How will hydrogen power our future?

on a platform in a station in Berlin a group have come to look at a locomotive but these are no ordinary train spotters and this is no ordinary train it runs not on electricity or diesel but hydrogen it is a glimpse of the future it turns out we've already glimpsed before because hydrogen has been the fuel to save the world ever since the 19th century in the 30s the 50s the 70s we were told hydrogen cars and planes weren't just science fiction they were just around the next page and so here we go again he's coming we will leave soon thank you we're already behind the schedule but what if it is real what if this time it isn't just sci-fi it would change everything thank you this is the Vaseline refinery in Cologne here in the rhinelands the heart of Europe's steel chemicals and Manufacturing industry this is where it all begins where they turn crude oil into petrol diesel jet fuel and the ingredients for Plastics petrochemicals fertilizers and pretty much everything else you can think of the main product we're making here is really we call it the middle distillate so this is basically diesel for transportation it is heating oil it's quite important it's also jet fuel to fuel the main Frankfurt airport or the cologne airport for instance another element is the chemical industry so 40 of our output goes into the chemical industry as if that single thing crude oil there's a lot of different things that come from that exactly now you're probably asking yourself why in a report about green energy we're here in a dirty oil refinery well partly it's because some hydrogen isn't very clean in fact there's a whole Spectrum from Gray hydrogen the stuff they make in places like this from oil and gas to Blue hydrogen where you capture the CO2 coming out of these chimneys to the Holy Grail green hydrogen produced without any emissions which brings us to this seemingly unremarkable new Warehouse we've got the demineralized water plants so the water treatment uh isn't and it's actually being poured into the uh into the facility and then lined up here next to each other a nice nice little blocks are the electrolyzer stacks so water goes in goes to the electrolyzers and then it comes out as high to hydrogen comes out one end and oxygen pops up out the other so it starts with water it all starts with water you see what you've got here is one of Europe's biggest green hydrogen projects creating the element not from fossil fuels but from Renewable Power they'll pipe the gas back into the refinery where it can carry on doing what it already does but this is just the tip of the iceberg because where hydrogen gets really interesting is in its other quality as a fuel the things that really make hydrogen special are the fact that it burns clean you don't have point of burn CO2 emissions and that's huge right especially if you're looking at distributed applications where it's hard to capture individually so that's one of the big important things another one is that it is storable you know we can store it we can store it indefinitely it can provide that seasonal flexibility that long duration that we're looking for in a lot of different sectors hydrogen in other words isn't just about trains and flying cars it might just be the answer to one of the biggest questions in the energy transition however many wind turbines and solar panels we have we will need a way of storing vast amounts of energy for when the wind's not blowing and the sun's not shining the task battery is probably can't fulfill I think the biggest role hydrogen will play is that intermittency and that storage and kind of the use for all of those parts of the energy system that you can't Electrify easily the the high grade heat that the bits around long distance Mobility because you cannot envisage a world where all of that is done with electrons so so so so in a sense actually hydrogen might be the kind of invisible bits you know in 2015 2060 hydrogen you may not necessarily have a hydrogen car perhaps you might but you may not necessarily have a hydrogen cut but hydrogen will be there potentially as the backbone of the power system and for the big trucks you can't you know driving yourself exactly it is part of the answer but it's not a silver bullet and this is the other critical thing you need to know about hydrogen there's a lot of people spending a lot of money right now trying to persuade you that this gas H2 is the answer to everything hydrogen in your boiler powering your car in Planes but actually quite a lot of this is hype I think there are areas where hydrogen is not needed and there's area areas where it's apps apps and then you come to the areas where the jury is still up and we just don't know because there are a lot of Technologies and we're really in day one or two of figuring out what's going on those are things like power generation potential aviation fuel there's a lot of competing Technologies as well here on the banks of the river mersey is a place you probably haven't heard of before but without what they do here we all be in big trouble in this cavernous room are machines which consume more power than the city of Liverpool carrying out a task which doesn't just matter for hydrogen but for well everything this is one of the most important industrial sites in the country and it's the first time anyone has been allowed in to film this place why well let me give you a sense of what they do here they take brine concentrated salt water and split it into a number of chemicals including chlorine what's coming out of those pipes there is what we use to purify 98 of the drinking water in this country if this place goes down then within seven days we're rationing water okay so I've probably got your attention but why are we really here well guess what's coming out of these electrolysis cells as well as chlorine that's right hydrogen wow okay and it's it's literally this is a electrolysis happening right now yes this is called electrolysis uh and when we think about making hydrogen we could actually electrolyze water to make hydrogen and there were no other uh contaminants or or byproducts come from that other than oxygen and water vapor using pretty much the same machines very similar machines to what we're doing here yes wow very similar technology so it's a hundred Euro technology but it's also possibly the future absolutely and innovine the company here says you can repurpose its electrolyzers to make green hydrogen it is one of many companies hoping to make a killing in the new hydrogen economy I say economies Some people prefer to call it a bubble they're not the first such bubble the license plate tells the story H2 for hydrogen back in the teeth of the 1970s oil price shock Hollywood stars were already getting in on the craze this car driven by actor Jack Nicholson is not an ordinary automobile it's a hydrogen car it's fueled by hydrogen that has been extracted from Water by pure sunlight there are a lot of very good things that could come from using the power of the Sun oh what about the early 2000s when the second Gulf War prompted another look at this technology we can change our dependence upon foreign sources of energy we can help with the quality of the air bubble after bubble ended with a pop the cars and plants too expensive the engineering too challenging the hydrogen molecule to small and volatile to control and most of all the markets just not there but might this time be different after all this time governments have actually committed to Net Zero and it's hard to get there without something like hydrogen for power for chemicals and maybe for other things too which brings us back to the railway and a record-breaking hydrogen train which just traveled more than a thousand kilometers on a single tank [Music] the train certainly an experience even if it might go over most people's heads now if this were a regular commuter train you would be hearing the sound of diesel but instead it's basically silent because this is running on a fuel cell above here above my head right now is a fuel cell that's converting hydrogen from a tank into the power that is running this train it is an entirely New Concept and we didn't have anything like this in the UK yet at least that's why we're here in Berlin rather than Bridge end because we're still a long way from investing as much as the Germans I mean my personal view is definitely coming it's definitely coming I think it's a question now of when not if it's the timing and for that for that timing to work a number of items need to be in place the government will play an incredibly important role in this because the development of that wider economy has a large political element to it as well so they are waiting for the governments to build the pipes and infrastructure to make it happen and for the time being those Keen to see hydrogen in action are coming to Germany rather than the UK for this glimpse of the future government officials from around the world here for a test drive before they snap up one of these trains what do you say to all those people who say there's been a lot of hype like for you know for decades about hydrogen and what makes this moment real we're on a hydrogen train that's what makes it real you know like um you can South Australian government's got over 500 million of investment in hydrogen so we're very very serious but if everyone's so serious does this mean this isn't a bubble is it enough to override continued worries about the safety of this highly explosive gas and what about cost up until recently blue hydrogen the kind you get from fossil fuels while capturing the CO2 was Far cheaper than truly green hydrogen but that's changed too we're finding that in Europe a green hydrogen project would be cheaper than a new blue hydrogen project today in parts of the market and depending on your renewable electricity design and that's a flip that's the change compared with where we were even you know kind of a year or so ago is it it's mind-boggling so green hydrogen right now is potentially cheaper than blue hydrogen but of those the UK has kind of got its eggs in the blue hydrogen basket more than the green hydrogen basket the UK is definitely definitely sees a larger wall for green in the future now than it did before so originally the UK had a target for hydrogen that was kind of agnostic on color entirely now it's doubled that Target and added a carve out for green as the next chapter of this story plays out there are big questions for the British government they were far more focused on Blue hydrogen than most of their neighbors they had lots of plans for investment but now amid the chaos in Westminster no one's sure what the strategy is anymore as another page in the hydrogen epic gets written there's a chance this country which once hoped to be the world leader they get left behind again

Channel: Sky News

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Keywords: sky news, daily climate show, climate, sky news live, sky, sky news latest, climate change, news, climate change news, sky news climate, watch sky news live, climate crisis, climate change 2022, hot climate, climate science, uk news, blackout, energy crisis, energy crisis uk, gas shortage, energy supply, uk climate news, energy security, energy bills, hydrogen, hydrogen train, berlin

Id: GZrPNl8FnzQ

Length: 11min 44sec (704 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 28 2022