Hydrogen X V7 Download
Dibe Naro
The main changes from the last version are to clean up some of the terminology. It's hard to summarise the full splendour of a use case in just a couple of words, and that has led to some confusion. I have downgraded the aviation use cases a tad since the last version, and upgraded off-road vehicles. Of which, a bit more below, where I give a thumbnail of my reasoning for each use case. Oh, and for the avoidance of doubt, by hydrogen I also include ammonia and e-fuels or synfuels made via hydrogen (don't @ me!).
For those who want more background, let's start with the standard view of the hydrogen economy. I don't mean Jeremy Rifkin's bonkers view ("the Worldwide Energy Web and the Redistribution of Power on Earth"), I mean the view of hydrogen as the Swiss Army Knife of the future global economy, able to do pretty much any job that needs doing.
The problem is, just like a Swiss Army Knife, you won't use hydrogen for everything you could theoretically do with it. Clean hydrogen will have to win its way into the economy, use case by use case. It could do so on its merits, or it could do so because of supportive policy (including carbon prices). But it will have to do so in competition with every other clean technology that could solve the same problem. And that is where the dreams of the hydrogen economy hit reality: in almost all use cases there is a good reason why hydrogen is not currently used - because other solutions are cheaper, simpler, safer or more convenient.
What the ladder does is summarise in a single, simple graphic, my view of where clean hydrogen is sure to be part of a net zero future - starting with where we currently use grey, or polluting hydrogen - and where there are almost certainly other and better solutions - generally direct electrification and batteries.
Some people have asked whether the ladder is based on peer-reviewed research. The answer is yes, lots of it, all by other people. But, importantly, what it is trying to do is bring together all the different factors that will decide success or failure of a clean hydrogen solution, including thermodynamics, micro- and macro-economics, safety, human behaviour, resilience and geopolitics. If anyone knows how to do that, without building a model of Integrated Assessment Model complexity (and lack of credibility) I would love to meet them. And yes, there will be regional differences - based on availability of resources, need for heating and so on - but the ladder at this point presents a single global view.
Current uses of hydrogen - principally for fertiliser, oil refining and petrochemicals production - currently accounts for around 2% of global CO2 emissions. Clean hydrogen has to win here, as there is no alternative.
Clean hydrogen offers a very promising way of decarbonising steel, but its not 100% sure, because there are alternatives like molten oxide electrolysis that could out-compete it. As clean hydrogen gets cheaper, and if cheap CO2 becomes available via Direct Air Capture (unlikely) or as a byproduct of biogas production (more likely), we could start to see it used to make a range of chemical feedstocks.
In the power system, you won't routinely use hydrogen to generate power because the cycle losses - going from power to green hydrogen, storing it, moving it around and then using it to generate electricity - are simply too big. The standout use for clean hydrogen here is for long-term storage.
Even long-term storage is not a slam dunk for hydrogen: there are scalable alternatives (in addition to things like pumped hydro, demand response, batteries, etc, etc, which won't get to the right scale or are geographically limited). It is possible that compressed air storage might be cheaper than hydrogen (Professor David Cebon is a big fan of this approach). Or we might just use unabated natural gas and offset a few percent of residual emissions.
It is possible to see a role for hydrogen in things like island grids and uninterruptable power supplies (UPS). In each case you might need more days of resilient supply than can be cheaply provided by batteries, and in the case of non-grid-connected islands where renewable power can be generated, making and storing hydrogen might be less absurdly expensive than alternatives. They make row E.
The other thing on row E is clean power imports. Hydrogen pipelines are a cheap way of importing energy, as long as what you have in Country A is hydrogen, and what you can use in Country B is hydrogen. Similarly for ammonia/fertilisers. The problem is that these are edge cases. In the net zero economy of the future, what you are going to have a lot of is clean electricity in Country A and a need for clean electricity in Country B. While you certainly can import power by converting it into hydrogen, compressing or liquefying it, transporting it, removing and adding back heat, storing it, and using it to regenerate power, the round trip losses are gargantuan. HVDC connections look more likely to win [disclosure, I'm an investor in XLinks, though my views drove the investment, not the other way round].
One thing we won't be doing with clean hydrogen is using it for short-term grid services like balancing and inertia. Software (demand response) and batteries will simply be waaaay cheaper and simpler than hydrogen.
In aviation and shipping, the opportunities for clean hydrogen range from shipping - where clean ammonia based on clean hydrogen looks promising - down to short-haul and light aviation, where battery electric aircraft look like they are going to win as battery energy densities increase and costs come down.
Medium- and long-haul aviation is going to be impossible to electrify due to fundamental limitations in battery chemistry/physics. Hydrogen, however, also suffers fundamental limitations, not because of its gravimetric energy density (which is excellent) but because of its volumetric energy density (which is terrible). My colleague in Ecopragma Capital, Henry Lawson likes to say you can fly London-New York on a hydrogen plane as long as you have two other planes in tow carrying the hydrogen. However, I have medium and long-haul aviation fairly high up, levels D and C respectively, because it is possible to see them use some volume of synthetic fuels based on hydrogen, which counts in my book. Otherwise, if we want to keep flying, it's biofuels, and there just isn't enough of it for all the uses it will need to be put to.
Local ferries, routes up to a few hundred kilometers, are most likely to go electric, as described in the report Liebreich Associates wrote last year for the IADB. However, coastal and river vessels, working routes of a few hundred to a thousand or so, look like a very promising market for hydrogen. These lengths of routes can't be served by batteries, but marine vessels don't have the energy density challenges of aviation, so hydrogen might work, either in a fuel cell or just burned in an internal combustion engine which can benefit from the existing marine engine supply chain (more on combustion engines below).
OK, this is the controversial one. I've written and tweeted endlessly about this, so it shouldn't come as any surprise that I am not bullish at all about any use of hydrogen in any but niche settings.
By now everyone should have managed to get their head around the fundamental inefficiency of turning electricity into hydrogen, compressing it, storing it, moving it around and then converting it back into power on board a vehicle. Somewhere between half and three quarters of the input power is wasted, and this is not going to change much - there are fundamental thermodynamic constraints. Not only that, but the H2FC vehicles are also much more complicated so they have higher maintenance costs, and although hydrogen can be safely handled, you really don't want it in every garage and workshop. You can forget use cases like urban delivery, two and three wheelers, metro trains and buses.
It's not just about efficiency. We do plenty of inefficient things in life, like drive SUVs and sports cars, cook on barbecues and go on holiday. The fundamental problem with H2FC cars is that they are worse vehicles on all the dimensions bar one which people use to choose their next car: worse acceleration (because BEV's are astonishing), less seating and cargo space (because they are full of hydrogen tanks), higher maintenance (because their drive trains are so complex) and you can't refuel them conveniently at home at the office, at the mall, at a nearby lamp-post and so on.
The one area in which hydrogen cars win is that you can refuel them quickly during long trips. Is this a killer app? I don't see it. Most of us do so few trips over 250 miles each year that the disadvantage of the odd enforced charging stop will pale into insignificance by comparison to the enforced weekly trip to a hydrogen fuelling station. By the time EV charging is as ubiquitous as internet bandwidth, those who do drive over 250 miles at a go a bunch of times per year (and I am one of them) will get used to doing slightly longer natural breaks, which will also be good for road safety.
I could have put hydrogen cars on level F, because it is conceivable there might be some use cases and drivers who really need to drive 400 miles in any direction at the drop of a hat, in freezing conditions. But let's keep things simple - Level G, hydrogen cars are not going to be a thing.
Local trains and buses simply don't cover enough miles for hydrogen to have any advantages. All you get is a vehicle with higher maintenance costs and a safety problem in your depot. Yes, investment is needed in charging infrastructure, but once that is done, you have a lower cost of ownership, a more comfortable vehicle for driver and passengers, and no problem charging during vehicle down time at night or during the day away from rush hours. Level G.
What about slightly longer train routes, particularly rural ones? Of course they can work using hydrogen fuel cells, but why would you bother? Just electrify the track already if it is a busy segment or, if it is not, stick a battery on the train. Simple, low cost of ownership, job done. So that's an F.
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