Ep 19 Replay - Hydrogen value chain and its potential to decarbonise the world With Thomas Briault

[00:00:00] Hi everyone, this is Ben. You and I were quite busy for community so we haven't been able to publish it in your episode. We just wanted to re-broadcast one of our favorite song, Hydrogen. Hope you enjoy it.

[00:00:30] This was a course chairman of the Hydrogen Committee at the Independent Power Producer Forum. We exchange all the Hydrogen value chain and its potential to decabonize the world. And my main tech as a follower, first, Hydrogen is still being accurately produced in majority with CO2 emission byproducts, while green Hydrogen is not at the moment cause competitive.

[00:00:54] Second, the cost of transforming the Hydrogen into Shippupo-Few is high due to the low efficiency of the transformation cycle. And third, however, Hydrogen has a very good potential to store energy for the long term think about season to season. And has the potential to displace LNG where it can be produced locally and transported through pipelines.

[00:01:18] Hello Thomas, welcome to the show. Could you introduce our group and tell us about how you started your career and how you started to work on Hydrogen?

[00:01:28] My name is Thomas Brio. I'm the Energy Advisor-leaser for Southeast Asia for Arab. I started in Arab 20 years ago now working in building services design, but I quickly moved to the Building Sustainability Team wanting to reduce the carbon impact of the buildings that we were designing.

[00:01:48] And then I later moved into our energy consulting team, always working on low carbon energy solutions in the built environment but kind of getting larger and larger in scale.

[00:02:01] And one of the big problems that I found in the UK was how we decarbonize heat. So in the UK, the peak heating demand is six times the peak electricity demand and that requires some form of energy solution that's widely storeable.

[00:02:20] And natural gas is what we use in the UK, but that isn't zero carbon. And so I guess through the last five years of my career, Hydrogen has been becoming more of an interesting subject.

[00:02:33] I think when I first started my career, back in 2001 or whenever we were talking about hydrogen but it was so expensive. So what has happened recently is people have started to value carbon reduction to the point where they're really looking seriously at Hydrogen.

[00:02:51] So I've then done a few projects in Hydrogen based in the UK. And then when I came out to Singapore to lead the Southeast Asia team, there was lots of talk of hydrogen loss of my colleagues in Australia working in Hydrogen and they guess Singapore has a land constraint that means Hydrogen is a real possibility for.

[00:03:12] And interesting that you had previous experience in the UK before we were getting to Singapore, if we stick back here to bits, could you just explain to us what is Hydrogen and why is it so important to achieve the water get to tradition toward net zero.

[00:03:29] Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, but it is very light and therefore it's quite hard to capture. It disappears very quickly and so it really needs to be created. However, what it does provide is a long term,

[00:03:46] a long term, storeable and to some extent transport about fuel which can be zero carbon and can be created from zero carbon. So the great benefit of coal and oil and other fossil fuels is they're easily storeable and they have high energy density but then or zero carbon.

[00:04:04] So Hydrogen has that potential and although electricity can be created from renewable energy, most renewable energy actually creates electricity but it's quite hard to store. And so Hydrogen provides that storage potential.

[00:04:18] For the rest of the interview, what I want to do is go face by face on the value chain of hydrogen. So we will talk about production, storage, trust station and then usage.

[00:04:29] If we start with production, could you introduce the concept of gray, blue and green hydrogen?

[00:04:36] Okay. So the concept of different colors of hydrogen depends on how they're made. There are two fundamental ways of making hydrogen.

[00:04:44] One is to essentially crack a hydrocarbon, a fossil fuel and capture the CO2 that comes out of that and store that potentially or release it.

[00:04:54] All the alternative is to crack water and you get oxygen and hydrogen. So green hydrogen is that cracking of water using renewable electricity and so it is considered to be the lowest carbon solution that will come to that in a minute.

[00:05:10] Gray hydrogen is the cracking of natural gas but the release of the CO2. So it achieves nothing from carbon reduction and it is used today because people need hydrogen for various different things.

[00:05:24] Blue hydrogen means that you capture the CO2 and store that ideally forever in salt cabins or in old gas fields.

[00:05:34] There are a number of other types of colors of hydrogen. So black if it's coal with no CO2 capture purple if it's nuclear but the really important thing actually is how much CO2 is associated with its creation.

[00:05:48] You can have very bad blue hydrogen. You can also have quite bad green hydrogen depending on how you create it and transport it.

[00:05:55] So there's a concept being developed in a number of different countries. Aropp are actually working on the standard for different types of hydrogen in the UK and working with the energy industry there.

[00:06:07] And there it's focusing much more on the kilograms of CO2 emitted per kilowatt hour of hydrogen energy stored and the concept of color disappears because the important thing here is to decarbonize the world and stop climate change.

[00:06:22] That's quite interesting that the color of hydrogen doesn't matter anymore and what we're really focusing on is the CO2 emission contents. Could you explain how the majority of hydrogen is currently being produced and home moving forward we couldn't make the production greener or lower the CO2 contents of the hydrogen produced?

[00:06:43] Yeah well hydrogen has been produced for many years, probably a hundred years over a hundred years. Our first gas networks were created with coal gas and that contains a high percentage of hydrogen but it's grey hydrogen the CO2 associated with cracking different hydrocarbons is released because it's expensive to capture.

[00:07:04] And if you're not forced to capture it much like with fossil fuel burning, it is released. So the vast vast majority of hydrogen is produced that way is grey hydrogen here in Singapore a grey hydrogen is produced for the towns gas network and pumped into the towns gas network from Sonoco gas works but also grey hydrogen is produced by industry for use in various different industrial and chemical plants and use for wide variety of different.

[00:07:33] And who do you think the production of hydrogen can be made greener with lower the auto emission? Yeah so it's possible to retrofit carbon capture and storage onto some reformation plant but in reality old reformation plant is relatively inefficient new reformation plant can capture very high percentages of the CO2 well over 95%.

[00:08:00] The issue currently is that quite often there's a combustion process in there so you get a flu gas that comes out the chimney and that contains a mixture of lots of different gases. So it's difficult just like on any normal fossil fuel power station to extract that CO2 not impossible but I think will need to move to more efficient plant and then see that captured once that's been captured the CO2 can then be compressed and re injected back into oil gas wells.

[00:08:28] Well gas wells that's been done in the past typically that is done at the moment actually to stimulate the gas well to get more gas out but it has also been done just as a sequestration.

[00:08:40] The alternative of course is to move away from the idea of fossil fuels and as we talked about green hydrogen to use renewable electricity to produce.

[00:08:49] Yeah and that's then that green hydrogen is really at the beginning stage and that it is still not gas competitive so with COVID now the production of hydrogen if we move to the storage and transportation of hydrogen.

[00:09:05] We use something in introduction that was quite interesting being that the hydrogen is essentially a way for us to store energy.

[00:09:14] This electricity whether it's produced by renewables or otherwise the issue is that we can't really store it.

[00:09:23] It needs to be consumed at the moment where this produce and essentially hydrogen is helping us to store energy.

[00:09:31] No, I think it would be quite interesting if you can explain to us like two physical aspects of hydrogen.

[00:09:39] The first one being that has a high energy per unit of mass and the second one being that it has a very low density per unit volume and explain who's all two characteristics are impacting the way hydrogen can be stored and transported.

[00:09:55] Yeah so hydrogen has a very very high energy density per mass as you say and that's why it's used in rocket fuel right so liquid hydrogen is used in rocket fuel however as you say atmospheric pressure hydrogen has very very low density which means that actually in some senses it's a safer fuel because if it escapes anywhere it doesn't pull it just disappears but it means that it's quite hard to compress it.

[00:10:21] It's very hard to liquefy it you have to get it down to almost absolute zero so minus 250 degrees Celsius and very very costly to do very energy intensive to do the other alternatives are to convert it or combine it with another chemical to create a sort of combined fuel that then can be recract.

[00:10:42] So there are a number of different one of those the most popular at the moment is probably ammonia that's being considered that's transported around the world as fertilizer however ammonia it is very toxic and therefore requires big safety distances so people are looking at other alternatives that combine hydrogen with chemical compounds which creates a much more stable and transportable fuel a bit like oil which is obviously very transportable but all of those require a lot of energy.

[00:11:12] So that's the only way to be created and then to get them back into hydrogen and that is the challenge in terms of price with hydrogen today and shipping.

[00:11:22] Yeah I understand there's a lot of efficiency loss when we convert toward hydrogen and then when we convert back to electricity.

[00:11:29] We have co-ed production storage and for addition now if we move to usage could you explain what are the main industrial application of hydrogen and I think you could sum of the truth he and also explain how to make these application greener yeah I guess there are.

[00:11:46] Potentially a very wide range of applications but the three main ones are as an industrial feedstock or fuel as a transportation fuel at the moment we use fossil fuels predominantly for that or as a fuel for power generation so if we think about renewable electricity we can store renewable electricity and balance the intermitency of clouds coming over solar panels with batteries

[00:12:11] but if you want to store it day to night and particularly week to week or season to season that's a very big challenge so the hydrogen offers in the power generation sector the opportunity to have that long term storage and to deal with that with that challenge in the vehicle space in the transportation space.

[00:12:33] The high energy density per unit of mass as we talked about earlier means that for every unit of energy the weight is about a third of charged batteries so for heavy vehicles for long distance travel hydrogen has a distinct advantage over batteries however the downside is that you have to move the fuel around and create refueling stations much as we currently do.

[00:13:00] Whereas one of the advantages of electric vehicles is the fact that you can plug it in anywhere so I think for heavy truck hydrogen offers some great advantages and I guess so people are looking at buses it's also very quick to refuel whereas recharging batteries takes you know hours particularly for buses the first place where hydrogen transportation was commercially viable without any sort of support is in warehouse for cliff trucks.

[00:13:30] So for glyph trucks typically in warehouses operate 24 seven but if they're batteries powered you essentially need to forklifts for every person that you've got on site because one is charging while the other one is being used whereas with a hydrogen you can refill it in minutes and then you can use it for 24 hours so there are some very specific advantages where hydrogen has it but in most cases that energy penalty associated with the conversion in the air.

[00:14:00] So you can use hydrogen to hydrogen firstly which can be about 70% efficient if you're talking green hydrogen production but the conversion then into a shipable fuel you typically lose at least 50% of the energy just in creating a shipable fuel and then back out again so in the end the price of hydrogen is you know two three sometimes even five times the price of the original electricity that you put in depending on how far you're shipping it and what fuel you're going to get.

[00:14:30] That's interesting meaning that essentially for passengers vehicles batteries makes a lot more sense than yourself.

[00:14:40] No one understands the green hydrogen at the moment is not commercially viable without any governmental supports looking at the country in this easier specific region what all the countries that has put in place the right framework to support the development of green hydrogen.

[00:14:57] Yeah it's interesting hydrogen is a bit like gas in terms of markets energy markets you know the global oil market is just completely global market and there's one price because it's really easy to move around the electricity market is very very locally based so one country right next to another country can have very different electricity prices and to do a lot with their generation mix but also to do with their fuels and regulations and all sorts of things and gas traditionally.

[00:15:27] As being some somewhere in between it's like a continental fuel mostly it's piped and 90% of natural gas is still piped and only 10% is in the form of LNG and that is because of the energy penalty of converting into LNG and regassive so you know Russia into Europe or Canada into the US and I think that element of the energy penalty is so much stronger in hydrogen so much so much worse because the creation of a shipable fuel is so expensive.

[00:15:57] At the use of hydrogen in the future in terms of hydrogen shipped internationally will be quite limited to those countries that are geographic it's isolated and have very limited resource so we're talking Japan South Korea Singapore I think in Europe we'll see Germany needing to import hydrogen.

[00:16:18] I think lots of other countries for example the UK will store hydrogen but will create their own and won't create a shipable fuel so they'll create as a gas and uses it as a gas and therefore not have to pay that large energy penalty associated with liquefying or converting it into another fuel.

[00:16:37] But so you know Singapore has got a very unique situation quite limited renewable resource a well developed economy which can potentially afford to use hydrogen over some other so I think Singapore might be one of the first places to import hydrogen via ship and it's most likely that will come from Australia just because it's relatively close and the renewable resource is high in Australia and the land cost is low.

[00:17:04] So the production of hydrogen will be cheap and therefore that energy penalty that you pay will be less extreme.

[00:17:10] That's very interesting considering that Australia might also be exporting renewable electricity directly into Singapore and cable projects.

[00:17:19] No I want to have you view on in five or ten years what do you think the hydrogen value chain will be looking like whole hydrogen will be produced and how it is going to be used.

[00:17:32] Yeah I think hydrogen will generally be used domestically or used where it can be piped to another country and the compression will be a relatively niche market that's just my belief but there are a number of things that are driving the high cost of hydrogen at the moment.

[00:17:48] One is obviously the cost of renewable energy that is very low at the moment it is the cheapest form of energy anywhere in the world but we needed to come down even further because that increase in the price of hydrogen because all the conversion efficiency means that that one of the key levers another one is that the electric risers as you said green hydrogen has been produced in the past but at relatively small scale and we're going from few kilowatts.

[00:18:17] kilowatts to a few megawatts now but the discussions with all the hydrogen hubs particularly in Chile and Australia are gigawatt scale hydrogen production and creating the electrolyzer or the electrolyzer stack so you have multiple electrolyzers from that is going to take a long time and I think the factories to produce those electrolyzers will be need to be being built and the efficiencies of those production but as we saw with solar panels as soon as the Chinese stepped in kind of driven by the energy

[00:18:47] feed in tariffs in Germany initially but then across Europe suddenly there's a market and the Chinese create a manufacturing industry that means they can roll out photo-altec panels at a very low cost I imagine the same thing with electrolyzers so I think hydrogen will be in the mix for most economies it'll be dominant in some of those isolated economies where they're currently very reliant on LNG for example and I see it as a way of domestically

[00:19:16] storing seasonal energy that can then be used so if you think about the UK the will need to build up a reserve of hydrogen that can then be used for heating fuels

[00:19:27] is that twice fascinating thank you for your time Thomas. Thank you it's been a pleasure