, ICE, ICE-hybrids and HEVs. That is why it is important that every country adopts carbon taxes and caps to keep incentives aligned for a diversity of approaches of reducing carbon emissions. Picking winners in the technology space is not something that governments have been good at historically.
I think we need hydrogen over the long term - it allows technologies like airplanes powered by renewable energy. There is a case to be made that we need to be on the experience curve early even if it means that it relies on fossil fuels in the first years. This is also true for battery-powered electric vehicles by the way - the electricity is often sourced from fossil fuels.
Manufacture of synthetic fuels pairs nicely with overproduction of cheap renewable energy sources, and some amount of it is necessary for a niche of applications that require energy density or other aspects of combustion.
So, exactly as you said, why should we pick winners wrt hydrogen vs any other synthetic fuel?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_at...
PS: I support developing of liquid hydrogen technologies in general. It's just the naming coal burning as "green" that puts me off.