Green Eggs and Hydrogen

 Thanks to MIT’s newsletter The Download (https://forms.technologyreview.com/newsletters/briefing-the-download/) I discovered that Saudi Arabia, central to the production of petroleum, is creating a brand new city devoted to the production of green hydrogen.

So, what is “green hydrogen”?

Google® what is green hydrogen, and one result is …

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State of the Planet
Earth Institute, Columbia University
Why We Need Green Hydrogen
by Renee Cho, January 7, 2021
[ EXCERPTS ]

Green hydrogen is hydrogen fuel that is created using renewable energy instead of fossil fuels. It has the potential to provide clean power for manufacturing, transportation, and more — and its only byproduct is water.

Advantages of green hydrogen
Hydrogen is abundant and its supply is virtually limitless. It can be used where it is produced or transported elsewhere. Unlike batteries that are unable to store large quantities of electricity for extended periods of time, hydrogen can be produced from excess renewable energy and stored in large amounts for a long time. Pound for pound, hydrogen contains almost three times as much energy as fossil fuels, so less of it is needed to do any work. And a particular advantage of green hydrogen is that it can be produced wherever there is water and electricity to generate more electricity or heat.

Hydrogen can also be used with fuel cells to power anything that uses electricity, such as electric vehicles and electronic devices. And unlike batteries, hydrogen fuel cells don’t need to be recharged and won’t run down, so long as they have hydrogen fuel.

Fuel cells work like batteries: hydrogen is fed to the anode, oxygen is fed to the cathode; they are separated by a catalyst and an electrolyte membrane that only allows positively charged protons through to the cathode. The catalyst splits off the hydrogen’s negatively charged electrons, allowing the positively charged protons to pass through the electrolyte to the cathode. The electrons, meanwhile, travel via an external circuit—creating electricity that can be put to work—to meet the protons at the cathode, where they react with the oxygen to form water.

The challenges of green hydrogen
Its flammability and its lightness mean that hydrogen, like other fuels, needs to be properly handled. Many fuels are flammable. Compared to gasoline, natural gas, and propane, hydrogen is more flammable in the air. However, low concentrations of hydrogen have similar flammability potential as other fuels. Since hydrogen is so light—about 57 times lighter than gasoline fumes—it can quickly disperse into the atmosphere, which is a positive safety feature.

Because hydrogen is so much less dense than gasoline, it is difficult to transport. It either needs to be cooled to -253˚C to liquefy it, or it needs to be compressed to 700 times atmospheric pressure so it can be delivered as a compressed gas. Currently, hydrogen is transported through dedicated pipelines, in low-temperature liquid tanker trucks, in tube trailers that carry gaseous hydrogen, or by rail or barge.

Fuel cell technology has been constrained by the high cost of fuel cells because platinum, which is expensive, is used at the anode and cathode as a catalyst to split hydrogen. Research is ongoing to improve the performance of fuel cells and to find more efficient and less costly materials.

A challenge for fuel cell electric vehicles has been how to store enough hydrogen—five to 13 kilograms of compressed hydrogen gas—in the vehicle to achieve the conventional driving range of 300 miles.

The fuel cell electric vehicle market has also been hampered by the scarcity of refueling stations. As of August, there were only 46 hydrogen fueling stations in the U.S., 43 of them in California; and hydrogen costs about $8 per pound, compared to $3.18 for a gallon of gas in California.

It all comes down to cost
The various obstacles green hydrogen faces can actually be reduced to just one: cost. Julio Friedmann, senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, believes the only real challenge of green hydrogen is its price. The fact that 70 million tons of hydrogen are produced every year and that it is shipped in pipelines around the U.S. shows that the technical issues of distributing and using hydrogen are “straightforward, and reasonably well understood,” he said.

The problem is that green hydrogen currently costs three times as much as natural gas in the U.S. And producing green hydrogen is much more expensive than producing gray or blue hydrogen because electrolysis is expensive, although prices of electrolyzers are coming down as manufacturing scales up.

Friedmann detailed three strategies that are key to bringing down the price of green hydrogen so that more people will buy it:

Support for innovation into novel hydrogen production and use.
Price supports for hydrogen, such as an investment tax credit or production tax credit similar to those established for wind and solar that helped drive their prices down.
A regulatory standard to limit emissions. For example, half the ammonia used today goes into fertilizer production.

Read the full text at: https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2021/01/07/need-green-hydrogen/
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So how does Saudi Arabia fit into the green hydrogen picture?

TIP: Google® saudi green hydrogen

Here are EXCERPTS from several articles resulting from the above search string …

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How Saudi Arabia plans to dominate the $700 billion hydrogen market
It's lucky to have perpetual sunshine and wind, and vast tracts of unused land. (Bloomberg $)
The kingdom is building a $5 billion plant to make green fuel for export and lessen the country’s dependence on petrodollars.
By Verity Ratcliffe
March 6, 2021
Sun-scorched expanses and steady Red Sea breezes make the northwest tip of Saudi Arabia prime real estate for what the kingdom hopes will become a global hub for green hydrogen.

As governments and industries seek less-polluting alternatives to hydrocarbons, the world’s biggest crude exporter doesn’t want to cede the burgeoning hydrogen business to China, Europe or Australia and lose a potentially massive source of income. So it’s building a $5 billion plant powered entirely by sun and wind that will be among the world’s biggest green hydrogen makers when it opens in the planned megacity of Neom in 2025.

The task of turning a patch of desert the size of Belgium into a metropolis powered by renewable energy falls to Peter Terium, the former chief executive officer of RWE AG, Germany’s biggest utility, and clean-energy spinoff Innogy SE. His performance will help determine whether a country dependent on petrodollars can transition into a supplier of non-polluting fuels.

Huge obstacles remain to the gas becoming a major part of the energy transition, and skeptics point to Saudi Arabia’s weak track record so far capitalizing on what should be a competitive edge in the renewables business, especially solar, where there are many plans but few operational projects.

Saudi Arabia possesses a competitive advantage in its perpetual sunshine and wind, and vast tracts of unused land. Helios’s costs likely will be among the lowest globally and could reach $1.50 per kilogram by 2030, according to BNEF. That’s cheaper than some hydrogen made from non-renewable sources today.

The hydrogen plant will produce 15,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day at most, hardly a match for the 9 million barrels of crude the kingdom pumps daily. Even so, finding a way to corner part of the clean-fuels market represents a necessary economic lifeline.
Read the full text at: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-07/saudi-arabia-s-plan-to-rule-700-billion-hydrogen-market
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Wall Street Journal
    Energy & Climate
Can a multibillion-dollar project in the Saudi desert jump-start the demand for green hydrogen, an elusive energy source that could help eliminate carbon emissions from vehicles, power plants and heavy industry?

The allure of hydrogen is undeniable. Unlike oil and natural gas, it doesn’t emit carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases when burned. It’s more easily stored than electricity generated by wind turbines and solar farms, and it can be transported by ship or pipeline. Green hydrogen, which is produced using renewable energy sources, is especially attractive as a fuel. It’s made from water rather than methane or other hydrocarbons.

But those who foresee a green hydrogen future face a quandary: The high cost of producing the odorless, colorless, flammable gas can be mitigated only by large-scale projects, which in turn make economic sense only if there is a widespread market for green hydrogen. That doesn’t yet exist.

In Neom, a planned megacity of the future now taking shape in northwestern Saudi Arabia, the investors behind the green hydrogen project think they can deliver the chicken and the egg.

The initiative—a joint venture of Neom, U.S. chemical company Air Products & Chemicals Inc., and Saudi Arabia’s ACWA Power—will invest $5 billion to build what will be the world’s largest green hydrogen production facility. Another $2 billion will be invested in distribution infrastructure in consumer markets around the world, primarily to fuel industrial vehicles and public buses.

Plans call for the sprawling facility, which isn’t yet under construction, to produce 650 tons of green hydrogen a day starting in 2025. The facility’s output will dwarf that of a green hydrogen plant in Québec that produces about nine tons a day, making it the largest such facility in the world. The Neom project exemplifies the Kingdom’s ambitious plan to diversify away from oil and natural gas and showcase Neom as a global hub for technology and green energy.

One of Neom’s main advantages in what could become a global race to develop green hydrogen is that the city’s location along the Red Sea possesses world-class solar and wind power, according to Peter Terium, head of Neom’s energy sector. Solar will power the plant during the day, wind at night, he says.
Read the full text at: https://www.wsj.com/articles/green-hydrogen-plant-in-saudi-desert-aims-to-amp-up-clean-power-11612807226
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The new fuel to come from Saudi Arabia
By Jim Robbins
12th November 2020
From Yale e360
Green hydrogen is taking off around the globe – its supporters say it could play an important role in decarbonisation, but sceptics question its safety and practicality.

On the edge of the Saudi Arabian desert beside the Red Sea, a futuristic city called Neom is due to be built. The $500bn (£380bn) city – complete with flying taxis and robotic domestic help – is planned to become home to a million people. And what energy product will be used both to power this city and sell to the world? Not oil. Instead, Saudi Arabia is banking on a different fuel – green hydrogen. This carbon-free fuel made is from water by using renewably produced electricity to split hydrogen molecules from oxygen molecules.

This summer, a large US gas company, Air Products & Chemicals, announced that as part of Neom it has been building a green hydrogen plant in Saudi Arabia for the past four years. The plant is powered by four gigawatts of electricity from wind and solar projects that sprawl across the desert. It claims to be the world’s largest green hydrogen project – and more Saudi plants are on the drawing board.

While it has advantages, says Michael Liebreich, a Bloomberg New Energy Finance analyst in the UK and a green hydrogen sceptic, “it displays an equally impressive list of disadvantages”.

“It does not occur in nature so it requires energy to separate,” Liebreich writes in the first of a pair of recent essays for BloombergNEF. “Its storage requires compression to 700 times atmospheric pressure, refrigeration to -253C… It carries one quarter the energy per unit volume of natural gas… It can embrittle metal, it escapes through the tiniest leaks and yes, it really is explosive.”

The Middle East, which has the world’s cheapest wind and solar power, is angling to be a major player in green hydrogen. “Saudi Arabia has ridiculously low-cost renewable power,” says Thomas Koch Blank, leader of the Rocky Mountain Institute’s Breakthrough Technology Program. “The sun is shining pretty reliably every day and the wind is blowing pretty reliably every night. It’s hard to beat.”
Read the full text at: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20201112-the-green-hydrogen-revolution-in-renewable-energy
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From oil giant to green powerhouse?
Although Saudi Arabia seeks to diversify its energy sector and economy away from fossil fuels, the OPEC leader is eager to maintain its status as a fuel exporter giant by leveraging cheap solar and wind power to produce green hydrogen.
By Stasa Salacanin
World’s Largest Green Hydrogen Project Unveiled in Saudi Arabia

Air Products, the world’s leading hydrogen producer, plans to power a huge green hydrogen plant using 4 gigawatts of Saudi renewable electricity.
John Parnell July 07, 2020
Air Products & Chemicals, the U.S. industrial gas giant, announced plans on Tuesday to build a green hydrogen plant in Saudi Arabia powered by 4 gigawatts of wind and solar power, the world's largest such project announced so far.

The $5 billion plant will be jointly owned by Air Products, Saudi Arabia's ACWA Power and Neom, a new mega-city planned near Saudi Arabia’s borders with Egypt and Jordan.

The completed facility will produce 650 tons of green hydrogen daily, enough to run around 20,000 hydrogen-fueled buses, Air Products said. The fuel will be shipped as ammonia to end markets globally then converted back to hydrogen. Ammonia production is expected to start in 2025.

The project would be a big step forward for Saudi Arabia's ambition for Neom to become an important global center for renewable energy and green hydrogen. The country is establishing Neom as a special economic zone, with an ambition to host 1 million people from around the world. "This is a pivotal moment for the development of Neom and a key element in Saudi Vision 2030 contributing to the Kingdom’s clean energy and circular carbon economy strategy," Neom CEO Nadhmi Al Nasr said in a statement.

ACWA Power has delivered a series of major solar projects in recent years and has previously achieved record-low solar prices in the region.

Germany's thyssenkrupp will supply the electrolyzers. Last month the company revealed its electrolyzer manufacturing capacity had reached 1 gigawatt, with the option to ramp up further. Norwegian firm Nel and the U.K.’s ITM Power are also developing electrolyzer gigafactories.
Read the full text at: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/us-firm-unveils-worlds-largest-green-hydrogen-project
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Jean Steinhardt served as Librarian, Aramco Services, Engineering Division, for 13 years. He now heads Jean Steinhardt Consulting LLC, producing the same high quality research that he performed for Aramco.

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