From a couple minutes of searching, hydrogen-powered freight locomotives don't seem to be available, with more focus instead on passenger trains powered by hydrogen fuel cells.
> Am I ignoring something here, or couldn't they just lay railroad track then? It's not a heavily populated area.
They'd need to either go directly through to the port's yard, through half the port and with a new bridge over a river, or branch off of a closer yard (between cluden and stuart), cross through a creek and two highways.
Former means enormous capex (if you can even get permitted and negotiate with the port), and latter means merely large but now you're at the mercy of traffic on the NCL.
Nothing impossible, but I can see how the refinery would have started trucking 25 years ago (apparently it started in 1996) and scaled that up progressively.
And then there's the bad news that this section of the NCL is not electrified, so you'd still be paying for your diesel and it would be completely unhelpful.
Not to mention as the article notes:
> Resource-poor Asian neighbors such as Japan and Korea are also counting on Aussie green hydrogen to help get them off fossil fuels in the decades ahead.
This is a project / study from the parent company, per their own "our company page":
> In early 2021 our sister company Ark Energy Corporation was established by Korea Zinc to decarbonise the energy supply of the group starting with Sun Metals.
That helps explain part of why Hyundai was running hydrogen ads on Korean broadcast news for years. I assumed it was because they knew they had fallen behind in battery tech research, but being able to source hydrogen (green or not) from Australia instead of the middle east must also be a factor.
Not necessarily. Once energy costs become around around 2.5x cheaper than they are now, MVC distillation becomes cost effective for desalination. With the space and sun they have, they have the potential for near unlimited water.
> About 40% of Australia is covered by dunes. Australia is the driest inhabited continent,[6][7] with the least fertile soils.
We have room for solar panels to generate the entire energy consumption of the globe. Raw material availability isn't a problem in general. The water required is under 10% of what is currently used for agriculture, and if you want more you desalinate it. Desalination needs a lot of energy of course, but the one thing they won't be short of in this scenario is cheap electricity to power desalination plants.
The thinking behind this is pretty simple. Australia is a major exporter of natural gas. If they can get the price of producing Hydrogen to below the cost of fracking for methane, then it's a winner. Last I checked they were a factor of 4 away, but that was before the Ukraine War. I don't know if it's possible to drop the production price by a factor of 4, but the price of natural gas rising by a factor of 4 seems entirely possible.
Australia and Canada are the planets kings of resource extraction. This sort of thing is what they excel at. Unlike Canada, Australia has the land, the sun, and is next to Asia (with Queensland the closest). Asia is the worlds industrial base but is energy poor. Yes it is currently just a dream, but maybe not a pipe dream.
> Am I ignoring something here, or couldn't they just lay railroad track then
I don't know how much of an impact this causes for freight, but passenger trains in Australia often get delayed / slowed down due to heat deforming the rails. At least in Victoria anyway. This may be one consideration for not going that way.
Whenever I read about "green hydrogen" I'm always suspicious that's it's a bait and switch by the fossil fuel industry. Say green hydrogen enough times, people will start thinking all hydrogen is green. Meanwhile industry just keeps making most hydrogen from fossil fuels.
Clean = no additional gh emissions. Production of anything, including hydrogen produces a lot of additional emissions. Green hydrogen is just relatively "greener" than alternatives but that doesn't matter in the long run, just like replacing brown coal with black coal is a "greener" but doesn't matter in the long run.
"Production of anything, including hydrogen produces a lot of additional emissions"
Why would you say that? I mean, some sort of pollutant emission is inevitable in any heavy industry, but there's no physical reason it has to involve the transfer of carbon that's been locked under the ground for 100s of millions of years into the atmosphere, which is the only thing we really need to stop doing (unless some sort of process for extracting it from the atmosphere again at the same rate we add it is feasible, which isn't looking particularly likely).
I think you're both right. Introducing H2 as a fuel only helps matters if the energy used to produce the H2 is not from fossil fuels, and probably hurts otherwise.
Right now the world produces a small fraction of its electricity cleanly and the rest using fossil fuels. If you want to divert some of that human energy consumption from heating/cooling/cooking/lighting/computing to H2 production then how do you make sure the diverted energy is from clean sources and that those consumers don't take it upon themselves to fill the new hole in their lives with additional fossil consumption?
If you're going to say we should create petawatt-hours-per-year of additional electricity generation capacity in order to do this, that sounds great but the infrastructure doesn't exist and it will take decades-to-centuries to build it.
So, I'm very much in favor of developing and maintaining the technological expertise required to use H2 for energy. I'm not nearly as convinced when it comes to trying to deploy it at scale in the 2020s.
> I think you're both right. Introducing H2 as a fuel only helps matters if the energy used to produce the H2 is not from fossil fuels, and probably hurts otherwise.
That's "green hydrogen" by definition - ie. what this article & discussion is all about. The gp is simply mistaken, and the coal analogy is ridiculous. Whether green hydro turns out to be economic/scalable is a separate matter.
Almost nothing, yes. Only active GH gas sequestration from atmosphere can be clean, and even then it's not guaranteed. We, as humanity, need to somehow quantify total emissions produced from any given activity, and then grade it somehow. Currently we have super primitive grading - 1) green and 2) not green. Which is completely insufficient and often misleading in third decade of 21 century.
I don't have hard numbers, but I'm pretty sure that hydrogen is much much less green than some other alternatives like solar in total footprint. But we lump them together as if they are equally good. Same as with corporations going carbon neutral - one company is doing actual carbon sequestration and is really neutral, another company is cheating and just buying carbon credits from some undeveloped country and pretends to be neutral too (especially if they are just using existing forests as a claim). They are not the same but the names are.
But most industrial hydrogen production is the so-called 'blue' hydrogen. Produced from fossil fuels, because that's a cheaper process than electrolysing water.
The problem GP is talking about is the vast, vast majority of hydrogen today is produced by steam reforming, which is vastly cheaper than electrolysis (around 3x) but produces huge amounts of CO2 (6 tons per ton of hydrogen).
Going all in on hydrogen is a bit of a loosely defined notion. Mostly it boils down to dumping lots of money on the table for whomever wants to grab it and creating a few photo opportunities for politicians parroting whatever their sponsors want them to parrot. And as it turns out the fossil fuel industry seems to want to claim most of that.
Looking at the physics, green hydrogen has some applications but what politicians seem to be pitching ranges from delusional to physically challenging. Those pesky laws of thermodynamics get in the way.
So, transporting hydrogen at scale is a problem because even chilled to near absolute zero it's still way less energy dense by volume than liquid LNG. And of course chilling it to those levels is challenging and expensive. It takes up quite a bit more space. As in, you need several ships to move the same amount of energy as a single LNG ship. And of course the way to deal with cold gases heating up is to vent some of it (you boil some off to cool the rest). So, not all of it makes it to the destination. It gets worse. Those ships need fuel. And hydrogen isn't it because of it's volume. You'd need to sacrifice most of the shipping volume to storing the fuel to move it around.
Volumetric density of hydrogen is a problem for transport, shipping, planes, aviation, etc. Moving around enough of it to be interesting would require an order of magnitude more ships, trucks, etc. than we use today for moving around fossil fuels. That's expensive.
And all of that is before you consider that creating hydrogen is inherently more expensive than just using renewable power directly (via batteries).
None of these problems has much wiggle room for scientific breakthroughs. That perpetuum motion machine just doesn't exist. Hydrogen generation is already close to the theoretical maximum in terms of efficiency. There are not going to be any 2x or 3x improvements there. Same for volume. You can't chill it any further than absolute zero. Converting it into other fuels works but is also lossy.
There's a role for green hydrogen. It's replacing the enormous amount of grey hydrogen we generate today for things like fertilizer production. Australia is not going to export hydrogen in meaningful amounts, ever. Nor is anyone else going to be able to scale that to meaningful amounts. It's physically impossible. But they'll likely produce some other things that can be shipped out using green hydrogen. Like fertilizer, steel, etc.
> So, transporting hydrogen at scale is a problem because even chilled to near absolute zero it's still way less energy dense by volume than liquid LNG.
What about transporting Ammonia .. that's three H and and an N .. different beast.
'Better' is always subjective - methane spills from a 1 km long shipping vessel is a lot of potent greenhouse gas back in the air, with an end point issue of using the methane without the C binding and creating CO2 - versus the ammonia with just Nitrogen as waste (or going into ag soils).
Mind you ammonia is an irritating gas and no fun spilled in water at sea .. so, yeah.
The main take home point is that the argument against hydrogen because it's a tiny slippery hard to teansport molecule is a complete furphy - there are other options.
Of course those inefficiencies multiply. You generate hydrogen at 30/40% efficiency. You generate methane from that at a similar efficiency. Then you compress it ... which takes energy. You ship it around. Which takes energy. Then you burn it at 40% efficiency. Numbers rounded up here. Real world efficiencies are worse. Multiply all of that and you end up with efficiencies of a few percent. Nice that it can be done at great cost but there are a lot of things that are probably more efficient and cheaper.
It works, but you loose some more energy. Better still is to make fertilizer with that and ship that out.
Shipping ammonia half way around the world with the intention of using it as a fuel doesn't make sense from an efficiency point of view. You loose so much energy creating the hydrogen, transforming it into ammonia, shipping it around, and then turning it back into mechanical or electrical energy, which again is not super efficient. By the time that is done, you are looking at maybe 10% efficient (possibly way less). So, it's a very costly way to move stuff around using ammonia as a fuel. Nice that it works but unlikely to be a preferred solution aside from some niche use cases.
And while ammonia is better then hydrogen in terms of volumetric density. It's still about half of what lng gives. So, you need two ammonia ships for every lng ship to deliver the same amount of energy. That same property also is an issue with bio kerosene vs. ammonia in planes.
You don't transport hydrogen, you transport some other fuel made in a hydrogen-driven chemical process close to where the hydrogen is made. The hydrogen serves as an initial step (that is true for just about any power-to-something) and as an input buffer to allow running downstream processes 24/7 and not just whenever the sun is shining.
Because different natural endowments of renewable energy. There is a lot more sun and square meters in Australia than Germany or ... just about anywhere in Europe or Asia.
I just wanted to add other storage challenges to your list, but upon googling for it, I had to learn that something called liquid organic hydrogen carrier exists:
"Hydrogen oil – LOHC – has two great advantages compared to compressed and liquid hydrogen:
The hydrogen is stored in oil, LOHC, and there is substantially less free hydrogen on board the ship, which reduces the risk.
The hydrogen oil can be transported in conventional tanks, about the same way as for diesel today, and therefore has substantially lower transport costs than compressed and liquid hydrogen."
I too am missing the punchline. Sounds like synthesizing hydrocarbons directly would probably be simpler and would not require changing any existing infrastructure.
I don't know what this LOHC stuff really is, but it's easy to imagine that dissolving H2 in in an existing liquid would be much less of an undertaking than inducing it to become C8H18 or whatever.
> And all of that is before you consider that creating hydrogen is inherently more expensive than just using renewable power directly (via batteries).
This may be nit-picky of me, but how is using a chemical battery to store energy using electricity directly, but not using a chemical (hydrogen) to store energy not using electricity directly?
A standard definition of a battery is anything that store energy and outputs electricity. To that extent hydrogen is just the chemical element of a battery (fuel cell). You don’t recharge it by inputting electricity (like you do a lithium ion battery), but you replace the active chemical element of it by using electricity to generate more hydrogen and inserting it into your empty fuel cells (recycling your battery basically).
I think if you define direct electricity usage to exclude hydrogen (which is kind of silly) then you’d also need to exclude all other forms of battery. And you are left with basically just overhead wires.
Also nobody is proposing a mass transport of hydrogen to be a viable future. Most proposals have them generated via electrolysis on site.
Solar panel to battery to electrical engine is pretty efficient. We're talking ~80% efficiencies here.
Solar panel to hydrogen you are down to 30-40% right away before you do anything with the hydrogen. You still need to transport it. Once it gets to a fuel cell, you hit maybe 70-80% efficiencies. That's pretty good but these inefficiencies multiply. So, now you are down to 20%. That's a 4x difference. And of course there are losses along the way, etc. So it's more like 10 to 15%. Burning it is worse.
You're correct that the current state of the art isn't great and may in fact be worse than you imagine [1].
An important fact, though, is that there has been little serious sustained effort to push for hydrogen production until now.
Just recently we have seen papers on new techniques [2] some of which are already being tested at trial industrial scales [3]
What is happening now is similar to vaccine development during COVID - accelerated parallel development of stages; the heavy industry side of hydrogen development is being pushed and built on the assumption that key stages will be improved in both incremental and hopefully radical ways.
The message from the climate side of these developments is there's little to no time to waste.
If you’re being incredibly charitable, it’s throwing the fossil fuel industry a lifesaver because they fumbled the ball on the transition to renewables and it won’t be possible for them to compete in the way they have previously (by being market makers)x It’s not quite a make-work scheme, but it’s a way for industry and government to transition energy sources while maintaining the market status quo.
Ultimately if we decarbonise and transition to renewable green energy we will be in a much better place, but I hope the transition sees the fossil fuel giants lose their preeminence. Things like green hydrogen give them a possible way of hanging onto something like model they use now.
This is all very charitable though - it’s just as likely that this is a totally cynical bait and switch.
Yeah. The fossil fuel companies didn’t fumble anything. They’ve actively been involved in hindering nuclear [1] and they invest in Wind and Solar because it’s an ineffective way to actually displace their main business but offers enough of a hedge to collect government subsidies they’d otherwise not have access to. These are multi-billion dollar companies in a slow-moving capital intensive market. This isn’t like tech which is easily capitalized and can move quickly to disrupt incumbents [2].
[2] Even that isn’t easy so much - Microsoft, Google, Apple, Meta, and Amazon have remained at the top for about a decade and it’s unlikely their dominance will be disrupted (even Microsoft which lost its way for a while to Google came back to be number one or two). Basically you can disrupt legacy businesses that haven’t adapted to tech or don’t have a multi-national company in the mix. But disrupting multi-national tech companies is unlikely at this point. Hence why Meta is acting so desperate with MR - Apple, Google, and regulators are an active threat to their continued growth / ability to survive at all. If you own the platform, this becomes less of a concern since competitors can’t push around your business model. Regulators basically just solidify/ossify your position since anyone that reaches a much lower level than these companies are at today suddenly becomes subject to regulation that encumbers them the same way that the larger company is encumbered (ie the intent is largely to slow them down), except this happens to a competitor much earlier in their lifecycle since these companies have had several years of additional growth and none of the limits scale the legislation to account for that (not that it matters in practice because it’s unlikely anyone is going to fund a serious attempt to take on a large behemoth - see DuckDuckGo’s growth struggles and they haven’t even gotten large enough to branch out like Google has).
> they invest in Wind and Solar because it’s an ineffective way to actually displace their main business
This is completely delusional. There was more new net capacity in solar installed in 2022 than nuclear has ever delivered by around 50%. Wind exceeded the historical nuclear max by 30%. And the balance of hydro/geothermal/etc came close to matching it as well. Pipelined production will see the first two doubling in the next few years.
I don't understand why you're trying to take my comment on this weird tangent.
What the fossil fuel companies did was hide what they knew about global warming and manipulate governments into continued investment in reliance on fossil fuels. It's not like it's all a big conspiracy against nuclear.
Also, as other commenters indicate, wind and solar are quite effective in displacing their business, even if not entirely (due to the intermittency problem) - as they are cheaper, renewable, safer, don't have the waste issues and do not involve problematic geo-politics for the fuel. Not to mention how wind and solar don't preclude the use of nuclear for night-time generation.
This is why it pays to better inform the public about the difference between Green Hydrogen from renewables and Blue Hydrogen from fossil fuels.
The driver behind Australias Green Hydrogen is a Western Australian Andrew "Twiggy" Forrest - PhD in Marine Biology and a few billion in iron ore wealth and generational ownership of vast tracts of land.
His plan is to significantly increase global Green Hydrogen production with the next few years and to grow more from there.
The export plans are electricity via cable to Singapore and SE Asia, and to Europe via Ammonia - large molecule Hydrogen and surplus Nitrogen (nuetral atmosphere release on cracking later for power generation.
Twigs has been parroting on about Green Hydrogen for at least a decade. I feel like every time he thinks FMG stock needs bit of a pump he'll yell something about Green Hydrogen ...
Who's yelling? Let's all stay calm. Just saying he talks a good game, but talk is cheap.
> He, on the other hand, goes ahead and invests a few billion and ground breaks on capital infrastructure.
I don't have a few billion to spend. Sorry. Where's this few Billion Twigs has invested in Green project again? Maybe I'm wrong. There's Gladstone and that's about it, in terms of significant dollars actually put down by FMG/Twigs AFAICT. I'm genuinely just asking.
Gladstone is ~$150 million direct investment (by Forrest) for Green Hydrogen, so that's small beer; Clarke Creek wind, solar and battery farm from ealier this year was $3 billion (by Forrest) IIRC, and he's just put another $4 billion into CWP Renewables acquisition (which I'll be honest I haven't yet mapped - that may or may not overlap the Clarke Creek project).
However many of this small projects are part of a larger $50 billion commitment with Germany to produce up to five million tonnes of green hydrogen (per annum) by 2030.
Your snark is inaccurate. FFI (one of the major players discussed here) is not part of the fossil fuel industry, and it’s chairman castigates the fossil fuel industry publicly and repeatedly.
Green Hydrogen is Hydrogen generated by NOT using fossil fuels.
I work for a company that is working VERY HARD to make this a major industry. Cynicism is a no effort way to discount these efforts. you're doing more damage to our efforts than the fossil fuel industry is doing by greenwashing.
A modifier implies that there exists things that are not that. If not then “hydrogen” would suffice. So “green hydrogen” to me suggests that “dirty hydrogen” could exist.
That would have been a reasonable judgement in the previous decades. Perhaps not so much now. There is a change of mood, and attitudes towards the fossil fuel industry, reflected by this years' change of government. The recent intervention into the gas market simply wouldn't have happened a few years ago.
To be sure the fossil fuel industry is still a danger here and will stop at nothing to curb the growth of renewables. But its political power has taken a hit.
The simple colour code naming of hydrogen production methods is well established enough now for it to be pretty hard for the industry to pass off 'brown' or 'blue' etc as green (though they will try deceptively to market both as 'good enough'). And 'green hydro' is genuinely carbon emission free in both production and use.
64.2% of all newspaper circulation is owned by Murdoch. And it is here where he pioneered the idea of weaponing his mastheads to further his political and economic views.
And Murdoch famously partnered with the mining industry to take down a government when they tried to introduce a mining tax.
And I’m far from a conservative. I just think socialism is more stupid & damaging in the real world (as opposed to in theory) than any of the realistic alternatives, but that doesn’t make me a supporter of the Coke party rather than the Pepsi party, or indeed of Rupert Murdoch.
Australia should stop exporting raw materials and do the refining closer to the mines. That would cut the cost of transport dramatically and keep more of the profit in Australia. But Australia seems wedded to the idea that it should remain an exporter of raw materials instead of finished goods.
And the idea that this can be up and running within less than twelve months sounds rather like wishful thinking to put it charitably.
"Australia", understood as a nationwide polity attending to its aggregate interests, barely exists. The part of it that decides what happens to resources (ie. the resource owners and client governments) doesn't give a crap about value-adding, because it can make scads of cash from exports without having to deal with much in the way of messy labour relationships, etc.
There are some signs of change however. The resource industry is currently looked at with more suspicion than I've seen here before. Time will tell.
> And the idea that this can be up and running within less than twelve months sounds rather like wishful thinking to put it charitably.
Why so? Hyzon is apparently already shipping (they just posted about one of their trucks starting commercial work at the port of Houston) so that's available (with the need for modifications e.g. right hand drive and australia-standard carriage), the solar farm already exists, the wind farm is apparently under construction (https://infrastructurepipeline.org/project/macintyre-wind-fa...), and as befits of their name "plug" apparently delivers modular plug-and-run electrolyser, and they have running projects (https://hydrogen-central.com/plug-1mw-electrolyzer-commissio...).
So it all looks at least realistic, though obviously the proof's in the pudding.
It's more profitable for companies in Oz to export some raw materials currently. It really does depend on the material though, Aluminium as an example Oz exports a fair bit of that as well as bauxite. Hydrogen somewhat is processed at least before export.
Economically speaking, why bother producing the steel in Australia? The vast majority of it is mined nowhere near the normal population centres, so there’s not really any convenience in refining it on site. By the time you’ve gotten it to a port, you aren’t going to be losing that much transporting the ore rather than steel. I think you also need coal, which iirc is by and large not located close to the iron ore resources.
Additionally, I’d bet the value-add (profitwise) from steel refining is not very high - it would be a competitive industry, since anyone can spin up a refinery and import the steel. The restriction is the iron supply, so that’s where the price impact hits if there’s a shortage.
It’s all a matter of economics, and it appears that it’s not very profitable to produce steel in Australia - so we don’t.
5.5 million tonnes of it annually counts as a bit more "we don't [produce steel]" - even if it's a drop in the bucket to the 1100 million tonnes China produces. Apparently we're about the 28th largest producer worldwide (which obviously suggests we're one of the lowest producing OECD nations).
It really wouldn't. China has decided to turn an absolutely massive amount of iron ore into steel for non-economic reasons, which means that the profits to be made are largely in supplying them with raw materials.
This is very accurate. I used to work with a steel distributor, and it's not just cheaper to ship to China, refine and ship back, it's significantly cheaper than refining on shore.
> high cost of labour / history of problematic industrial relations
High “cost” would be much less of an issue, if we actually taxed these resource companies appropriately. At the moment they’re basically allowed to waltz out of the country with materials en masse, for relatively no cost.
The one time we suggested that maybe they should be paying fairly, they screeched loudly and ran an enormous media campaign against that party.
That’s a naive understanding of 2 topics in 1 post. Structural high labour costs can’t be negated by a CO2 tax - how could they?
The Gillard / Ken Henry CO2 tax proposals would have had a devastating impact on employment in both mining and oil & gas. While many ideologues would have cheered this at the time, both industries were and are essential to modern industrial economies. There are many examples all over the world (and in Econ 101 textbooks) of what happens after you increase taxes on an activity or product. While there was a media campaign, it’s disingenuous to suggest that’s the only thing that stopped the tax (and got rid of one of many terrible governments we’ve had in modern-day Australia).
> hydrogen is tiny so tends to leak out of containers
I'm not a materials person, so please point out the error the following thought experiment.
Use a cylindrical vessel with an opening at the bottom. Fill with hydrogen, then fill with a liquid that is heavier than hydrogen (so it sits at the bottom), then plug it. Hopefully the heavier liquid is less "leaky". Would this work?
I wish we would stop using words green, zero, neutral for anything with actual normal as usual emissions (which is practically everything today). Of course writing something like "feeble attempt at pretending that adding extra steps into a regular emissions scheme means anything for the climate" instead of "green" is a bit too long for journalists, but at least it would be factually correct. I wonder, is there any organization preparing for the eventual scenario when we will blew the worst prediction target and won't stop at that point?
> Ammonia doesn’t burn well on its own, he notes, and converting exported ammonia back to hydrogen for steel plants or fuel-cell vehicles requires a lot of energy. “You’re using energy to import energy. If you need green hydrogen in Europe, it’s probably cheaper to make green hydrogen in Europe,” Tengler concludes.
Surely hydrogen makes more sense for in-situ energy storage at solar and wind farms to smooth out supply during dark/windless times
Why the negativity here? What people mostly worry about (fossil fuel being used to produce electric then produce hydrogen in the background) is simply explained in this line in the article
"The carbon-free rigs will pack 50 kilos of hydrogen zapped from water using electricity from the refinery’s dedicated solar power plant."
hence __green__ hydrogen.
On the contrary, I think storing energy in hydrogen has more potential in long term compare to lithium or any other type of batteries that rely on ores we need to dig up, refine and dump as waste after a couple of years, no?
Electrolysers are (for now) slightly more mineral limited than batteries and don't last as long. Both are valuable enough to recycle, and both are having a lot of work being done in finding abundant chemistries. Batteries are further along on the latter.
Western australia has good enough solar resources that they could in theory use a heat based hydrogen production method, but that is more logistically difficult.
TL;DR Hydrogen isn't for electricity, it's for ammonia/steel/polymers/etc and the stores of various hydrogen compounds created for those purposes are your emergency backup for the month long dunkelflaute if it ever manifests
The offshore wind podcast at (https://gwec.buzzsprout.com/) recently put out a three part series on hydrogen that i found particularly interesting, and promising (to this layman)
102 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 175 ms ] thread> The trucks’ unchanging route was also a plus: The relatively flat loop enabled use of a smaller, cheaper, fuel cell.
Am I ignoring something here, or couldn't they just lay railroad track then? It's not a heavily populated area.
But building a train wouldn't get anyone talking.
And they could start building it today with no development work required. All the parts needed are available off the shelf.
https://newatlas.com/transport/fortescue-wae-infinity-train-...
https://www.railwaypro.com/wp/alstom-to-develop-a-hydrogen-s...
https://www.worldfinance.com/strategy/canadian-pacific-on-tr...
https://www.trains.com/trn/news-reviews/news-wire/canadian-p...
They'd need to either go directly through to the port's yard, through half the port and with a new bridge over a river, or branch off of a closer yard (between cluden and stuart), cross through a creek and two highways.
Former means enormous capex (if you can even get permitted and negotiate with the port), and latter means merely large but now you're at the mercy of traffic on the NCL.
Nothing impossible, but I can see how the refinery would have started trucking 25 years ago (apparently it started in 1996) and scaled that up progressively.
And then there's the bad news that this section of the NCL is not electrified, so you'd still be paying for your diesel and it would be completely unhelpful.
Not to mention as the article notes:
> Resource-poor Asian neighbors such as Japan and Korea are also counting on Aussie green hydrogen to help get them off fossil fuels in the decades ahead.
This is a project / study from the parent company, per their own "our company page":
> In early 2021 our sister company Ark Energy Corporation was established by Korea Zinc to decarbonise the energy supply of the group starting with Sun Metals.
Not necessarily. Once energy costs become around around 2.5x cheaper than they are now, MVC distillation becomes cost effective for desalination. With the space and sun they have, they have the potential for near unlimited water.
Has a strong directional component too - the "Roaring Forties"
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/averages/tables/cw_018106.shtm...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wind_farms_in_Australi...
> About 40% of Australia is covered by dunes. Australia is the driest inhabited continent,[6][7] with the least fertile soils.
We have room for solar panels to generate the entire energy consumption of the globe. Raw material availability isn't a problem in general. The water required is under 10% of what is currently used for agriculture, and if you want more you desalinate it. Desalination needs a lot of energy of course, but the one thing they won't be short of in this scenario is cheap electricity to power desalination plants.
The thinking behind this is pretty simple. Australia is a major exporter of natural gas. If they can get the price of producing Hydrogen to below the cost of fracking for methane, then it's a winner. Last I checked they were a factor of 4 away, but that was before the Ukraine War. I don't know if it's possible to drop the production price by a factor of 4, but the price of natural gas rising by a factor of 4 seems entirely possible.
Australia and Canada are the planets kings of resource extraction. This sort of thing is what they excel at. Unlike Canada, Australia has the land, the sun, and is next to Asia (with Queensland the closest). Asia is the worlds industrial base but is energy poor. Yes it is currently just a dream, but maybe not a pipe dream.
I don't know how much of an impact this causes for freight, but passenger trains in Australia often get delayed / slowed down due to heat deforming the rails. At least in Victoria anyway. This may be one consideration for not going that way.
Agree however that the messaging around it has great greenwash potential. That was deffo Australia's previous fed government's intent with it.
Why would you say that? I mean, some sort of pollutant emission is inevitable in any heavy industry, but there's no physical reason it has to involve the transfer of carbon that's been locked under the ground for 100s of millions of years into the atmosphere, which is the only thing we really need to stop doing (unless some sort of process for extracting it from the atmosphere again at the same rate we add it is feasible, which isn't looking particularly likely).
Right now the world produces a small fraction of its electricity cleanly and the rest using fossil fuels. If you want to divert some of that human energy consumption from heating/cooling/cooking/lighting/computing to H2 production then how do you make sure the diverted energy is from clean sources and that those consumers don't take it upon themselves to fill the new hole in their lives with additional fossil consumption?
If you're going to say we should create petawatt-hours-per-year of additional electricity generation capacity in order to do this, that sounds great but the infrastructure doesn't exist and it will take decades-to-centuries to build it.
So, I'm very much in favor of developing and maintaining the technological expertise required to use H2 for energy. I'm not nearly as convinced when it comes to trying to deploy it at scale in the 2020s.
That's "green hydrogen" by definition - ie. what this article & discussion is all about. The gp is simply mistaken, and the coal analogy is ridiculous. Whether green hydro turns out to be economic/scalable is a separate matter.
There are significant emissions from the production of everything from turbines, batteries, cabling etc.
I don't have hard numbers, but I'm pretty sure that hydrogen is much much less green than some other alternatives like solar in total footprint. But we lump them together as if they are equally good. Same as with corporations going carbon neutral - one company is doing actual carbon sequestration and is really neutral, another company is cheating and just buying carbon credits from some undeveloped country and pretends to be neutral too (especially if they are just using existing forests as a claim). They are not the same but the names are.
Looking at the physics, green hydrogen has some applications but what politicians seem to be pitching ranges from delusional to physically challenging. Those pesky laws of thermodynamics get in the way.
So, transporting hydrogen at scale is a problem because even chilled to near absolute zero it's still way less energy dense by volume than liquid LNG. And of course chilling it to those levels is challenging and expensive. It takes up quite a bit more space. As in, you need several ships to move the same amount of energy as a single LNG ship. And of course the way to deal with cold gases heating up is to vent some of it (you boil some off to cool the rest). So, not all of it makes it to the destination. It gets worse. Those ships need fuel. And hydrogen isn't it because of it's volume. You'd need to sacrifice most of the shipping volume to storing the fuel to move it around.
Volumetric density of hydrogen is a problem for transport, shipping, planes, aviation, etc. Moving around enough of it to be interesting would require an order of magnitude more ships, trucks, etc. than we use today for moving around fossil fuels. That's expensive.
And all of that is before you consider that creating hydrogen is inherently more expensive than just using renewable power directly (via batteries).
None of these problems has much wiggle room for scientific breakthroughs. That perpetuum motion machine just doesn't exist. Hydrogen generation is already close to the theoretical maximum in terms of efficiency. There are not going to be any 2x or 3x improvements there. Same for volume. You can't chill it any further than absolute zero. Converting it into other fuels works but is also lossy.
There's a role for green hydrogen. It's replacing the enormous amount of grey hydrogen we generate today for things like fertilizer production. Australia is not going to export hydrogen in meaningful amounts, ever. Nor is anyone else going to be able to scale that to meaningful amounts. It's physically impossible. But they'll likely produce some other things that can be shipped out using green hydrogen. Like fertilizer, steel, etc.
What about transporting Ammonia .. that's three H and and an N .. different beast.
Mind you ammonia is an irritating gas and no fun spilled in water at sea .. so, yeah.
The main take home point is that the argument against hydrogen because it's a tiny slippery hard to teansport molecule is a complete furphy - there are other options.
Shipping ammonia half way around the world with the intention of using it as a fuel doesn't make sense from an efficiency point of view. You loose so much energy creating the hydrogen, transforming it into ammonia, shipping it around, and then turning it back into mechanical or electrical energy, which again is not super efficient. By the time that is done, you are looking at maybe 10% efficient (possibly way less). So, it's a very costly way to move stuff around using ammonia as a fuel. Nice that it works but unlikely to be a preferred solution aside from some niche use cases.
And while ammonia is better then hydrogen in terms of volumetric density. It's still about half of what lng gives. So, you need two ammonia ships for every lng ship to deliver the same amount of energy. That same property also is an issue with bio kerosene vs. ammonia in planes.
"Hydrogen oil – LOHC – has two great advantages compared to compressed and liquid hydrogen:
The hydrogen is stored in oil, LOHC, and there is substantially less free hydrogen on board the ship, which reduces the risk. The hydrogen oil can be transported in conventional tanks, about the same way as for diesel today, and therefore has substantially lower transport costs than compressed and liquid hydrogen."
https://greenshippingprogramme.com/pilot/infrastructure-for-...
This sounds like a parody of hydrocarbons.
While the 'used' oil is being stored, to be 'reloaded' with hydrogen by whichever means.
So the 'carrier-oil-component' is the reusable thing here.
All while being able to be handled, stored, transported similar to diesel.
Supposedly.
shrug
This may be nit-picky of me, but how is using a chemical battery to store energy using electricity directly, but not using a chemical (hydrogen) to store energy not using electricity directly?
A standard definition of a battery is anything that store energy and outputs electricity. To that extent hydrogen is just the chemical element of a battery (fuel cell). You don’t recharge it by inputting electricity (like you do a lithium ion battery), but you replace the active chemical element of it by using electricity to generate more hydrogen and inserting it into your empty fuel cells (recycling your battery basically).
I think if you define direct electricity usage to exclude hydrogen (which is kind of silly) then you’d also need to exclude all other forms of battery. And you are left with basically just overhead wires.
Also nobody is proposing a mass transport of hydrogen to be a viable future. Most proposals have them generated via electrolysis on site.
Solar panel to hydrogen you are down to 30-40% right away before you do anything with the hydrogen. You still need to transport it. Once it gets to a fuel cell, you hit maybe 70-80% efficiencies. That's pretty good but these inefficiencies multiply. So, now you are down to 20%. That's a 4x difference. And of course there are losses along the way, etc. So it's more like 10 to 15%. Burning it is worse.
An important fact, though, is that there has been little serious sustained effort to push for hydrogen production until now.
Just recently we have seen papers on new techniques [2] some of which are already being tested at trial industrial scales [3]
What is happening now is similar to vaccine development during COVID - accelerated parallel development of stages; the heavy industry side of hydrogen development is being pushed and built on the assumption that key stages will be improved in both incremental and hopefully radical ways.
The message from the climate side of these developments is there's little to no time to waste.
[1] https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2021/se/d0se0...
[2] https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/seawater-splitting-syste...
[3] https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/water-splitting-device-s...
Ultimately if we decarbonise and transition to renewable green energy we will be in a much better place, but I hope the transition sees the fossil fuel giants lose their preeminence. Things like green hydrogen give them a possible way of hanging onto something like model they use now.
This is all very charitable though - it’s just as likely that this is a totally cynical bait and switch.
I think you're really stretching charitableness to its limits here... (groan)
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2016/07/13/are-f...
[2] Even that isn’t easy so much - Microsoft, Google, Apple, Meta, and Amazon have remained at the top for about a decade and it’s unlikely their dominance will be disrupted (even Microsoft which lost its way for a while to Google came back to be number one or two). Basically you can disrupt legacy businesses that haven’t adapted to tech or don’t have a multi-national company in the mix. But disrupting multi-national tech companies is unlikely at this point. Hence why Meta is acting so desperate with MR - Apple, Google, and regulators are an active threat to their continued growth / ability to survive at all. If you own the platform, this becomes less of a concern since competitors can’t push around your business model. Regulators basically just solidify/ossify your position since anyone that reaches a much lower level than these companies are at today suddenly becomes subject to regulation that encumbers them the same way that the larger company is encumbered (ie the intent is largely to slow them down), except this happens to a competitor much earlier in their lifecycle since these companies have had several years of additional growth and none of the limits scale the legislation to account for that (not that it matters in practice because it’s unlikely anyone is going to fund a serious attempt to take on a large behemoth - see DuckDuckGo’s growth struggles and they haven’t even gotten large enough to branch out like Google has).
This is completely delusional. There was more new net capacity in solar installed in 2022 than nuclear has ever delivered by around 50%. Wind exceeded the historical nuclear max by 30%. And the balance of hydro/geothermal/etc came close to matching it as well. Pipelined production will see the first two doubling in the next few years.
What the fossil fuel companies did was hide what they knew about global warming and manipulate governments into continued investment in reliance on fossil fuels. It's not like it's all a big conspiracy against nuclear.
Also, as other commenters indicate, wind and solar are quite effective in displacing their business, even if not entirely (due to the intermittency problem) - as they are cheaper, renewable, safer, don't have the waste issues and do not involve problematic geo-politics for the fuel. Not to mention how wind and solar don't preclude the use of nuclear for night-time generation.
The driver behind Australias Green Hydrogen is a Western Australian Andrew "Twiggy" Forrest - PhD in Marine Biology and a few billion in iron ore wealth and generational ownership of vast tracts of land.
His plan is to significantly increase global Green Hydrogen production with the next few years and to grow more from there.
The export plans are electricity via cable to Singapore and SE Asia, and to Europe via Ammonia - large molecule Hydrogen and surplus Nitrogen (nuetral atmosphere release on cracking later for power generation.
He, on the other hand, goes ahead and invests a few billion and ground breaks on capital infrastructure.
So, regardless of my feelings about the guy, what I see is you yelling on a forum about how he yells at the sky Vs him getting on and doing something.
> He, on the other hand, goes ahead and invests a few billion and ground breaks on capital infrastructure.
I don't have a few billion to spend. Sorry. Where's this few Billion Twigs has invested in Green project again? Maybe I'm wrong. There's Gladstone and that's about it, in terms of significant dollars actually put down by FMG/Twigs AFAICT. I'm genuinely just asking.
However many of this small projects are part of a larger $50 billion commitment with Germany to produce up to five million tonnes of green hydrogen (per annum) by 2030.
Green Hydrogen is Hydrogen generated by NOT using fossil fuels.
I work for a company that is working VERY HARD to make this a major industry. Cynicism is a no effort way to discount these efforts. you're doing more damage to our efforts than the fossil fuel industry is doing by greenwashing.
It is not the same political environment that has existed for the previous decade.
To be sure the fossil fuel industry is still a danger here and will stop at nothing to curb the growth of renewables. But its political power has taken a hit.
The simple colour code naming of hydrogen production methods is well established enough now for it to be pretty hard for the industry to pass off 'brown' or 'blue' etc as green (though they will try deceptively to market both as 'good enough'). And 'green hydro' is genuinely carbon emission free in both production and use.
If they're frothing at the mouth, it's hurting the fossil fuel industry.
64.2% of all newspaper circulation is owned by Murdoch. And it is here where he pioneered the idea of weaponing his mastheads to further his political and economic views.
And Murdoch famously partnered with the mining industry to take down a government when they tried to introduce a mining tax.
And I’m far from a conservative. I just think socialism is more stupid & damaging in the real world (as opposed to in theory) than any of the realistic alternatives, but that doesn’t make me a supporter of the Coke party rather than the Pepsi party, or indeed of Rupert Murdoch.
And the idea that this can be up and running within less than twelve months sounds rather like wishful thinking to put it charitably.
There are some signs of change however. The resource industry is currently looked at with more suspicion than I've seen here before. Time will tell.
Why so? Hyzon is apparently already shipping (they just posted about one of their trucks starting commercial work at the port of Houston) so that's available (with the need for modifications e.g. right hand drive and australia-standard carriage), the solar farm already exists, the wind farm is apparently under construction (https://infrastructurepipeline.org/project/macintyre-wind-fa...), and as befits of their name "plug" apparently delivers modular plug-and-run electrolyser, and they have running projects (https://hydrogen-central.com/plug-1mw-electrolyzer-commissio...).
So it all looks at least realistic, though obviously the proof's in the pudding.
Additionally, I’d bet the value-add (profitwise) from steel refining is not very high - it would be a competitive industry, since anyone can spin up a refinery and import the steel. The restriction is the iron supply, so that’s where the price impact hits if there’s a shortage.
It’s all a matter of economics, and it appears that it’s not very profitable to produce steel in Australia - so we don’t.
It really wouldn't. China has decided to turn an absolutely massive amount of iron ore into steel for non-economic reasons, which means that the profits to be made are largely in supplying them with raw materials.
High cost of energy / high cost of labour / history of problematic industrial relations all conspire against this worthy goal.
High “cost” would be much less of an issue, if we actually taxed these resource companies appropriately. At the moment they’re basically allowed to waltz out of the country with materials en masse, for relatively no cost.
The one time we suggested that maybe they should be paying fairly, they screeched loudly and ran an enormous media campaign against that party.
What is the conversion factor between electricity->hydrogen->electricity?
How much does storing hydrogen cost per kwh?
What is the density of that storage? Per kg or m^2?
What is the leakage rate for that storage? (hydrogen is tiny so tends to leak out of containers)
How much does a the hydrogen producer cost per KW? The hydrogen consumer?
Doesn’t feel too bad to me, especially how cheap renewables are.
[0] https://newatlas.com/energy/hysata-efficient-hydrogen-electr...
I'm not a materials person, so please point out the error the following thought experiment.
Use a cylindrical vessel with an opening at the bottom. Fill with hydrogen, then fill with a liquid that is heavier than hydrogen (so it sits at the bottom), then plug it. Hopefully the heavier liquid is less "leaky". Would this work?
Surely hydrogen makes more sense for in-situ energy storage at solar and wind farms to smooth out supply during dark/windless times
"The carbon-free rigs will pack 50 kilos of hydrogen zapped from water using electricity from the refinery’s dedicated solar power plant."
hence __green__ hydrogen.
On the contrary, I think storing energy in hydrogen has more potential in long term compare to lithium or any other type of batteries that rely on ores we need to dig up, refine and dump as waste after a couple of years, no?
Western australia has good enough solar resources that they could in theory use a heat based hydrogen production method, but that is more logistically difficult.
TL;DR Hydrogen isn't for electricity, it's for ammonia/steel/polymers/etc and the stores of various hydrogen compounds created for those purposes are your emergency backup for the month long dunkelflaute if it ever manifests