Two recent explosions at hydrogen fueling stations may have soured the fuel’s reputation, but there is increasingly optimistic sentiment for it, with two reports last week claiming it will have an important role to play in the energy mix of tomorrow.
One of these, led by the UK Institution of Engineering and Technology, said hydrogen could come to replace natural gas as a fuel for heating in the country.
“We are now in a position to
seriously consider the viability of using hydrogen in the UK’s gas grid for use
by homes and businesses which could significantly contribute to the
decarbonisation of the UK’s energy sector,” the lead author of the report, Dr.
Robert Sansom said in a press release.
The fascinating part is that
the hydrogen would be produced from natural gas: a process called gas
reforming. This means hydrogen will not exactly replace natural gas, but rather
become a gas-derived fuel to be used for heating. However, as is so often the
case, the hydrocarbon-free alternative—hydrolysis—is too expensive to apply at
the large scale needed to produce fuel to heat the 85 percent of UK homes that
currently use natural gas.
In all fairness, the authors
note, “Hydrogen has not been deployed at scale anywhere in the world and so any
proposal will need to compensate for this lack of experience. We know hydrogen
produces no carbon emissions when burned but it is also important to fully
investigate and understand the overall environmental impact a switch to
hydrogen is likely to make. It’s fundamental that these areas, as well as
others identified in the report, are comprehensively addressed before a programme
of large-scale deployment is considered.”
In other words, for now, the
stated benefits of hydrogen, even if it is derived from natural gas, which kind
of compromises the zero-emissions purpose, are more theoretical than practical.
It will be a while before the switch from gas to hydrogen begins.
Yet practical improvements of existing hydrogen technology are
being made as well. Recently, a team of scientists announced an improved hydrogen tank that could make the
fuel more popular among drivers. Japan, one of the largest energy importers in
the world, wants to build a “hydrogen society” and is spearheading the
hydrogen drive.
The latest to come on board with the hydrogen idea is the
International Energy Agency, which on Friday released a report, which was—no
coincidence—released in Japan during the G20 summit. The report says “Hydrogen
can help to tackle various critical energy challenges, including helping to
store the variable output from renewables like solar PV and wind to better
match demand. It offers ways to decarbonise a range of sectors – including
long-haul transport, chemicals, and iron and steel – where it is proving difficult
to meaningfully reduce emissions.”
To enable these, the IEA
offers four principal directions of work, including turning industrial ports
into “nerve centers” for the launch of larger-scale hydrogen use; utilizing
existing infrastructure to transport it; expanding the use of hydrogen as a
fuel in road transportation; and launching trade routes for the fuel.
As good as all this sounds, the report agrees
with what the UK’s IET researchers say: producing hydrogen from anything but
fossil fuels is prohibitively expensive at the moment. And that’s not all.
Hydrogen production is not emission free.
“Today, hydrogen is already being used on an
industrial scale, but it is almost entirely supplied from natural gas and coal.
Its production, mainly for the chemicals and refining industries, is
responsible for 830 million tonnes of CO2 emissions per year. That’s the
equivalent of the annual carbon emissions of the United Kingdom and Indonesia
combined,” the IEA report said.
There are several ways to eliminate these
emissions, whether through carbon capture and storage or by producing more
hydrogen from renewable power. But, once again, these are more theoretical
scenarios than processes that could be enabled at this point in time. For now,
in other words, hydrogen remains more of an energy equivalent of an exotic
fruit.