Green hydrogen could one day provide a clean energy solution to some of the trickiest sectors to decarbonize. Hydrogen can be combusted at high heat levels, much like thermal coal or engine fuel, but instead of emitting greenhouse gases when burned, it leaves behind nothing but water vapor. This could make it indispensable for cleaning up hard-to-abate industries like steelmaking and transportation.
But green hydrogen is prohibitively expensive, and may never be a commercially viable option without considerable technological advances in its production and application. Last year, a Harvard study determined that green energy may be even costlier than previously estimated when full life cycle costs, like storage and transport to end users, were included. In fact, they determined that green hydrogen is so expensive it would make far more sense to invest that time, attention, and money toward other greenification alternatives rather than continue down the path toward commercial green hydrogen.
“Even if production costs decrease in line with predictions, storage and distribution costs will prevent hydrogen being cost-competitive in many sectors,” lead author Roxana Shafiee, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard University Center for the Environment, told The Harvard Gazette. “Our results challenge a growing idea that hydrogen will be the ‘Swiss army knife of decarbonization’ and suggest that the opportunities for hydrogen may be narrower than previously thought.”
As a result, the once-huge hype over green hydrogen has largely fizzled out. In 2023, less than a tenth of planned green hydrogen projects were actually realized, pointing to a significant and growing green hydrogen ambition and implementation gap. This doesn’t mean that green hydrogen is a lost cause, just that we will have to be more streamlined in its application. “Years of failed and half-failed hydrogen projects have shown us that while the fuel stock is not a panacea for greenhouse gas emissions, but that certain applications still hold enormous promise if we can deploy them at scale,” Oilprice reported earlier this year.
In line with this refined approach to hydrogen’s decarbonization potential, a new breakthrough from researchers at the City University of Hong Kong may have found a way to make solar hydrogen a commercially viable option by streamlining its use in the chemicals industry. In a recent article published in Nature Reviews Clean Technology, the researchers conceptualize a system using sunlight to not only produce green hydrogen, but to simultaneously produce high-value chemicals.
The review “argues that introducing high-value chemical syntheses into solar electrolysis systems could transform it from a cost-losing proposition into an economically compelling industry,” according to a report from Tech Xplore. The chemical outputs could provide a sustainable source of materials for chemical industries, pharmaceuticals, transportation, and indoor applications.
“This isn’t just about making cleaner hydrogen, but making profitable hydrogen, since when solar electrolysis is turned into a chemical reactor, the whole system can pay for itself,” says Professor Fatwa F. Abdi from the School of Energy and Environment at City University of Hong Kong.
Not only would this be a win for green hydrogen, it would be a huge win for the chemicals industry, which is traditionally an energy-intensive sector with significant greenhouse gas emissions. “What we are suggesting is a cleaner chemical industry that doesn’t just cut emissions, but also stays economically viable,” says Abdi. “Big centralized single-product plants make sense for cheap, high-demand chemicals. But expensive specialty chemicals are better produced in decentralized facilities that generate multiple products,” he goes on to explain.
This potential breakthrough is still in conceptual stages, but could be critical to revive the waning green hydrogen mission. It highlights that green hydrogen is still a potentially transformative tool in certain sectors – just not all. In many applications, consuming clean energy directly, instead of to create green hydrogen, is still the most sensible and responsible use of renewables. But we can expect continued breakthroughs, like the City University of Hong Kong’s discovery for chemical processes, in diverse hard-to-abate sectors, proving that green hydrogen is not a lost cause.
By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com
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