Can hydrogen help the world reach net zero? | FT Film

[Music] hydrogen is this magic molecule which is the lightest most energetic and the most abundant in the universe when you master hydrogen in its pure component you're basically having the best energy you can have [Music] in the global shift to cleaner forms of energy ever more attention is being drawn to the awesome potential of the smallest simplest element there is hydrogen in this film we'll look at the Gathering Rays to build a massive new hydrogen economy which could transform sectors from heavy industry to mass transportation starting here in the southern Spanish province of theodad real solar panels are being used to power the biggest green hydrogen plant in Europe it's been built by eberdroller the continent's biggest utility company the solar electricity Powers a process called electrolysis this uses electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen the hydrogen goes directly to an adjacent Factory to make ammonia which is used today mainly in fertilizer and is widely seen as a potentially crucial zero carbon fuel our molecule water is a hydrogen and oxygen with the energy and the green energy we break the molecule so we get oxygen in one side and hydrogen in the other side we take the energy from the phototake band which is actually four or five kilometers away from here in puertoiano we take it and we bring it to this building where we have the electrolysis we have 16 cells of electrizes there we we break the water molecules we get this hydrogen this oxygen and what we do is the oxygen can be used for other industrial uses and the hydrogen is delivered to to the customer we can only produce in the day so this is why we have the tanks we store a part of the production so during the night we can use that hydrogen we have store and deliver it to the customer as well the projects near the town of Puerto Yano is just the start of an ambitious hydrogen drive from bed roller which plans to invest 3 billion euros in this space by 2030. before 2030 we have different projects in different geographies in the Iberian Peninsula in the U.S in Australia Brazil and we will see how these products are progressing and it's not only about the hydrogen or ammonia or methanol manufacturing facility it is also about the electricity that you need to generate from Renewables to fuel all these factories and this is also an interesting investment from our site hydrogen is already in widespread use largely in the fertilizer and petrochemical industries currently nearly all of it is made by breaking apart hydrocarbon fossil fuels giving hydrogen and carbon dioxide that gives off about a billion tons of carbon dioxide each year two percent of global greenhouse gas emissions for the moment the green hydrogen process is more expensive but ibed roller with a huge and growing collection of solar and wind farms hopes that will change pretty quickly as the cost of renewable energy and electrolyzers continues to fall while the price of fossil fuels goes up with tighter carbon pricing systems what we want is that the final customer you know the guy that is going to buy the the bread in the supermarket does it have to pay more in order to buy a Prelude which has not polluted while it has been produced so fertilizers of course are a key element in order to decarbonize the the whole chain if we can take that money lower the price of the king hydrogen our customer will be able to sell more green fertilizers and that money will flow through the chain until the final customer that's the goal that's the idea and this is something we are counting on in order to make those those that project fully viable some energy experts have voice concern that enthusiasm for green hydrogen could go too far recent Studies have shown that if man-made hydrogen leaks into the atmosphere it could interact with greenhouse gases to worsen global warming meanwhile the world is already struggling to build enough Renewable Power to move its electricity generation away from fossil fuels the more electricity that's used to make green hydrogen they worry the longer it will take to decarbonize the grid we can see that renewable is suspending very much everybody can see that this will also bring economies of scale keep going down through the learning curve my understanding it is that the final solution will be green hydrogen but green is just one color in the hydrogen rainbow pink hydrogen also involves electrolysis with the electricity generated by nuclear plants instead of Renewables gray hydrogen is produced by splitting apart methane gas to produce hydrogen and carbon dioxide black and brown hydrogen are produced in a similar way using black or brown coal the blue hydrogen process also breaks up fossil fuels but in this case the carbon dioxide is captured and stored or used for industrial purposes Advocates say this is the most promising cost-effective solution in the near term but critics argue that it comes with a high risk of greenhouse gas leakage and that it's being aggressively promoted by the fossil fuel industry and then there's Emerald hydrogen a concept being pursued by one ambitious startup near Hull in the northeast of England [Music] High Rob has patented a system to produce hydrogen from hydrocarbons like methane using a plasma torch the process happens in the absence of oxygen meaning that it produces solid carbon instead of carbon dioxide one of the funniest things we talk to people about is your carbon footprint is your CO2 your carbon dioxide footprint carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas solid carbon ironically solid carbon is the lead in your pencil it's inert it won't turn into a carbon dioxide in thousands of years so it's not a problem in fact it's quite a useful byproduct it gets used in the tire industry to make tires Rubber and usable it gets used for Coatings toner and so forth and then we're increasingly using it in new cases as a building material in cement or with steel in the production of Steel and other use cases High Rock says its process can offer a useful alternative to Green hydrogen it can be deployed on a small scale and uses less energy per kilogram of hydrogen produced and it offers a potential means of using the world's reserves of fossil gas without dangerous emissions of carbon dioxide hydrocarbons get a lot of negative press because when they're burnt they produce CO2 but they're great fuels they're really really energy rich and therefore they're a great source of hydrogen for us we've got buyers we've got too many buyers and we're having to limit the number of projects we can do this year the investment behind that is huge and fantastic because people see the potential of our technology foreign out a full-scale hydrogen economy will require vast amounts of capital and for some investment funds that looks like one of the biggest opportunities in the world today Pierre Tien from a former industrial gases executive is the CEO of high 24 a fund dedicated to hydrogen Investments launched in 2022 the fund has raised 2 billion euros from a range of major industrial and financial companies including Airbus and Allianz when you master hydrogen as in its pure component you're basically having the best energy you can have to be very clear if you move into the energy of the future world it's skin energy and it's a mix of electrons on hydrogen whatever you do in the future you will need a mix of the two the only question is is hydrogen represent 10 15 to 20 percent of the final energy demand you have no choice it's going to represent a big part of it as a phone we are involved from the Upstream to the downstream so we are involved into the wall value chain of hydrogen Upstream um you're dealing with very Classic Industries which are already using hydrogen just need to shift from Gray to Green so if you find the right schemes with the right policy support you can deliver green hydrogen at a price which is similar to Gray and then you will get a solid return steady those projects are the first one to start and you've got the second type of projects which are more risky they are far bigger they are more exploratory but if they move forward they're going to be extremely interesting in terms of performance is the one trying to develop this power to X topic which is you do massive renewable capture you do hydrogen you transform it to ammonia and then you ship it to the countries that need that source of power which is clean and then the third one which are the ones that are linked to Mobility where you basically try to deploy the networks that are going to enable captive fleets and massive heavy duty fleets of tracks of buses or trains so we are looking at those three types of our projects with different Blended risky world but all of them are very promising so far all of high 24's Investments have been in Europe which has been the busiest region for hydrogen projects so far but prtn warns that European policymakers will need to up their game if the continent is to remain at the Forefront of this fast-moving industry Europe is a little bit too regulated in the way it process its knowledge but the skills are there the issue is to have a real friendly business market system and this is where Europe still has a little bit of a way to go it's a fundamental moment that we're living now but Europe needs to tackle it very seriously because if not we will lose many energy intensive Industries and that's going to be a drama foreign competition between governments over hydrogen investment has reached a fever pitch the EU which had long set the pace for green policy is now scrambling to respond to a game-changing move by the US where Joe Biden's 369 billion dollar inflation reduction act has offered lavish subsidies for clean hydrogen production [Music] positive sign that everyone wants to become come neutral climate change is a global challenge for all of us so it's good that the US is stepping up with the IRA Japan and others and hydrogen is a key example for that low carbon green hydrogen so in that sense I think we it's positive that we are all working on it and if the uh the U.S will step up it's clearly also the EU will step up I think 10 years ago when I joined the Commission in the energy Department hydrogen was a niche it was something for researcher coming together it was always there but it wasn't top on the agenda I think that has changed and I think it's it's a good momentum yeah I think financial support is important but mostly it should come from private sector so there's a key role for the private sector to provide enough funding and and go ahead and we see a lot is happening there in in the hydrogen area then in order to accompany and have cover the costs of the first ones the first movers who have to pay a high price we have set up a hydrogen bank or hydrogen facility which is financed by our Innovation fund with 300 billion and this will be a starting point this year to really do more Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine has highlighted the risks of Europe's Reliance on Russian natural gas giving new impetus to the hydrogen agenda we had a hydrogen strategy already in 2020 but with the invasion of Russia and Ukraine we really made very ambitious targets for hydrogen as well in order not only to decarbonize but also to become more independent for example from imports from Russian gas or fossil fuels to see one of the most disruptive hydrogen investments in the EU we headed to one of the continent's northernmost cities lulia in Swedish Lapland [Music] steel production accounts for about seven percent of global greenhouse gas emissions today it relies heavily upon blast furnaces which heat iron ore with Coke a carbon-rich derivative of coal the carbon in the coke binds with the oxygen in the iron ore leaving iron together with large volumes of carbon dioxide this transformation that we do here at ssab when transforming both luliocyte and oxalisone we are actually reducing the Swedish carbon dioxide footprint with 10 outside lulia ssab Sweden's biggest Steel company and also its biggest carbon emitter has built a first of its kind pilot plant that uses green hydrogen in place of coal we use the same iron ore but instead of using carbon to reduce the oxygen we use hydrogen so if you take this iron ore pellet we put it down in this process we add a high hydrogen gas and then the hydrogen gas reduces the oxygen from the pallet and then we get the rest product here is water and then we get a pellet a sponge iron pellet as it's actually almost 100 iron the only different thing is that in this process it comes out as a liquid and in the hybrid is still a cold product so then we have to take this product and then melt it down I'm actually super proud of ssab for being in the Forefront in this transformation people were sort of shaking the head saying that are you what are you doing this is not the way you do it but now we sort of we have produced the fossil free iron ore or sponge iron we have produced the steel from it and our partners has produced vehicles from it so we have actually been able to prove that this works ssab's Chief technical officer Martin pay says that this process is now at the center of the company's long-term strategy it has already made its first shipments of green steel using iron treated in the lulia pilot plant to customers including the automotive company Volvo and it plans to start full-scale industrial production in 2026. in the beginning there is really a concern if there will be such products on the market at all now when we have shown that this works and a lot of other companies are starting to plan for such transition and we get a quite clear signal that more customers believe also that this is the right way to go for us as a company we realize that we cannot just continue without significant technical breakthrough otherwise we would be Irrelevant in the long run [Music] Beyond heavy industry one of the biggest potential target areas for hydrogen is transportation the green passenger vehicles electric batteries have become the dominant technology beating out hydrogen fuel cell cars it's cheaper to recharge an electric car than to fill up an equivalent hydrogen vehicle and it's easier to roll out electric charging stations than to create the complex hydrogen fuel Network needed to support large numbers of fuel cell cars but experts see more potential for other areas of Transportation where the heavy weight of batteries and the time they take to charge can create problems hydrogen could offer a compelling option for trucks buses trains and ships and it might just offer a means of cleaning up the world's most controversial form of transport [Music] foreign of all the challenges in the post for a Greener World economy cleaning up Aviation has long been seen as one of the most fearsomely difficult but here in the English Cotswolds one startup is trying to prove that hydrogen can offer a solution zero Avia has developed a system to power planes using hydrogen fuel cells fuel cells effectively perform electrolysis in Reverse turning hydrogen and oxygen into water together with electricity that powers a motor the company was founded in 2017 by valmiff darkov a former Google executive and has received investment from Amazon and Bill Gates's breakthrough energy Ventures and when I started the company we actually looked at all of those areas so we looked at batteries we looked at hybrids we looked at sustainable Aviation fuels bio and synthetic hydrogen combustion even and it was pretty clear that the combination of hydrogen on board the aircraft but going to electric motors so through fuel cells is the best possible option so and we didn't see anybody doing this so that's how I started the company to do it many airlines are currently focused on moving towards so-called sustainable aviation fuel which is chemically the same as conventional jet fuel but produced using plant matter or carbon dioxide captured from the air Val argues that this approach still comes with climate impacts linked with the burning of hydrocarbons in the air which only fuel cell powered flight can avoid so you don't have nitrogen oxides you don't have high temperature water vapor you don't have particulate emissions all of those things actually contributes two-thirds of the aviation climate impact so if you just do the let's say biofuels or synthetic aviation fuel saf you're solving only a third of the problem at the best and you're not solving two-thirds of the problems in order to solve two-thirds of the problem or an entire problem you need to get away from combustion and hydrogen electric is the only way to do it hydrogen flight is hardly new nearly a century ago airships using hydrogen-filled balloons crossed the Atlantic on a regular basis but that era came to a fiery end with the Hindenburg disaster of 1937. zero Avia says there's no danger of a similar tragedy involving its engines it's been testing its system on small planes in the cotsworld where the company has set up a large operation thanks to financial incentives from the UK government since January 2023 xero Avia has been running test flights of a 20-seater-sized plane with one of its engines powered by hydrogen despite one earlier Crash Landing in 2021 in which nobody was harmed test pilot John killerby says the company is on track to meet all the regulatory requirements needed to get its hydrogen-fueled engines on the commercial Market in the next few years we're designing how we test the system to demonstrate that they're safe we won't be able to use this technology in a commercial application unless we demonstrate that it's safe we worked the same requirements of safety that that there are for conventional known about powertrain systems and we as an organization are working really closely with The Regulators to make sure that as we progress they learn and we progress together zero Avia is in a race against U.S rival Universal hydrogen which in March 2023 ran a 15-minute test flight of a 40-seater-sized plane with one engine powered by a hydrogen fuel cell valsa zero Avia expects to get its engine for 20-seater planes on the market in 2025 followed by 70 seaters in 2027 and 100 seaters in 2029. this is uh the beginning of guilt-free flying um if you will so that's that's when you say hey I'm flying on sunshine or or wind or any picky Renewable Power of Choice different geographies different types of Renewable Power but you can fly on electricity you just need to use the right medium to pack that electricity on board the aircraft and hydrogen is the best way to do it so what will the hydrogen economy of the future look like and how quickly can we get there hydrogen has the potential of decarbonizing industry and transport and that's our common goal it's good for climate change it's good for competitiveness but we also shouldn't overestimate the role of hydrogen it has a key role in certain sectors but there's a lot more in the electrification which we can do by solar wind bioenergy for those and so on if you can Electrify then do it because it's the most efficient and competitive way to do it but sometimes you can't then we have another solution this is hydrogen this is another root it's a more expensive route not only in terms of economics in terms of efficiency the use of energy is much poor but is a solution that we have in our hands you will come in and you will have majority of operations on the non-combustion fuel hydrogen electric approach where you won't have smell of jet fuel the noise levels will be much lower there will be no pollution around the airports and the fuel will be produced on-site from renewable electricity I think the hydrogen economy will be 25 of the world's energy Supply will come from hydrogen so if you look out 2050 Fusion hopefully by then will be sorted we've got hydrogen they're going to be massive parts of what we do and we want to be a big part of that as a business our vision known dream and we want to help deliver Net Zero as a planet so we want to do our small part of that and hydrogen is a great place to be if you believe in the energy transition this is the wave of the decade and the only real risk which is not a small one is that energy transition doesn't come because for a reason some people stop it or don't want to push it with the regulatory Frameworks or the policy support that are needed to make it happen hydrogen may not be the answer for most of the challenges that we face in decarbonizing the world economy but it's increasingly looking like an exciting potential solution for many of them and the race to take advantage of those opportunities is already well underway this was the second film in a three-part series please make sure to like comment and share

Channel: Financial Times

Views: 346,097

Keywords: hydrogen, Financial Times, FT, zero carbon emissions, hydrogen economy., energy, power, emission, investment, investing

Id: v7UwbJ8n9L0

Length: 24min 46sec (1486 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 14 2023