More pie in the sky from the green lobby. No sign here of how the hydrogen would be produced in sufficient quantities to replace all the world’s fuels. A bunch of wind turbines and solar installations would barely begin to do it, given they’re already fully occupied with ever-increasing electricity demand. If ‘infrastructure investment in storage might cost around $637 billion by 2050’, who would be willing to pay such eye-watering sums?
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Carbon-free hydrogen production could significantly lower greenhouse gas emissions in power generation and manufacturing, but it will require a mammoth and long-term financial commitment to become cost competitive, says Power Engineering.
This is according to a new report by BloombergNEF. The research wing of media giant Bloomberg is focused on next-generation energy technologies which also reduce carbon emissions.
Hydrogen can be a zero-carbon substitute for fossil fuels. Companies such as Mitsubishi Hitachi Power Systems (MHPS), GE, Siemens and Ansaldo Energia already are working on programs to blend hydrogen into their turbine fuel mixes.
In fact, the BNEF report says, clean hydrogen deployment could cut about one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions from generation, heavy duty transportation and industrial manufacturing such as steel making.
The concept of clean or green hydrogen requires that renewables such as wind or solar power the electrolysis plants which would create the hydrogen by separating that molecule from water.
“Hydrogen has potential to become the fuel that powers a clean economy. In the years ahead, it will be possible to produce it at low cost using wind and solar power, to store it underground for months, and then to pipe it on-demand to power everything from ships to steel mills,” Kobad Bhavnagri, head of industrial decarbonization for BNEF and lead author of the report, said in a statement.
This vision will not come cheap. Bhavnagri’s report estimates that a hydrogen scale-up would require close to $150 billion in subsidies on the global level. It also factors in a cost applied to carbon such as a tax or allowance policy.
If these policies are put in place, the BNEF report suggests that renewable hydrogen could be produced at between 80 cents to $1.60 per kilogram in most of the world by 2050. That production cost is equivalent to natural gas priced at between $6 to $12 per million British thermal units (mmBtu), according to the report.
Full report here.
via Tallbloke’s Talkshop
March 31, 2020 at 02:57AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 