6 February 2021 | New Scientist | 49Adam Vaughan is chief
reporter at New Scientist.
You can follow him
@adamvaughan_ukA train powered
by a hydrogen fuel
cell near Vienna,
Austria, in 2020Airbus aims to get
zero-emission
hydrogen planes
flying by 203550 to 55 kilowatt-hours of electricity
(a medium-sized UK home uses about
8 kWh a day on average) and 9 to 10 litres
of water. Up to 86 per cent of the costs of
green hydrogen are for electricity to power
the electrolysers. But wind and solar power
costs have dropped rapidly in the past decade,
and are expected to fall further.
The electrolysers themselves account for
the remaining cost. They are an old technology,
but one that its makers claim can be made
cheaper. Graham Cooley at UK manufacturer
ITM Power says a 10 megawatt electrolyser
costs half as much as it did three years ago,
and the price will fall further, especially
because of developments in China, now
a major manufacturer of these devices.
Duncan Clark at Ørsted, which is in
phase two of its Gigastack project using a wind
farm off the Yorkshire coast of the UK to supply
green hydrogen to a nearby oil refinery, says
the technology is at a “special moment”, akin
to where offshore wind power was a decade
ago before costs dropped dramatically and
installations proliferated. “Only a few
things are big and interesting enough
to rival offshore wind, and green hydrogen
is one of them,” he says.
Even so, government interventions are likely
to be needed, such as subsidies to make green
hydrogen cheaper and carbon taxes to make
grey hydrogen more expensive. “The market in
the next 10 years is likely to be policy-driven.
There will be a strong reliance on public
funding for projects,” says Bennett.Carry on regardless?
Hydrogen’s success may in the end be
decided by society’s willingness to pay for
it. Green hydrogen will need billions, either
through taxation or energy bills: Bloomberg
New Energy Finance estimates that it will
require $150 billion over the next decade
globally to bring the cost down to a
competitive level. “Someone has got
to pick up the bill,” says Bennett.
Nonetheless, Bennett is optimistic thatthe current round of hype over hydrogen
is different. This is partly because of the
near-unanimity from different industries
on its potential and partly because, for
many hard-to-abate sectors, we have few
alternatives on the table. “If we don’t have
[clean] hydrogen available by 2030 or 2040,
we think we’re going to be in a sticky place
for some of these sectors,” says Bennett.
“There are certainly risks on being overly
bullish on the future hydrogen economy,”
he says. “But I think it’s a bad time to be an
out-and-out sceptic because there’s clearly
momentum and funding going into projects in
the short term regardless.” The question today
no longer seems to be if hydrogen will help us
fight climate change, but a matter of whether it
ends up as the star turn or just a bit player. ❚6
MAKING GREEN
AND BLUE
Shell is among the companies
exploring whether the port of
Rotterdam in the Netherlands
could host the world’s biggest green
hydrogen scheme. Spanish oil firm Repsol
is eyeing the possibility of making green
hydrogen next to its refineries. Far bigger
green hydrogen projects are being floated,
such as Australia’s vast “Asian Renewable
Energy Hub” to use renewable electricity
to produce hydrogen for use domestically
and for export to Asia.
Blue hydrogen projects, which use
natural gas to make hydrogen but capture
most of the carbon dioxide that is usually
released in the process, include Equinor’s
Saltend plant in the UK. The company
hopes to make a final investment decision
on this in 2023. It has applied for UK
government funding. Other blue hydrogen
proponents include fossil fuel companies
such as Woodside, Australia’s biggest oil
and gas producer, and the government of
Alberta in Canada, which hopes to use the
approach to reduce CO₂ emissions in the
state, which is better known for its highly
polluting tar sands oil fields.