It’s been decades since the first debates about environmental preservation have started. As a civilization, we can all agree on one thing – we have just one Earth, and we have to keep it clean if we want to keep living here. Hydrogen is a common topic in this debate, and I’ve done a lot of research on where we stand and Hydrogen’s place in this debate.
95% of Hydrogen production is a byproduct of fossil fuels, so it isn’t good for the environment until green production methods such as electrolysis and carbon capture of fossil fuel become more prevalent. Hydrogen is explosive and flammable like natural gas but is much safer because it is lighter than air and dissipates if there is a leak. Hydrogen is also not toxic.
I’ve been doing a lot of research on hydrogen as a fuel, hydrogen production, and infrastructure that and will share some of that information with you below. We have a great understanding of how to produce, store, and use hydrogen and have just been waiting on the will to do so and the correct technological advances to make it possible.
Let’s get started!
Is Hydrogen Climate Friendly?
This is a difficult question to answer, as the answer is both yes and no. Yes, hydrogen is climate-friendly, however, the traditional production methods for hydrogen are either directly from fossil fuels or as a byproduct of extracting the oil or gas. The cost of producing hydrogen from green sources is quickly dropping and approaching the cost of hydrogen from fossil fuels. The video below quickly describes the sources of hydrogen.
What are the Different Sources of Hydrogen?
Hydrogen is obtained either from reforming natural gas, coal gasification, sequestering or capturing carbon dioxide while reforming gas or gasification, or from electrolysis.
How Hydrogen is Extracted from Natural Gas
Natural Gas is obtained from fracking and natural gas wells consists mostly of methane, along with other hydrocarbon fuels such as propane and butane, some impurities, and occasionally helium, nitrogen, CO2, and hydrogen sulfide. Heating methane up to over 700C and using a catalyst will produce hydrogen and Carbon monoxide and CO2. This is the primary source of Hydrogen production and is called Natural Gas Reforming.
Hydrogen from this production method is considered Grey hydrogen due to the fact that it doesn’t reduce CO2 emissions at all. There are plenty of companies working on capturing the carbon released from this process and sequestering it underground by either pumping it back into empty wells or some other method. Blue hydrogen is obtained from this method of Hydrogen production.
Obtaining Hydrogen From Coal
Extracting hydrogen from coal uses a similar method to reforming natural gas. Coal is heated up to a high temperature and pressurized with oxygen. This produces synthesis gas which is composed of hydrogen and carbon monoxide. The synthesis gas is combined with steam forming Carbon Dioxide and Hydrogen which can be extracted. This is brown hydrogen.
The newer methods attempt to capture and sequester the carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide preventing them from contributing to the total carbon in the atmosphere. This would be blue hydrogen.
How does Hydrogen Electrolysis Work
The traditional method of Electrolysis is basically using electricity to cause a reaction in salty water that has a byproduct of hydrogen and oxygen. The disadvantage of this method of production is the brine solutions needed for electrolysis.
Newer methods such as PEM are able to produce higher quantities of hydrogen with fewer byproducts. PEM stands for Polymer Electrolyte Membrane which uses a plastic electrolyte that allows protons from water to pass through due to the electrical input separating the water into hydrogen and oxygen.
Several companies have high capacity projects already in production for PEM electrolysis and are just getting started with large scale manufacturing of electrolysis plants. ITM Power(Link Here) and Siemens(Link Here) are prime examples.
Hydrogen from electrolysis is considered to be green hydrogen and is the type that will help the environment. Unfortunately, only 5% of hydrogen is currently Green or Blue.
Best Method to Make Hydrogen for the Environment
Making hydrogen using electrolysis is expensive. The cost of the equipment is high, running the plants costs money, and you need a whole lot of electricity to make the hydrogen. The good news is that the capital costs(equipment) are dropping fast as the manufacturing scales up, and electricity costs are very low due to excess renewable energy in many parts of the world for part of the day.
How Much Does a PEM Electrolyser Cost?
Its difficult to find specific information but the cost of the electrolysis plants is lower every year. ITM Power is foreseeing a 25% cost reduction year over year for the equipment with further cost reduction in the future. (Link to article here) By 2025 the capital costs will be competitive with other sources of hydrogen due to manufacturing scale.
One custom made PEM Electrolyser is many times more expensive than one from a factory making 500 a year.
Are Electricity prices really dropping?
In California, the power grid operators have a problem with too much electricity during the day during certain parts of the year. You can look at the California Independent System Operator website(Link Here) and run the numbers yourself if that interests you. This is for wholesale energy prices for 2020.
| Month | Days with $10 prices | Days with under $5 prices |
|---|---|---|
| January | 0 | 0 |
| February | 5 | 1 |
| March | 10 | 7 |
| April | 3 | 20 |
| May | 7 | 20 |
| June | 15 | 9 |
| July | 19 | 2 |
| August | 8 | 0 |
| September | 3 | 0 |
| October | 6 | 1 |
| November | 2 | 8 |
| December | 0 | 0 |
| Total | 72 days | 68 days |
Electricity is almost free for 8 hours a day for close to half the year in California due to excessive solar generation. Using that low cost energy to produce green hydrogen would be helpful for the environment.
The state has plans to go to 100% renewable energy in the next 20 years and will have a lot more excess wasted electricity during the day. Why not make hydrogen during the day and than use that hydrogen to generate electricity at night.
General Electric makes combustion turbines that can be converted to using hydrogen or a mix of hydrogen and natural gas as a fuel source. (Link Here)
This combined with a lower cost of the equipment will make hydrogen an important player in the transportation and power generation industry while helping the environment.
Hydrogen Fuel Cells
The scientific community has been saying that hydrogen is a wonder fuel that can help us transition from fossil fuels to clean energy. Hydrogen fuel cell cars and buses are becoming more common with multiple large scale projects in the works. The only byproduct is freshwater.
This is actually quite a simple chemical reaction. The Fuel cell splits the hydrogen into electrons and protons, the electrons complete a circuit generating electricity. The proton travels through the fuel cell and reunites with the electron in a reaction that generates heat and water.
However, the issue with this is the production of hydrogen. Despite all the things hydrogen could do for the environment, its production is so harmful that industries still don’t have the courage to start producing it fully, as it could lead to an ecological disaster.
Future Hydrogen Technologies
Nanotechnologists are trying to produce photoelectrochemical cells (PEC) to produce hydrogen in a more environmentally friendly way. One of these systems is actually made from semiconducting nanoparticles, titanium dioxide, for example, which is placed on a conducting glass substrate with the glass attached to an electrode. There’s water between the glass plate and the electrode. Incident light causes electrons to move from the nanoparticles to the electrode.
This strips electrons from the water, which breaks the water molecules and releases hydrogen.
Green hydrogen could actually be the key with which we’ll unlock the door to a greener Earth. Germany has allocated the largest share of its clean energy stimulus funds to green hydrogen, that’s how important it is. Germany is actually a great example, as they’re one of the leading countries on their green initiatives, and anyone can take them as an example. If one of the world’s foremost environmentally-friendly countries is putting money into this, it’s worth thinking about it.
How Does Liquid Hydrogen Impact the Environment?
A new British study suggests that future hydrogen-based energy systems may still disrupt the climate, as hydrogen is a secondary greenhouse gas. The impact of using hydrogen is much smaller than the other main greenhouse gases and the impacts pointed out in the study are due to switching to a 100% hydrogen economy.(Link to the Study)
Hydrogen is an indirect greenhouse gas with a potential global warming effect. Well, here’s a direct quote from an article posted by the European Commission on October 19th, 2006:
“The results suggest that because hydrogen reacts in the atmosphere with tropospheric OH radicals, the emission of hydrogen into the atmosphere would disrupt the distribution of methane and ozone, the second and third most important greenhouse gasses.
Emissions of hydrogen lead to increased burdens of methane and ozone and hence to an increase in global warming. Therefore, hydrogen can be considered as an indirect greenhouse gas with the potential to increase global warming.
The scientists have estimated that the potential effects on climate from hydrogen-based energy systems would be much lower than those from fossil fuel-based energy systems. However, such impacts will depend on the rate of hydrogen leakage during its synthesis, storage and use.
The researchers have calculated that a global hydrogen economy with a leakage rate of 1% of the produced hydrogen would produce a climate impact of 0.6% of the fossil fuel system it replaces. If the leakage rate was 10%, then the climate impact would be 6% of that of the fossil fuel system.
The current study suggests that a future hydrogen-based economy would not be free from climate disturbance, although this may be considerably less pronounced than that caused by the current fossil fuel energy systems. Careful attention would have to be paid to reducing hydrogen leakage to a minimum if the potential climate benefits of a future global hydrogen economy are to be realised.”
What does all of this mean? It means that while the use of hydrogen may be environmentally profitable, its production is not good for the environment, and we shouldn’t be focusing our industries on hydrogen use until we figure out a way to produce it cleanly.
Because of its effect on tropospheric OH radicals, hydrogen is actually an indirect greenhouse gas, but emitting it could be potentially less dangerous for the environment than it is currently. The current use of fossil fuels is still more dangerous than the use of hydrogen. However, it must be noted that these impacts all depend on the rate of hydrogen leakage during synthesis, storage and use.
A future of hydrogen-based systems would not be perfect, but it’d certainly be much safer than the systems that are in place now. It’s important to note that the transition to clean energy is going to take a long time.
Take solar panels that we’ve mentioned as an example, even the best solar panels are still stuck at 25% efficiency. We’re going to need to put a lot of work in before we see any long-term results, and hydrogen can definitely be a step forward, as long as we find a safe way to produce it.
Literature:
https://ec.europa.eu/environment/integration/research/newsalert/pdf/39na1_en.pdf