This week, we’re turning to the subject of hydrogen and its potential to play a role as a cleaner fuel in future. Could hydrogen be the answer to our energy conundrum?
In this episode
00:37 - How do we use hydrogen as a fuel?
How do we use hydrogen as a fuel?
Jochen Steinbauer, Siemens Mobility & Phillip Broadwith, Chemistry World
With temperatures soaring in some places, our love affair with fossil fuels is going to have to come to an end pretty soon. And hydrogen is regarded by some as a strong contender. Others are less convinced. Kicking off our investigation, Will Tingle…
Will - Hydrogen. The most abundant element in the known universe. And you're probably familiar with its work in water and every molecule of every living thing ever. But in the right conditions, hydrogen is a source of renewable energy. And if it is the most common element in the universe, surely harnessing it as a fuel source sounds like a no-brainer. In fact, hydrogen fuelled projects have been in the pipeline for many decades now. The first hydrogen powered car was the Chevrolet Electrovan made back in 1966, and hydrogen power has been in the news spotlight in every decade since.
TV Presenter - 'In two weeks time, this van will be the first working vehicle in the world to be sold running on hydrogen.' 'It may be the future of driving for all of us, and it's already here.' 'Buses that run on hydrogen are being introduced to try to help cut emissions in the capital. The vehicles, which cost 10 million pounds, produce no pollution or carbon dioxide and will be on our roads by 2010.'
Boris Johnson - 'We want to be the Klondike of carbon capture and storage. The Qatar of hydrogen! I think Qatar may already be the Qatar of hydrogen... But we want to be with you!'
Will - As the underlying technology has developed, so too have hydrogen based projects, more recently companies have been looking into hydrogen powered trains. I spoke to Jochen Steinbauer, head of platform development at Siemens Mobility, about the upcoming launch of their H2goesRail project, a joint venture with Deutsche Bahn, which has fitted trains with hydrogen fuel cells instead of diesel engines and plans to put them on mainline railways.
Jochen——目前,第一个示范train is running in our Siemens test centre, but the first test operation on public lines with our first demonstration train will be in September in Bavaria and this will be a really great event.
Will - But why did they choose hydrogen in the first place when electrically powered trains are already so widespread and proven? What advantages does hydrogen have?
Jochen - The hydrogen trains, with a range of almost 1000 kilometres, provide a certain flexibility in the operation compared to battery trains, which have a range of 80, maximum 100 kilometres. There's a certain restriction in the operation, so you have to have a continuous system or special charging stations but, for the hydrogen train, you're completely flexible.
Will - And whilst flexibility is always good with public transport, Jochen is also very impressed with how the trains themselves run.
Jochen - The hydrogen trains, with a range of almost 1000 kilometres, provide a certain flexibility in the operation compared to battery trains, which have a range of 80, maximum 100 kilometres. There's a certain restriction in the operation, so you have to have a continuous system or special charging stations but, for the hydrogen train, you're completely flexible.
Will - And whilst flexibility is always good with public transport, Jochen is also very impressed with how the trains themselves run.
Jochen - The performance of the train is, from my perspective, important. The train has 1.7 megawatt in power, and the diesel train has an average of 0.6 megawatts. So we provide a higher acceleration and a higher top speed of 160, so degraded wattage for our customers is shorter for travel times and more comfortable. So the potential in hydrogen technology is huge and therefore I strongly believe that these hydrogen trains have a great future.
Will - Strong words from Jochen Steinbauer there. But before we get carried away with the excitement, we should probably attempt to understand the chemistry. How does hydrogen fuel work and where does the hydrogen come from in the first place? I spoke to the business editor of Chemistry World, Phillip Broadwith.
Phillip - At the moment, the vast majority of the hydrogen that we use comes from fossil fuels in the process of refining oil and in the process of cracking to make different oil products. You can release some of that hydrogen as hydrogen gas, we can make it renewably using electricity to take water, which is hydrogen and oxygen, and electrically split that molecule apart and recombine it to make hydrogen - h2 gas - and oxygen.
Will - Is that where the different terms of hydrogen come from when we speak about 'green hydrogen' and 'blue hydrogen?' Is that because that's the different ways in which they are made?
Phillip - That's absolutely right. All the hydrogen is the same, but we classify it by where it comes from because that has, from an environmental point of view, an influence on the amount of emissions that are associated with producing it. But generally the main ones are black or grey, which come from fossil fuels. Blue is from fossil fuels but with the carbon captured and stored and green from renewable sources.
Will - So once we've pulled our hydrogen apart one way or another, what goes on inside a hydrogen fuel cell that gives us this energy?
Phillip - So our hydrogen fuel cell is basically the opposite process to the electrolysis that we were using to make the hydrogen with electricity. It takes hydrogen gas, h2, and oxygen gas, o2, and recombines them in a way that generates electricity. So instead of just burning the hydrogen in air to make water, you can do the same chemical reaction but inside a fuel cell which allows those atoms to combine together to make water. And instead of making heat, it makes electricity. The reason it can do that is because chemical reactions involve transmitting electrons between molecules. And if instead of transmitting those electrons directly in a kind of combustion process, you transmit them in a way that makes them go round a circuit, they can produce electricity and do electrical work.
Will - If we are using and burning hydrogen gas the same way we use natural gas, can we just send the hydrogen down the same pipes that we use to pump gas into our homes?
菲利普-好的,我们绝对可以。这是中欧ically feasible. Whether we should or not is a completely different question. So it all comes down to how much energy it takes to generate the hydrogen to transport it, and then how much energy you get out at the other end. Everybody says the energy density of hydrogen is much better than the energy density of natural gas. And if you consider it by terms of weight, then yes, it is. If you consider it in terms of volume, natural gas has much more energy per unit volume. The problem with heating homes is that if you compare it to using natural gas, it's much less efficient. And if we wanted to do that with renewable hydrogen, with green hydrogen, it would take more renewable electricity than we currently generate for the whole country to heat everybody's homes using hydrogen. And partly that's because each step of the process we lose some energy. Not all of these processes are a hundred percent efficient. So we generate some renewable electricity, we use that to make hydrogen which has a process of efficiency of about 80%. We might lose 20% of the energy that we'd had as electricity in making hydrogen. We then have to transport that hydrogen which takes some energy and then we have to burn that hydrogen in a boiler to heat water to heat our houses. That's not a particularly efficient process.
Will - If hydrogen can't be pumped down the same gas pipelines as the ones we were using before, how best to transport it, if at all?
Phillip - The best way to transport it is a pipeline because that doesn't require you to compress the hydrogen, which loses lots of energy. It doesn't require you to cool it or anything like that. But whether we need to transport hydrogen at all depends on what we're going to use it for. The vast majority of the hydrogen that's used at the moment is used in chemical processes, it never leaves the compound or plant where it's made. Partly that's because we are making it in places that process fossil fuels and therefore produce the hydrogen and then it gets used in various chemical processes. But partly it's because of that difficulty in transporting hydrogen.
08:41 - What are hydrogen companies investing in?
What are hydrogen companies investing in?
Eugene McKenna, Johnson Matthey
Eugene McKenna leads business development, strategy and marketing at Johnson Matthey’s Hydrogen Technologies business, which is putting a lot of weight behind the hydrogen wheel.
Eugene - So I think I'm sitting in a room at the moment, and as I look around it, almost everything in the room has been made either from the energy or the molecules in fossil fuels. And the world economy, which has improved people's lives enormously over the last 30 years, 40 years, 50 years., all of that growth is fueled by fossil fuels. And if we look forward over the next 30 years, we've got to keep all of that economic growth, keep it going, make more people wealthier in the developing world and do it all while stopping using fossil fuels. That's an enormous task. It's impossible to do without hydrogen, not simply from the perspective of energy sources and energy carriers, but also from the perspective of the materials that we make the modern world from. We've got to make it again, but make it without fossil fuels.
Chris - So what technologies are you investing in or developing in order to do that?
Eugene - So Johnson Matthey has a long history in this, we're a 200 year old company. Actually fuel cells were invented over 200 years ago, and Mr. Johnson actually helped William Grove with the first experiments with fossil fuel. So it has been a long time coming. We're also involved in the fuel cells and the Apollo landing craft. Our interest is in the smart components at the heart of the machine's electrolysers that will make green hydrogen from renewable electricity. We also design the technology that will enable blue hydrogen that's making clean hydrogen from natural gas, but capturing the carbon dioxide. And we also have a chemical toolkit that will enable us to use that hydrogen, not just as a fuel source, but to make the modern world around us, for example, making nitrogen, making ammonia so that we can feed the world and making plastics. And finally, we also have an interest in that kind of reverse reaction, which is to take the hydrogen and turn it back into electricity through fuel cells to replace internal combustion engines.
Chris - One of the points made by Phil Broadwith in the piece we were just listening to was the amount of energy that you are moving when you use hydrogen compared with natural gas, the amount of energy that you're moving is very different. So is hydrogen sufficiently versatile and energy rich in order to be a substitute for natural gas, or is it just the best option we've got on the table at the moment?
Eugene - So I think the key thing about hydrogen is that it doesn't contain carbon. So it's a carbon free energy carrier and we've got to use it where it is the best possible thing to use that does not produce greenhouse gases. So it will be essential for some of the most carbon intensive processes in the world today, such as making glass and making steel. Making steel, for example, produces far more greenhouse gases than transport in the world. So these are things that are easily forgotten. Electricity is going to be very good for many applications, such as for heating houses. I would agree it will finally be a better solution for heating houses, but only once those houses are well insulated. In the UK for example, hydrogen has been used before for lighting and for heating when we had time gas, which was made from coal, from gasification of coal, even back in the 1960s. So the pipelines used to contain hydrogen and carbon monoxide. And the interest in putting hydrogen into that network at the moment is that we can have lots of blue hydrogen very quickly and there's got to be somewhere to put it and it can be put into the gas network at up to 20% without changing any of the end use applications. While we wait for the hydrogen fueling networks that will use hydrogen in fuel cell cars, for example.
Chris - The thing that really people are focusing on both in industry but also domestically, has got to be the bottom line though. What is happening to what's in their pocket. So what are the cost implications of doing this kind of thing? What are your models suggesting in terms of how big this market is and how much people are going to have to spend to do this?
Eugene - So, I do think it important that people bear in mind that what we're trying to do is to fuel the modern world without destroying it. So there shouldn't be a direct comparison with the fossil fuel world, but we see huge economies of scale in manufacturing the materials that are required to go through this energy transition. And as we build out renewables, we see huge potential to reduce costs as we drive technology forward, which is one of the great interests of Johnson Matthey. So for example, at the moment and before gas prices increased, grey hydrogen was around one and a half to $2 a kilogram, while green hydrogen was up to $8 a kilogram. Now over the next 10 years, we see the cost of green hydrogen dropping down towards that one to $2 a kilogram level, all driven by improvements in manufacturing and reduction in costs of fossil fuels. And if we look at the United States at the moment and the regulatory environment that they have there at the moment where they're giving $3 a kilogram for the production of clean green hydrogen, there's a regime or a regulatory regime which is encouraging people to invest in all aspects of the hydrogen economy so that those economies of scale can soon be realised.
克里斯-真正持有的东西呢?是我t just that technology isn't there? Is it that the infrastructure to use hydrogen in this way is not there? Is it that the market's not there and the Americans are getting behind it because they're already a bad offender on the carbon front, so they're doing something to offset that? What are the hurdles that you need to overcome?
Eugene - I think the Americans see the economy of the future and intend to win in it. I think the trickiest thing about this market is that we need everything to develop at the same time, both the production and the use. And so governments need to regulate to encourage those to happen. At the same time, subsidies are required at the start, otherwise people keep waiting for the next generation of technologies, which will be cheaper. So they need to be encouraged to buy the first generation so that the second generation will be cheaper. So get the regulation right and market forces will drive those costs down.
16:00 - Where does hydrogen fuel fall short?
Where does hydrogen fuel fall short?
Kathryn Porter
Hydrogen is not without its critics. The energy consultant Kathryn Porter has just penned an article on hydrogen as a fuel for The Daily Telegraph.
凯瑟琳——不,他没有。显然他的工作hydrogen projects and wants to talk about the benefits, but it's a pretty one-sided view. For example, he mentioned that in the past we had hydrogen going through our pipes in the old days of town gas. Well, that's not completely true. That was only going through low pressure networks locally, not through the high pressure gas grid that we have today. And it was extremely poisonous, so it is not really a good comparator.
Chris - Well, that was the carbon monoxide, wasn't it? That was poisonous to people, just to be clear with that. One of the big problems with hydrogen, as I see it, based on what Phillip Broadwith was saying is that we lose loads of it. He was saying there are losses when you make it. There are losses when you distribute it. There are losses when you use it. It's not a case of you just put hydrogen down the same pipes that you put methane down.
Kathryn - That's correct. Hydrogen has very small molecules, much smaller than methane which is the gas that we have at the moment. And so if you try and put it down the same pipes you're going to have more leakage. So it leaks sometimes through the pipes themselves if you've still got the old cast iron pipes. But particularly through joints. And then when it goes through metres and through appliances, the other issue you have is the way that you move gas through the pipeline system is through the use of compressors. Now when you have a system with methane, you have losses of about 3% through those compressors with hydrogen that are about 10 times bigger. You lose a third of your gas just from powering those compressors. So that's a huge amount of loss that you have to accept. And then as you mentioned earlier, you need a lot more gas to get the same energy output as well. So to have the same level of warmth in your home, you would need a much larger quantity of gas. So the amount that you'd have to put into the system at the start is so much bigger than a sci at the moment with methane. And then the cost would be so much higher.
Chris - In your Daily Telegraph article, you say that hydrogen's currently a backfill technology in the sense that it's our least worst option. What exactly are you getting at with that point?
凯瑟琳-所以我认为物理特性of hydrogen make it, I'm almost uniquely unsuitable for a lot of the applications for which it's now being developed. And the only reason really that it's being proposed, and your previous guest mentioned this, is because it can burn in the air without producing carbon dioxide. Now interestingly, it does give off water vapour and water vapour is also a greenhouse gas. So it is just not as good as it's being made out to be. It's just not a good material for these purposes. And if somebody came up with an alternative that had better properties though, they would almost certainly jump on that instead. So there's a danger that this becomes a huge waste of effort as well because other solutions could be developed down the line. I think particular nuclear power has a much better potential to meet a lot of the applications that we're talking about. Not domestic heating other than through electrification obviously, but a lot of the industrial applications that require high temperature heat could very well be served through nuclear power.
克里斯,也必须考虑有限公司mplete lifecycle, isn't it? Because as we rush towards electric cars and you throw away a perfectly good petrol or diesel car, there's the whole question of, well, how far would I have to have driven the old car before it's paid back its carbon footprint versus the same for the electric car. And the electric car has a huge carbon footprint embodied in it.
Kathryn - It does, yes. I mean, you have, some studies have suggested you need to drive 50,000 miles before you break even on the input energy. Back in 2013, a widely cited study showed that to make one electric car you emit 18 times more carbon dioxide than when you're making a conventional car. Now in the last decade, production methods have likely improved, but that's a very big gap to close. Electric cars also require a huge amount more minerals than conventional cars do. Um, and a lot of minerals that conventional cars simply don't use at all, um, which are not green and clean. You know, you look at lithium for example, the production process of lithium creates a lot of dirty water. There are actually disputes over access to water in South America because of lithium processing. And then you have other ethical concerns like the use of child labour in the Congo for mining of cobalt. So electric cars are not clean and I definitely don't think we should be replacing petrol and diesel cars that still have a useful life with an electric car. That type of wastefulness is not good for the environment.
Chris - Do I read you correctly then when the sort of message I'm hearing is, and and you're an energy consultant after all, that just using hydrogen because we can is perhaps not the best approach and that one of the best approaches might be to, to use electricity and focus on making the source of that electricity as clean and green as we can and then adapting people's end use of the electricity, heat pumps and so on, so that, that remains clean and efficient as well. Is that what you think is probably the best alternative to going down the hydrogen route?
凯瑟琳——这是,是的。我认为这是我们上海的方式ould be progressing unless we can find another material that can do the job that's being proposed for hydrogen better than hydrogen can. But at the moment that doesn't exist. We haven't really found one. And so for me, electrification and cleaning the electricity system is the best approach that we could have.
21:42 - Does hydrogen fuel have a role in net zero?
Does hydrogen fuel have a role in net zero?
Jess Ralston, ECIU
So does hydrogen have any part to play in our renewable future? Jess Ralston is from the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit.
Jess - I think like many things in this increasingly polarised world, I think the answer probably lies somewhere in the middle. Experts like the International Energy Agency, the Climate Change Committee, National Grid and others all think that hydrogen will be very important for sectors where there are no obvious solutions. For example, as Eugene touched on, heavy industries like steel making for glass, ceramics, those sorts of industries. However, there are solutions already existing for some of the sectors that we've talked about like heat pumps for heating, or electric vehicles. And I hear concerns around electric vehicles, around minerals and whatnot. But already in the UK, one in three cars sold in December was electric. So we are already seeing electric vehicles become the predominant technology for decarbonising our road transport. And I think the really key point that we might have missed in the programme so far is that we're not going to have an unlimited supply of hydrogen. We're not going to have enough to decarbonise this industry, that industry, the other industry is going to have to be strategically deployed so that it's deployed in the industries that need it most. Which are those that are hard to decarbonise like steel.
Chris - Yes. I think Phil Broadwith said quite poignantly at the beginning of the program that we don't have enough renewable sources in capacity terms of green electricity to make enough green hydrogen in order to just heat people's homes, let alone feed industry.
Jess - Exactly. And there's real questions about whether there's any point of taking green electricity, using that to make hydrogen, and then so green energy using that to make hydrogen and then turning it back into electricity for people's homes when we could just directly put the green electricity from wind farms into people's homes through things like heat pumps. So we've got questions about whether it's going to be blue hydrogen, green hydrogen, I don't know, turquoise hydrogen, which is one of the ones that's talked about. But I think we're going to need hydrogen. Of course we are. But we've got to be strategic about where we put it.
Chris - It sounds to me that you are a bit lukewarm then in the sense that there seems to be a lot of enthusiasm from some people - 'Let's go down the hydrogen route' and in fact it's more of a horses for courses. It might have a role, it might fit with some industries, but it's certainly not a one horse race and we certainly shouldn't be putting all our eggs in that basket.
Jess - I think that's spot on. And I think when it comes to things like home heating, there's a lot of research out there. I think over 37 independent studies have now said, look, it's not the right place to put hydrogen. And so we should probably listen to those independent studies. And even the government has gone sort of lukewarm on hydrogen heating, cancelling a proposed trial in one location and there's lots of residents concerned about the hydrogen heating trial and the other potential location. So I think until we see and get a clearer, firmer picture of where hydrogen's going to be most useful, and by that I mean most efficient, most cost effective and most practical, I think we'll have to wait and see where the big industries will be when it comes to hydrogen.
Chris - One of the things we haven't touched on so much is one of the things that people earmark hydrogen for, which is a useful storage vehicle for energy. Because when the sun is shining during the day and there's all this solar capacity, we often end up with a surfeit of electricity and we don't know what to do with it. In some cases that can be used to produce green hydrogen and that can then be used later on when the sun isn't shining. So there is that use for it isn't there? It's not just as simple as we make some electricity and then immediately make hydrogen and then cart that off to people's homes. It's more nuanced than that.
杰斯-绝对。更微妙的what the Climate Change Committee and National Grid say about hydrogen. They say it could be very useful for storing up that green electricity when we do have a surplus of offshore wind power or solar power. Actually Centrica, who are the owners of British Gas, have already committed to turning one of their natural gas storage facilities into a hydrogen storage facility. So we've already got people talking about using this as a storage fuel and that can help us make the most of renewables which are gonna be cheaper than the fossil fuel alternative and probably cheaper than things like nuclear as well. So it's, it's a way of making the best use and the most use of cheaper renewables and that's what the experts think it could have a major role in.
Chris - So putting all this together then, what's your view gazing in your crystal ball about the energy future? How is all this gonna fit together and what proportion of each of the different energy provisions do you think the different things that you foresee as being important are going to be?
Jess - Well, I think it depends on what sector you are talking about. Really when it comes to our power generation, we're already getting 40% of our electricity generation from renewables. And that's only going to increase as they continue to get cheaper. And they continue to get more feasible in different areas of the UK. So I think renewables are clearly going to be the leading power generator as we get to a decarbonised future. I think when it comes to things like home heating and road transport that you and I will take, I think that's probably going to be electric heat pumps, electric vehicles. But you know, even when it comes to heavier transport like HGVs, hydrogen could have a role to play there. We're yet to see how much it's going to cost and things like that, but it could have an important role. And it could have an important role like we discussed in storing up our power or potentially for peaking power as well. But yeah, I think there's a range of things that hydrogen could be used for. I think the government has a role to play in setting some strategic direction like Eugene was talking about. The US has got big green investment packages into things like hydrogen, but much, much wider than hydrogen as well. And the companies that are currently in the UK are thinking about investing in the UK are looking at the US and thinking, I'm just going to invest there instead because I'm going to get more for my money. So that's something that I think industry is pretty keen for the government to replicate in the UK. But I think if we look at what the experts are saying, hydrogen is going to have a major role, but it's going to be in specific sectors, and certainly we're not going to have an unlimited supply, so we've got to be quite clever about where we use it.
Chris - What about infrastructure? Because as we heard earlier on in the programme, it's not just as easy as chucking a new gas down old pipelines that there's a massive cost attached to doing that and that may be a deterrent.
Jess - Yeah, and I think Kathryn mentioned as well, we've got some pipes in the UK, um, which at the moment I don't think is suitable for hydrogen because they, um, will allow the smaller molecules to leak out. So there's some work to be done certainly by gas networks and others who are involved. But you will hear the gas networks telling you that it's gonna be easy and it's gonna be quick and it's going to be great to have hydrogen piped down to have our heating changed to hydrogen heating, but I don't think that's going to be the case. I think that's a wishful thinking on their part. And when it comes to transmission, there's a lot of work still to be done on cost and feasibility.
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