![](GreenPlay/Cover%202021_Rev5_SM.jpg)
Return To Main Page
Contact Us
![](images/Logos/Wired%20Logo.jpg)
24 April 2023
By Peter Brown
Forget
Cars, Green Hydrogen Will Supercharge Crops
Renewable generation projects are set to make this future fuel widely
available.
And it’s much more versatile than you think.
IN
THE DRY, red
dust of Western Australia’s vast Pilbara region, something green is
growing. In October 2022, construction began on a massive solar
photovoltaic and battery installation, around 40 soccer fields in
size, that will soon power a 10-megawatt electrolyzer—a machine that
uses electricity to convert water into hydrogen. But that hydrogen
isn’t going to fuel cars or trucks or buses: It’s going to grow crops.
The Yuri
Project—a joint venture between
global fertilizer giant Yara, utilities company Engie, and investment
and trading company Mitsui & Co.—is producing green hydrogen that’s
combined with nitrogen to create ammonia for fertilizer production.
Given the long-running conversation about hydrogen-fueled vehicles,
fertilizer probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when
thinking about green hydrogen. But in the past few years, the
discussion around the fuel has shifted and broadened as more
industries see this zero-carbon fuel’s potential to decarbonize
carbon-intensive industrial processes and sectors.
The production of ammonia for fertilizer
contributes around 0.8
percent of global greenhouse gas
emissions. Currently, the industry is a major consumer of hydrogen,
which is produced from natural gas or coal and generates significant
carbon emissions. Green hydrogen, on the other hand, uses electricity
from renewable sources to split water into hydrogen and oxygen using a
process called electrolysis, which means the process generates zero
carbon emissions.
That is an
exciting prospect for Yara, which is the largest ammonia producer in
the world. “The concept of green ammonia was first slated to us
probably back in 2014,”
says Leigh Holder, business development
director for Yara Clean Ammonia in Australia. “It was viewed with a
lot of skepticism back then, and a lot of that had to do with the cost
of renewables.”
Now the price of renewable energy from sources such as wind and solar
has plummeted, bringing green hydrogen within economic reach for a
huge range of potential applications. Perhaps surprisingly,
hydrogen-fueled passenger transport is not top of the list, says
Fredrik Mowill, CEO of Hystar, a major manufacturer of proton exchange
membrane (PEM) electrolyzers for the production of green hydrogen.
“There’s probably been a disproportionate amount of attention given to
transportation within green hydrogen,” Mowill says.
He says large-scale industrial applications—like the Yuri Project—are
what will really drive demand. “A company like Yara will need enormous
amounts of green hydrogen,” he says.
Another industry with a keen interest in green hydrogen is
freight transport. In Australia, diesel-fueled trucks take a major cut
out of the carbon budget. But electric trucks aren’t a viable
solution, either on the long-haul routes to get goods to and from
remote areas or when shifting heavy loads, such as around mines. “If
we can start decarbonizing that through hydrogen, that’s a great
application,” says Steven Percy, a senior research fellow in the
Victorian Hydrogen Hub at Swinburne University in Melbourne. Hydrogen
fuel cell electric trucks will soon be rumbling around the Sun Metals
zinc refinery near Townsville in Queensland in Australia’s
northeast—fueled by green hydrogen generated by a solar farm and
electrolyzer operation next door. A 40-ton, 500-horsepower,
hydrogen-powered truck was also unveiled at the European Conference on
Energy Transition in Geneva last year.
But perhaps hydrogen’s greatest potential lies in its ability
to store energy for rainy days. While fossil fuels are stores of
energy from prehistoric sunlight, hydrogen can be used to store the
solar energy of the previous 12 hours. “You need green hydrogen to
continue to increase the amount of renewable power,” says Mowill. Once
an electricity grid gets to a critical mass of renewable inputs from
sources such as wind and solar, something has to step in to stabilize
and smooth out those peaks and troughs of supply and demand. “You
can’t solve that with batteries; it’s at a scale that wouldn’t be
practical,” Mowill says. “Hydrogen is a very good way of balancing out
this.”
And unlike batteries, hydrogen can be efficiently transported. It can
be compressed into liquid hydrogen, which does require some energy, or
it can be converted into ammonia, which is already transported around
the world, then “cracked” back into hydrogen and nitrogen at its
destination.
Countries like Japan and South Korea, which are home to
energy-intensive industries (such as steel and the manufacturing of
cars and ships) but lack the renewable resources to power them
sustainably, are eager to import hydrogen from countries with an
excess of renewable energy, such as Australia.
“The idea is basically that you produce those hydrogen
molecules or hydrogen direct derivatives in countries with abundant
renewable resources,” says Carlos Trench, head of hydrogen projects at
Engie Australia & New Zealand. “Then you transport the
molecules—whether it’s ammonia or any other derivative—and then you
reconvert that molecule into green power at the destination where a
direct development of renewables is not feasible.”
Japan has already declared its intention to be a world leader
in the hydrogen economy as part of its carbon-neutrality strategy.
South Korea is hoping hydrogen will supply around one-third of its
energy by 2050.
But Percy stresses that despite all the excitement, green
hydrogen is still currently a bit player in the global decarbonization
game. “It’s really very small-scale right now,” he says. But it is
ramping up.
China’s state-owned energy company Sinopec has started construction on
what will be the world’s largest green hydrogen facility. When
completed, it will produce 30,000 tons of green hydrogen each year.
(At the moment, less than a million tons of low-carbon hydrogen is
produced annually, and much of that is created using fossil fuels,
with the resulting carbon then captured.)
Spain is also striding ahead with production and in 2020
unveiled its plans to become a major hydrogen producer. It set a
target of producing 4 gigawatts of green hydrogen annually by 2030—but
it has already surpassed this four times over and has plans for more
production facilities.
Cost is still an issue. About 60 percent of the expense of
green hydrogen is the cost of the renewable energy used to produce it,
Percy says, so as renewable energy gets cheaper, hydrogen will too.
The cost of the electrolyzer technology is another major component of
hydrogen’s relatively high price, but Mowill says electrolyzers are
becoming more efficient. There are also the logistics of storage,
compression, and transportation, which further bump up the price of a
molecule of green hydrogen.
But as hydrogen’s star rises, these costs will inevitably come
down, Percy says. “If you look at what happened with solar, both solar
and battery systems came down about 80 percent in about 10 years,” he
says. He predicts the same will happen with hydrogen once it finds
more solid technological ground. “The trials that are happening now
are really important for the industry to learn from,” he says. “While
it’s a pilot scale today, in five years’ time they’re likely to be
ready for something bigger.”
Green Play Ammonia™, Yielder® NFuel Energy.
Spokane, Washington. 99212
www.exactrix.com
509 995 1879 cell, Pacific.
exactrix@exactrix.com
|
|