20 | New Scientist | 8 June 2019
IT WAS billed as the climate
change election, but the climate
lost. Last month, Australians
re-elected the Liberal-National
coalition government, a shock win
over the opposition Labor party.
The government has been seen
as slow to act on climate change,
while Labor offered an ambitious
carbon reduction policy.
Yet economics may soon force
the coalition to go green. Australia
is the world’s biggest exporter
of liquified natural gas (LNG) and
the second biggest for coal, but a
renewable energy revolution is
coming. As Australia’s nearby
trading partners, including China,
South Korea and Japan, switch to
clean energy sources, the country
will be forced to adapt, or else find
itself without buyers. To stay
competitive, Australia is likely
to start exporting its abundant
sunshine, in the form of hydrogen.
“I see it as inevitable that the
world will go to a decarbonised
energy supply,” says Alan Finkel,
Australia’s chief scientist, who
has been tasked with developing
a national hydrogen strategy.
Hydrogen is a storable and
transportable fuel that can be
produced cleanly by splitting
water molecules with renewable
energy. With ample space for
solar and wind power, Australia
is well-positioned to become
a leading hydrogen exporter.
The country is already a big
energy producer. Fossil fuel
exports contributed A$55 billion
(US$33 billion) to Australia’s
economy last financial year,
about 14 per cent of total
exports, and they are tipped
to hit A$76 billion this year.
Much of it goes to the
neighbours. Japan buys 45 per cent
of Australia’s LNG and 39 per cent
of its coal. Since the Fukushima
nuclear disaster in 2011, the
country has depended on fossilfuel imports to meet 94 per cent
of its energy needs.
But under the Paris climate
change agreement, Japan has
committed to cut carbon
emissions by 26 per cent in 2030
(from a 2013 baseline) and by80 per cent in 2050. It doesn’t
have the space or the sunshine
to achieve these renewable energy
needs. “To meet their climate
goals, which are strongly held,
they need to import a zero-
emissions alternative,” says Finkel.
Japan has identified clean
hydrogen imports as a solution.is one major new factor, he says.
The other is the plummeting
price of solar and wind electricity,
which is the biggest cost for clean
production of hydrogen. Since
2010, as China has ramped up
production of solar panels and
wind turbines, the cost of solar
electricity has fallen 80 per cent
and wind by 50 per cent, and both
are still falling.
“Renewable energy has come
so far down in price in the last
10 years, it enables us to produce
hydrogen from renewables at a
cost almost competitive with
fossil fuels,” Buckley says. “It has
been a bit of a game changer.”
“That doesn’t mean it will be
easy, but it is conceivable, whereas
it previously wasn’t,” says Finkel.
The target is a hydrogen
production price of about A$2 per
kilogram, down from around
A$6 per kilogram today.
To do that, Australia needs to
be able to make hydrogen on a vast
scale. The technology exists, says
Kondo-Francois Aguey-Zinsou,
a hydrogen storage researcher at
the University of New South Wales
in Sydney, it just needs to be put
in place. “The big challenge is how
we develop the ecosystem for
producing hydrogen.”
For example, we already
know how to produce, store
and transport hydrogen for use,
but existing techniques are too
expensive. “All of those things
need innovation and scale for cost
to come out of the supply chain,”
says Darren Miller, CEO of the
Australian Renewable Energy
Agency, which is funding efforts to
commercialise these technologies.
To export the hydrogen, for
example, one possibility is to
liquefy it, as with natural gasExporting sunshine
Australia’s government may be slow to act on climate change, but
economics could soon force it to clean up. James Mitchell Crow reportsAustralia’s sunny
climate could help
produce hydrogenHydrogen powerCHAD
EHLERS/GET
TY94 %
of Japan’s energy is imported, much
of it as fossil fuels from AustraliaNews Insight
Its national hydrogen road map,
drawn up in 2017, estimates that
Japan could generate between
15 and 30 gigawatts of power from
imported hydrogen by the 2030s,
which represents about 20 per
cent of its current fossil-fuel
power generation.
As a concept, powering the
world using hydrogen isn’t new.
In 1923, biologist J. B. S. Haldane
proposed a network of windmills
across the UK, producing
electricity to split water molecules
and release hydrogen. If burned
correctly, hydrogen only emits
water vapour. The idea has been
regularly re-examined ever since,
but has never caught on.
This time it is different, says
Craig Buckley, a hydrogen storage
researcher at Curtin University,
Western Australia. Strong demand,
starting in Japan and South Korea,