What Is Green Hydrogen And Will It Power The Future?

humanity is facing an uphill battle when it comes to preserving our planet in order to avert some of the worst effects of climate change experts say that we need to stop global temperatures from rising 1.5 degrees celsius above pre-industrial levels to do this global carbon emissions need to drop to zero by 2050. it will take a variety of solutions to achieve this goal but one tool that's gaining traction is green hydrogen green hydrogen is hydrogen that's been produced exclusively from renewable power the advantage of green hydrogen is that it's a clean burning molecule meaning that it can help us to decarbonize a range of sectors that have proved hard to clean up in the past this includes the chemical iron and steel industries as well as transportation especially long haul hydrogen can also be used to heat our homes and store renewable electricity that would otherwise be wasted if we are serious about decarbonization if we are serious about going into a world which have zero carbon emission there is no choice but using hydrogen renewable energy can get you so far actually up to 50 to 60 reduction in total emission in the world because there are a lot of other industries and downstream products which are still emitting but have nothing to do with renewable energy and hygiene could be the solution the catch because hydrogen is very reactive it's not found freely in nature it only exists combined with other elements for example water is a combination of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom so to get hydrogen you must produce it by extracting it from naturally occurring compounds like water it's an energy-intensive process and although hydrogen itself is a clean molecule most of the hydrogen produced in the us today is extracted from fossil fuels in a pollution-heavy process globally hydrogen production is responsible for around 843 metric tons of carbon dioxide every year that's equivalent to the yearly co2 emissions of indonesia and the united kingdom combined that's why green hydrogen is so appealing but producing it is still very expensive and although costs are coming down a number of other challenges remain including the lack of infrastructure to transport and store it and the fact that fuel cells which convert hydrogen to usable energy for cars are still very expensive still solutions are coming and overcoming some of these challenges could propel the hydrogen market to 2.5 trillion in direct revenues by 2050 hydrogen can be produced in a number of different ways experts categorize the sources and processes by which hydrogen is derived using colors the overwhelming majority of hydrogen today is produced from fossil fuels brown hydrogen is made from coal in a process known as gasification gray hydrogen accounts for three quarters of all hydrogen production in the world and is extracted from natural gas via a method known as steam methane reforming a downside to both these processes is that they emit large amounts of co2 blue hydrogen is also made from fossil fuels but incorporates carbon capture and storage technology another way to produce hydrogen is through a method known as electrolysis here a device known as an electrolyzer splits a compound into its constituent elements using an electric current in this case the compound is fresh water which is split into hydrogen and oxygen if the electricity comes from renewable sources like wind and solar the subsequent hydrogen is known as green around the world the majority of hydrogen today is used in industry including oil refining ammonia production methanol production and steel production but recent advancements in green hydrogen production and storage combined with a global push towards sustainability means that green hydrogen is becoming much more appealing for a number of different industries and nations are seeing the potential europe is the leader part of the green deal which is up to one trillion euros of incentives of green initiatives in the next 10 years give or take half of it is actually being directed to hydrogen so close to a half a trillion of euros in the next 10 years china actually have strong targets to increase quite dramatically their production of energy plus to move their car fleets from a combustion engine to hydrogen south korea and japan are very focused about fuel cells and about the automotive market moving to hydrogen in the u.s president-elect joe biden has also made a big pledge to fight climate change we're going to invest 1.7 trillion dollars in securing our future so that by 2050 the united states will be 100 clean energy economy back in october the u.s department of energy also announced that it would invest up to 100 million dollars to advance hydrogen production and fuel cell technologies research and development the first industry hydrogen has the potential of transforming is transportation where hydrogen can act as a direct replacement of gas and diesel and holds some advantages over electric vehicles because hydrogen is an energy carrier and not an energy source itself hydrogen fuel must be transformed into electricity by a device called a fuel cell stack before it can be used to power a car inside each individual fuel cell the process looks something like this hydrogen drawn from an onboard pressurized tank reacts with a catalyst most often this catalyst is made from expensive platinum as the hydrogen passes through the catalyst it's stripped of its electrons which are forced to move along an external circuit and consequently produce an electrical current this electrical current is then used by the electric motor to power the car the only byproduct is water vapor of course the advantage of hydrogen fuel cell cars over conventional cars is the possibility of having a zero carbon footprint but if you have to go through the trouble of converting hydrogen to electricity to use it in cars why not just use battery powered cars the difference between a battery electric vehicle and a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle is that you essentially get a much faster refueling times five minutes for the hydrogen fuel cell vehicle compared to 45 minutes for the battery vehicle you also with a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle get about five times better energy storage per unit volume and weight so that frees up more room in the automobile for other things passenger space storage space and also allows you to go further so you're going to get along the ranges with a fuel cell vehicle experts believe that hydrogen fuel cell vehicles can be especially effective when it comes to long-haul trucking and other hard to electrify sectors such as freight shipping and long-haul air travel all applications where using heavy batteries would be inefficient the larger the vehicle or the device that you're talking about the bigger the advantage to uh to hydrogen it gets to the point with a truck an 18-wheel truck that using a lithium battery would be almost ridiculous your entire truck would have to be a lithium battery to make it practical or else the truck driver would have to be charging up the truck all the time instead of driving it but adoption of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles has been slow globally there were more than 18 000 hydrogen fuel cell vehicles on the road at the end of 2019. by comparison there were 7.2 million electric cars on the road today only three car companies offer hydrogen fuel cell passenger vehicles honda hyundai and toyota and they all cost around 60 thousand dollars that's twice the cost of some entry-level evs hyundai along with toyota and its truck subsidiary hino are also working on hydrogen fuel cell trucks france's oil and gas giant total recently invested in hydrogen fuel cell truck and bus startup hyzen motors and nikola motors has said that it will begin consumer production of its hydrogen fuel cell truck in 2023 but one company not convinced of the advantages of the fuel cell truck is tesla tesla is instead working on an electric semi truck which it hopes to start delivering in 2021 ceo elon musk has even gone as far as calling fuel cell technology mind-bogglingly stupid a big barrier to the adoption of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles has been a lack of fueling station infrastructure because even though fuel cell cars refuel in a similar way to conventional cars they can't use the same stations worldwide there are only 407 operational hydrogen stations today the majority are located in europe followed by asia and finally north america in the u.s there are just over 40 public hydrogen fuel stations with all but one in california you have to build the stations you have to build the refining capability you have to have the trucks that can move hydrogen to the stations or the pipes under the ground to move them to the stations aside from the infrastructure one point that is frequently brought up as a problem with hydrogen fuel is its inefficiency that's because by the time that hydrogen fuel is manufactured transported and distributed and transformed to electricity in the fuel cell seventy percent of its efficiency is lost this challenge is mitigated somewhat by the fact that hydrogen is very energy dense meaning that it can hold a lot of energy in a small volume when you buy a kilogram of hydrogen you're buying the same amount of energy as buying a gallon of gasoline the difference is when you go to then convert that hydrogen into useful propulsion of your car it's about two to three times as efficient as burning gasoline because it's an electrochemical reaction it's not combustion so it's much more efficient so you can immediately divide today's cost of hydrogen by about two or maybe two and a half times so the goal is to get hydrogen four vehicles to be down around the cost of today's liquid fuels gasoline and diesel along with the cost of hydrogen the cost of fuel cell car components and storage also needs to come down it is still it's very expensive today to produce a fuel cell without subsidies government intervention or anything the cap can get as high as 50 000 per unit hydrogen has to be kept under a huge amount of pressure so you do have to have very expensive extremely high pressure tanks new developments are starting to make fuel cell technology and hydrogen storage a bit more affordable but scaling it will take time my company kubogen has been working on a new hydrogen storage material so you get basically four to five times more hydrogen in the same space so your tank can be smaller or you can get longer range or any combination of the two and the cost is actually uh projected to be four to five times cheaper for the entire system than a current 700 bar system and it gets to the point with our material that the only cost factor when comparing a battery vehicle to a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle is the cost of the fuel cell and not the cost of the storage system another application for hydrogen that has experts excited is the ability to use it for storing renewable energy that would otherwise be wasted what's really made hydrogen come on the scene now is the simple fact that we have so much renewable power on the electric grid in places like california and texas which we didn't have 15 years ago but with all this renewable power on the grid we are now getting substantial curtailments of electricity which is a market signal that we need storage and so the reason hydrogen's really caught on right now is people are realizing it's really sort of an ideal way to store renewable power for long periods of time mitsubishi power along with fuel storage company magnum development are working on a project in utah which promises to build a storage facility for 1 000 megawatts of clean power partly by keeping hydrogen and salt caverns scheduled to be operational by 2025 the advanced clean energy storage project would be the largest clean energy storage system in the world so we're going to build a very large electrolysis system that will be able to convert renewable power into hydrogen and then we're going to store that hydrogen in that salt dome for long periods of time so that it can be used when the grid needs the electricity instead of when it's produced the hydrogen stored in the salt mines will be used by a power plant next door the intermountain power project which is in delta utah is the last coal-fired power plant that's providing power to the state of california and it's scheduled to be retired in 2025. intermountain power has selected our equipment to repower that power plant with gas turbines but they've asked us to make these the first heavy duty gas turbines ever that can provide this power with a mixture of natural gas and hydrogen browning says that initially the gas turbines will use 30 hydrogen and 70 natural gas but the goal is to use 100 green hydrogen by 2045 phase one of our aces project is going to be capable of 150 000 megawatt hours of energy storage and 150 000 megawatt hours is enough to fuel 30 of an 840 megawatt power plant and 840 megawatts is enough power to supply one-seventh of the peak needs of the city of los angeles today companies like nextera energy eos energy and even tesla store excess renewable energy and batteries but there's a big drawback if you're only storing electricity for a short period of time it's much better to store it in a battery you can do that at a lower cost so there's a better efficiency to that storage process but if you want to store electricity for a long period of time battery storage gets more and more expensive you have to build more and more batteries whereas with hydrogen we can store it underground in large salt domes for long periods of time at very low cost hydrogen's versatility means it has the potential to disrupt many avenues of our economy from energy production and storage to transportation in industrials in fact analysts think that by 2050 clean hydrogen could account for an estimated 22 percent of our energy needs up from just four percent of the energy that hydrogen supplies today but this would require massive amounts of additional renewable electricity generation one study estimates that generating enough green hydrogen to meet a quarter of our energy needs would take more electricity than the world generates today from all sources combined and an investment of 11 trillion dollars in production storage and transportation infrastructure still analysts say we're moving in the right direction we actually see a complete dive down of hydrogen production cost which has been dropped from two sources electrolyzer prices are down 50 in five years and the second element which is renewable energy costs which are also down between 50 to 60 percent already and we believe both of them will go down another 60 to 70 percent before the end of the decade as you get that scale of fuel cells uh in trucks and other applications going up costs will come down you'll start to see other applications emerging it all comes down to economics so that's really what the goal is get that cost of the green hydrogen down where it starts to displace some of these fossil fuels many experts believe that these advancements can't come about without government policy and investment to some degree governments are already stepping in in 50 years i believe that hydrogen is going to be a very integral part of our life if we are serious about decarbonization we just have no choice but to have hygiene in scale [Music] you

Channel: CNBC

Views: 540,384

Rating: 4.8120947 out of 5

Keywords: CNBC, business, news, finance stock, stock market, news channel, news station, breaking news, us news, world news, cable, cable news, finance news, money, money tips, financial news, Stock market news, stocks, green hydrogen, climate, environment, renewable energy, hydrogen power

Id: aYBGSfzaa4c

Length: 15min 25sec (925 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 03 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Hypx]

The video is pretty inaccurate FYI. That said, it gets the basic ideas sorta correct. We'll probably end up making vast quantities of green hydrogen in the future. Eventually, we will power many industries and forms of transportation with it. It is also much better at storing energy for long periods of time compared to batteries.

[u/jawshoeaw]

You know the rule about asking questions in headlines.