By now, it won’t surprise readers to know Chief Scientist Dr Alan Finkel’s enthusiasm for hydrogen continues unabated. At the end of July, he took to the stage at the Clean Energy Summit with the message that without it, the world will have trouble replacing fossil fuels in the accelerating timetable we face.
Dr Finkel pitched that message to the Summit: today, wind and solar leave a gap in the market; hydrogen is the best fuel to burn to fill that gap; and Australia (we suppose by way of our superabundant supplies of coal) could be a “major player” in a world market for hydrogen.
It’s the scale of the gap that worries Dr Finkel: he reckons the world would need to build 70 times more wind and solar than already existed at the end of 2018 (along with the associated storage – pumped hydro, and batteries) for those technologies to displace the energy we get from coal, gas, and oil.
In that light, he told the summit, hydrogen is attractive.
“Many people, not just me, will argue we will need a means of storing electricity in a high-density transportable form,” he told the summit, “and the leading candidate … is hydrogen”.
His key numbers were that Australia could, in time (think 20 to 30 years), export 30 megatonnes of hydrogen annually to match the energy exported in the 70 Mt of LNG the country shipped in 2018, since hydrogen has 2.4 times the energy density of LNG
With solar power driving the electrolysis, and assuming a 25 percent capacity factor, a site that can carry 50 MW of capacity per square kilometre and 50 percent energy losses in hydrogen production and handling, Dr Finkel calculated “three quarters of one giant cattle station” (18,000 square kilometers) could deliver that much hydrogen.
That’s the good news
So far, I expect Solar Quotes readers would probably agree overall, since anything we can add to the zero-emissions mix helps displace fossil fuels.
However, in discussing scale, he turned to the need to look at other sources of hydrogen – specifically, hydrogen from methane and coal.
Dr Finkel’s call for these sources stood on two legs: scale, and diversity. The former is, I guess, obvious from his export calculation – scaling up hydrogen to 2018-equivalent LNG exports requires a solar energy facility with eight times more annual generation, at 1,980 TWh, than Australia’s total electricity generation today.
While he described that thought experiment as a manageable task, there’s the rest of the world’s fossil fuel consumption to be displaced.
Even at a global scale, installing the capacity for the 44,000 TWh needed to meet the Hydrogen Council’s prediction the world will be consuming 667 Mt of hydrogen annually is still manageable he said – but for diversity of primary power sources, his other concern.
“It scares me to think of a future where we’ve only got two primary energy sources,” he said. “Who knows what the challenges will be? Land access rights, transmission lines, climate change changing the weather, one of those extraordinary volcanoes like Krakatoa that could lead to a month of shade?”
Dr Finkel said coal and natural gas “has to be given consideration,” since that approach doesn’t rely on solar or wind as the input, but rather uses fossil fuels “repurposed to produce a clean fuel”.
It’s worth highlighting his careful phrasing here. You need energy as an input for coal gasification or steam-methane reforming, and having said he was worried about solar and wind being the world’s only primary energy sources, Dr Finkel excludes them from this process, with fossil fuels as the source.
Carbon sequestration is clearly the big dependency here, since of the four technologies featured in Dr Finkel’s speech it’s the furthest from any kind of deployment and the furthest from economic success.
As he acknowledged in the speech:
“I agree that carbon capture and storage has never been successful economically when applied to electricity generation… but there are reasons to think that when applied to gasification of coal or steam NG that it can work better or more economically”.
I’d ask this: since the climate news of 2019 is so worrying, is it time to wonder whether 20-to-30 year timescales are fast enough. To borrow a summary from The Guardian columnist Greg Jericho, the climate change debate is now about “how bad we think it is, and how bad is really is”.
From the point of view of our ability to produce, store, and transport hydrogen, it can be regarded as a mature technology that’s only now penetrating new markets such as powering railways (The Conversation has a handy summary of rail projects here).
So Dr Finkel is right, the challenge is all about how to scale up hydrogen production without burning more fossil fuels to get it.
His bet is that carbon sequestration can be commercialised and scaled up fast enough to drive a hydrogen economy. Readers might think that since solar energy and wind power are already mature at scale, they offer a better bet!
The 10 largest coal producers and exporters in Indonesia:
- Bumi Resouces
- Adaro Energy
- Indo Tambangraya Megah
- Berau Coal
- Bukit Asam
- Baramulti Sukses Sarana
- Harum Energy
- Mitrabara Adiperdana
- Samindo Resources
- United Tractors
Source: Richard Chirgwin
