Ep 3 The hydrogen value chain and its potential to decarbonise the world with Thomas Briault

Ben: [00:00:00] Hello, everyone. You're listening to sustainable energy Asia, but guests today I'm joined by dumb-ass Breo. Who is leading the energy team in Southeast Asia at Arup leading design and engineering firm. He's also the current chairman of the hydrogen committee at the independent power producer forum.

We exchange on the hydrogen value chain and its potential to decarbonize the words. And my main tech as the following first hydrogen is still being currently producing majority. We see two emission byproducts while green hydrogen is not at the moment cost competitive. Second. The cost of transforming the hydrogen into shippable fuel is high due to the low efficiency of the transformation cycle. Answered, whoever the hydrogen has a very good potential to store energy for the long term. Think about season [00:01:00] to season. And has the potential to displace LNG. Where it can be produced locally and transported through pipelines

Hello Thomas welcome to the show.

could you introduce Arab and tell us about how you're studying your career and how you study to work on hydrogen

Thomas: Sure my name's Thomas Breo. I'm the energy advisory leader for Southeast Asia for Arab. I started in Europe 20 years ago. Now I'm 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. 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. And one of the big problems that our. Found in the UK was how we decarbonize heat. So in the UK the peak[00:02:00] heating demand is six times the peak electricity demand. And that requires some form of energy solution. That's widely storable 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. I think when I first started my career, you know, 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. The real, really looking seriously at hydrogen. So I've then done a few projects in hydrogen I'm 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, lots of my colleagues in Australia working in hydrogen. And I guess Singapore has a land constraint that means [00:03:00] hydrogen is a real possibility.

Ben: That's interesting that you had previous experience in the UK before relocating 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 what targets to transition to what net zero.

Thomas: Yeah. So, I mean, 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 storable and to some extent, transported 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 storable and they have a high energy density, but they're not zero. carbon. So hydrogen has that potential. And although electricity can be created from renewable [00:04:00] energy. Most renewable energy actually creates electricity, but it's quite hard to store. And so hydrogen provides that storage potential.

Ben: For the rest of the interview what I wanted to do is go phase by phase on the value chain of hydrogen. So we'll talk about production, storage, transportation, and then use age. If we start with production could you introduce as a concept of gray, blue and green hydrogen

Thomas: okay so the concept of the different colors of hydrogen depends on how they're made. There are two fundamental ways of making hydrogen. One is to essentially crank a hydrocarbon of fossil fuel, and capture the CO2. But it comes out of that and store that potentially or release it. All the alternative is to crack water and you get oxygen and hydrogen. So green hydrogen is the cracking of water using renewable electricity. And so it is considered to be the lowest carbon solution that we'll come to [00:05:00] that in a minute. 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. Blue hydrogen means that you capture the CO2 and store that ideally forever in salt Cavins or in old gas fields. There are a number of other types of covers 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. You can have very bad blue hydrogen. You can also have quite bad green hydrogen depending on how you create it and transport it. So There's a concept being developed in a number of different countries. Arab we're actually working on the, standard for different types of hydrogen in the UK and working with the energy industry then, and there it's focusing much more on the [00:06:00] kilograms of CO2 emitted per kilowatt hour of hydrogen energy stored and the concept of colored disappears because the important thing here to decarbonize the world and stop climate change.

Ben: That's interesting. That's the cutoff hydrogen doesn't matter anymore. And what we're really focusing on is the CO2. Emission contents. Could you explain Jose Metro ETF, hydrogen is currently being produced and home moving forward, we could make the production greener or lower the CO2 contents of the hydrogen produced.

Thomas: Yeah. Well, the hydrogen has been produced for many is 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 gray hydrogen, the CO2 associated with cracking different hydrocarbons is released because it's expensive to capture and if you're not forced to capture it much like with fossil fuel burning, it is [00:07:00] released. So the vast, vast majority of hydrogen is produced that way. There's gray hydrogen here in Singapore gray hydrogen is produced for the town's gas network and pumped into the town's gas network from Sonoco gasworks. But also gray hydrogen is produced by industry for use in various different , industrial and, chemical plants and, useful wide variety of different chemical processes.

Ben: And who do you sing? The production of hydrogen can be met greener with lower CO2 emission.

Thomas: Yeah. so it's possible to retrofit carbon capture and storage on to some reformation plant, but, in reality, old reformation plant is relatively inefficient. New reformation plant can capture very high percentages of the CO2, you know, well over 95%. The issue currently is that quite often there's a combustion process in there. So you get a flue gas that comes out the chimney and that [00:08:00] 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 we'll 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 old 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 secret station. 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.

Ben: Yeah. And then understand that green hydrogen is really at the beginning stage and that it is still not cost competitive. So we've covered now is a production of hydrogen. If we move to the storage and transportation of hydrogen. You said something in introduction. That was quite interesting. Being that [00:09:00] hydrogen did. Essentially a way for us to store energy. We edit Tricity, whether it's produced by renewables or. The wise. It's a key issue is that we can't really store it. It needs to be consumed., at the moment where this produce and essentially hydrogen is helping us to store energy. No. I think it would be quite interesting. If you can explain to us like two physical aspects of hydrogen. This is the first one being that he has a high energy per unit of mass. And the second one being that it has a real low density. You need to volume and explain how those two characteristics are impacting the way hydrogen can be store and transport it.

Thomas: 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 [00:10:00] density, which means that Actually in some senses, it's a safer fuel because if it escapes anywhere, it doesn't pool, it just disappears. But it means that it's quite hard to compress it. It's very hard to liquefy it. You have to get it down to almost absolute zero so minus 250 degrees Celsius. 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 re cracked. So there were 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 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 [00:11:00] those require a lot of energy 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 hydrogen.

Ben: Yeah, understand. There is a lot of efficiency laws when we convert to hydrogen. And then when we convert back to a twisty. We have COVID production storage limitation. Now, if we move to use, H could you explain what does the main industrial application of hydrogen. And I think you covered some of that Trulicity and also explain how to make these application greener

Thomas: yeah. I guess there are potentially a very wide range of applications, but the three main ones, 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 intermittency of clouds coming [00:12:00] over solar panels with batteries. 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 without challenge in the, vehicle space in the transportation space, 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. Whereas one of the advantages of electric vehicles is the fact that you can plug it in anywhere. So, I think for heavy trucks, hydrogen offers some great [00:13:00] 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 forklift trucks. So, forklift trucks typically in warehouses operate 24 7. But if they're batteries powered, you essentially need two forklifts for every person that you 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 into hydrogen firstly which can be about 70% efficient. If you're talking green hydrogen Production but the conversion then into a shippable [00:14:00] fuel, you typically lose at least 50% of the energy just in creating a shippable 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 using.

Ben: That's interesting, meaning that essentially for passenger vehicles batteries makes a lot more sense that she'll sales. No. What I understand is green hydrogen at the moment, it's not commercially viable results any governmental supports. looking at the country in this. Asia Pacific region. What all is. Countries that has put in place. Right from work to support the development of green hydrogen.

Thomas: Yeah. it's interesting. Hydrogen is a bit like. Gas in terms of markets energy markets. You know, the global oil market is, just a completely global market. And there's one price because it's really easy to move [00:15:00] around. The electricity market is very, very locally based. So, one country right next to another country can have very different electricity crisis. 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 has been some somewhere in between us, like a continental fuel, mostly it's piped and 90% of natural gas is still painted and only 10% is in the form of LNG and that is because of the energy penalty of converting into LNG and recast. So, you know, Russia into Europe or Canada into the U S 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 shippable fuel is so expensive that the use of hydrogen in the future. In terms of hydrogen shipped internationally we'll be quite limited to those countries that are geographically isolated and have very limited resource. [00:16:00] So we're talking Japan, South Korea, Singapore, I think in Europe, we'll see Germany needing to import hydrogen. I think lots of other countries, for example, the UK we'll store hydrogen, but we'll create their own and won't create a shippable 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 few. 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 states. So I think Singapore might be one of the first places to import hydrogen via ship and it's most likely that that will come from Australia just before it's relatively close and the renewable resource is behind in Australia and the land cost is low. So the production of hydrogen will be cheap. And therefore that energy penalty that you pay will be less [00:17:00] extreme.

Ben: That's really interesting considering that Australia might also be exporting renewable electricity directly into Singapore. Cable project. No hour to have your view on. In five or ten years, what do you think the hydrogen value chain will be looking like how hydrogen will be produced and how it is going to be used

Thomas: 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 driving the high cost of hydrogen at the moment. 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 of all the conversion efficiency means that one of the key levers. Another one is the electrolyzers, as you [00:18:00] said, green hydrogen has been produced in the past, but at relatively small scale, and we're going from a few kilowatts to a few megawatts now. but the discussions with all the hydrogen hubs, particularly in Chile and Australia are gigawatts scale hydrogen production and creating the electrolyzer or the electrolyzers stacks. So you have multiple electrolyzers for that is going to take a long time and I think the factories to produce those electrolyzers will be needed 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 a feed in tariff, 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-voltaic panels are very low cost.

I imagine the same thing with electrolyzers. So I think hydrogen will be in the mix for most economies. It will be dominant in some of those isolated [00:19:00] economies where they're currently very reliant on LNG, for example and. I see it as a way of domestically storing a seasonal energy that can then be used. So if you think about the UK the winter, we'd need to build up a reserve of hydrogen that can then be used for heating fuels.

Ben: Is that twice. Fascinating. Thank you for your time to miss.

Thomas: Thank you. It's been a pleasure.