WITH the new Labor federal government putting the foot to the floor on emissions reduction, developments on the hydrogen front are almost daily occurrences.
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The global push to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as coordinated through the United Nations has everyone on the hydrogen bandwagon in the expectation it will greatly help us reduce our environmental impacts without sacrificing our standard of living.
The theory of replacing fossil fuels with hydrogen is alluring in its simplicity, and it's a technology that has been used in specialised applications, and at limited scale, for decades.
My colleague Matthew Kelly has written extensively about hydrogen in the Newcastle Herald's Power and the Passion series, including an this explainer from April 2021 worth reading again.
But the subject is so big, and so important, that it's worth covering some of the basics again.
Hydrogen is the lightest element in creation.
Any standard reference will tell you that individual hydrogen atoms bond together to form H2, a colourless, odourless, tasteless, non-toxic and highly combustible material that is also the most abundant chemical substance in the universe, making up roughly three-quarters of all normal matter.
(This is just 0.5 per cent of all that is out there, according to astrophysicists who say the universe is 99.5 per cent "dark" matter and energy, which we cannot measure or see.)
Chemistry texts will tell you hydrogen bonds easily with many elements, and forms a vast array of compounds with carbon - the hydrocarbons, include methane (CH4), the main material in natural gas.
It's unlocking that hydrogen, and then getting hold of the carbon, that is at the heart of all the big-bucks research programs aimed at developing the "hydrogen economy".
The concepts are not new.
Welsh inventor Sir William Robert Grove is credited with first mixing hydrogen and oxygen in the presence of an electrolyte to produce electricity and water in 1839.
Fifty years later, two chemists, German Ludwig Mond and Englishman Charles Langer, extended his work and coined the term "fuel cell".
Plenty has happened since then.
The space race would not have been possible without dramatic breakthroughs by NASA and its partners in hydrogen technology.
But efficiency in fuel production - rather than fuel use - was never really a priority.
It is now, however, which is why hundreds of billions of dollars are being poured into research programs conducted by universities and private companies seeking to recruit the smartest minds in the world, in order to engineer an industrial revolution as dramatic as the switch from burning wood to burning coal, or from the horse to the steam engine.
And as with most early-stage ventures, there are some violent disagreements as to how we should proceed.
Western Australian billionaire industrialist Andrew "Twiggy" Forrest, the founder of iron ore miner Fortescue Metals, is spending heavily to move straight to "green" hydrogen, which would use renewable energy to produce hydrogen for an extremely low emissions energy.
But others say we need an interim stage where the energy source to produce the hydrogen is not so important.
This week, the Australian Workers Union used a report it commissioned from the McKell Institute to push back against the "green hydrogen only" camp, with the union's national secretary, Daniel Walton, saying "if we put aside purist objections to blue or grey or any colour hydrogen then we can move today".
So, who's right? Is hydrogen our saviour?
Too early to tell, but the eventual reality will be somewhere between a "hydrogen for everything" revolution and the years of disappointment that curmudgeons like me (a former mechanical fitter in the state's coal-fired power stations) sense are awaiting us because of the technical challenges.
To get an expert sense, I'm turning now to an interesting analysis published last week on the pro-renewables website Renew Economy by a European writer, Gerard Reid, titled "Hydrogen 101: What it must do, what it might do, and what it probably won't do".
Reid identifies five colours of hydrogen.
The first is grey, the most common method right now, steam methane reformation (SMR) to get hydrogen out of gas; another step adds gassification, with coal as the fuel stock.
Green hydrogen uses renewable electricity in electrolysis to split water (H20) into hydrogen and oxygen.
Blue hydrogen is grey hydrogen with carbon capture and storage (CCS), a process that even those in favour of it admit has been a disappointment for 20 years.
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Turquoise hydrogen comes from decomposing methane (pyrolysis) producing solid carbon instead of CO2 as a waste product.
Pink hydrogen is defined as electrolysis - the main method of making hydrogen so far - using electricity from nuclear power.
"Low-carbon hydrogen has almost all the usefulness of fossil fuels, with little or none of the emissions. In the decarbonised society of the future, hydrogen, rather than oil and gas, will be key to geopolitical heft," Reid says.
He says green hydrogen will be "readily available to any nation that has access to cheap renewable energy" - which should be Australia.
Importantly - and this is especially so in a region such as the Hunter which has a strong industrial base and hopes of perpetuating it - key products such as steel and aluminium and ammonia (used to make fertilisers and explosives) "cannot be produced at scale without fossil fuels unless hydrogen is used".
Reid says despite the hype, almost all hydrogen today "is of the highly polluting grey variety".
How polluting?
Well, Reid says the European Union already uses 9.7 million tonnes of hydrogen a year for industrial purposes.
To replace those just those 9.7 million tonnes, he says, would take 200 gigawatts of new renewable energy capacity, or as much nuclear power as there is in the whole of France".
To put that in perspective, 200 gigawatts is 200,000 megawatts. At any one time, NSW is using about 10,000 megawatts of electricity.
"The ability to increase production will likely depend on advances in green hydrogen, which has traditionally been the most expensive version of the gas but is expected to be the cheapest and most scalable option in the long term," Reid says.
"Blue hydrogen, in contrast, will always be more expensive than fossil fuels because it relies on gas as a feedstock for steam methane reformation.
"And it will always be more expensive than grey hydrogen because it requires carbon capture and storage to be added to the SMR process."
It is increasingly accepted that the intermittent nature of renewable power means building a grid with at least twice and probably three times the nameplate capacity of usual demand.
So, if we use 10,000 megawatts in NSW, we need a grid capable of producing 20,000 to 30,000 megawatts, so that power can be generated for storage as well as use. And that is without accounting for the extra renewable capacity needed to turn water into hydrogen.
It sounds so simple, but it isn't.
- PART TWO OF THIS ARTICLE WILL APPEAR ON TUESDAY