Fossil Blue Hydrogen
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For the To Nizhoni Ani June 26, 2024 Hydrogen Information Summit
Tom Solomon, 350NM
June 26, 2024
“Just use clean electricity”
1937: Hindenburg hydrogen airship explodes in New Jersey
Agenda
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link
Making H2 Takes Lots of Energy
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* It takes ~50 kWh and ~25 liters of water to create 1 kg of green hydrogen
Hydrogen is the smallest atom in the universe. Pure hydrogen (H2), is highly reactive. In nature it usually found combined with oxygen in water, (H2O) or with carbon in methane, (CH4). �It takes lots of energy to pull pure hydrogen* from these substances.
99.9% of Hydrogen is from Fossil Fuels
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* per IEEFA 2022, actual CCS projects average 45% capture, far below the claimed 90+%
In 2022 99.9% of global demand for hydrogen (95M metric tons) was made from fossil fuels.
Only 0.095M metric tons of green H2 was produced, ie 0.1% (IEA).
0.095%
Types or ‘colors’ of hydrogen, by source
2.3% of global CO2 emissions come from producing hydrogen.
+water
CO2
CO2
‘some’
‘methane’
“fossil H2”
Updated: June 2024
“Gray hydrogen” is made by mixing fossil methane (natural gas) with high temperature steam. That SMR process produces one part hydrogen with twelve parts carbon dioxide (CO2), a GHG.
For “Blue hydrogen” some*, not all, of the CO2 is then captured and stored in an underground site.
In 2022 under 1% was blue hydrogen.
SMR
<1%
Where is Hydrogen Used Today?
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NH3 mostly for fertilizer
This chart shows global use. In the United States, the 10Mt/year demand for hydrogen is mostly for ammonia fertilizer and petroleum refining (DOE).
Making hydrogen today produces 2.3% of global CO2 emissions.
About 95 megatons/year globally
Hydrogen Use-Case Ladder
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The top of the ladder, level A, are the current uses of grey hydrogen in the economy. Those uses, principally for fertiliser, oil refining and petrochemicals production - currently account for around 2% of global CO2 emissions. Clean hydrogen has to win here, as there is no alternative.
But the hydrogen hype is not about replacing grey fossil hydrogen. It’s about selling more natural gas.
Hydrogen use today.
NM Hydrogen Ecosystem - Redfern
May 21, 2024
The Tallgrass ecosystem includes a carbon capture and sequestration project with New Mexico Tech. The university has been studying the geology of the San Juan Basin since 2020 with the goal of getting three sequestration wells* operational in a few years. The project is in the middle of its federal permitting process and could be approved sometime next year.
It also includes the Escalante coal-fired power plant retrofitted to burn hydrogen, along I-40 between Albuquerque and Gallup and the hydrogen pipeline linking Farmington to central Arizona and crossing the Navajo Nation, a controversial project still in the planning stages.
It’s expected to include a hydrogen production facility or two in or near Farmington, with exact locations to be determined.
Tallgrass has to build another pipeline, this one for carbon dioxide, running from the Escalante power plant to the future carbon sequestration wells, roughly 100 miles to the north and crossing the eastern reaches of the Navajo Nation.
* San Juan Basin CCS Carbonsafe
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Escalante Coal-to-H2 project
Must build new:
Cuts electricity output from
253MW to ~164MW, thus unprofitable per eH2 CEO.
Plans to sell the hydrogen:
- inject 5% into gas pipeline
- make ‘green’ cement (?)
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Former 253MW Escalante Coal Power Plant, Prewitt, NM, Closed in 2020.
The eH2 plan: spend $600M on conversion, to produce hydrogen �from natural gas & hydrogen-electricity by 2025. Create 60 jobs
San Juan Basin (SJB) CarbonSAFE Site
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CCS carbon storage & sequestration site 10 miles NE of Farmington
Let’s Look at the Science
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link
Blue H2: 20% Worse Than Burning Methane
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Link https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/12/climate/hydrogen-fuel-natural-gas-pollution.html
How Green is Blue Hydrogen? https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ese3.956
Aug 12, 2021
“the greenhouse gas footprint of blue hydrogen was more than 20% greater than burning natural gas or coal for heat.”
Paper: How Green Is Blue Hydrogen?
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“To call it a zero-emissions fuel is totally wrong,” said Robert W. Howarth, a biogeochemist and ecosystem scientist at Cornell and the study’s lead author. “What we found is that it’s not even a low-emissions fuel, either.” They found that the greenhouse gas footprint of blue hydrogen was more than 20 percent greater than burning natural gas or coal for heat.
Very generous assumptions:
How Green is Blue Hydrogen, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ese3.956
H&J rebuttal to the the Romano rebuttal https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ese3.1154
Baseline assumptions for blue hydrogen:
Methane Levels Rising Sharply
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Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas with a global warming potential 84 times greater than CO2 over a 20-year time frame (IPCC).
Methane accounts for 25% of global warming.
ppb
https://gml.noaa.gov/dv/iadv/graph.php?code=MLO&program=ccgg&type=ts Howarth 2019 study https://bg.copernicus.org/articles/16/3033/2019/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/
The US shale gas boom started ~ 2008
2008 – US shale gas boom
Oct 18, 2024
The pattern is well explained by global trends in oil & gas. After collapse of USSR, gas emissions in Russia fell. Much of increase since 2008 is caused by fracking for shale gas. Dr. Robert Howarth, Dec 4, 2022
~90% of ‘natural gas’ is methane
Hydrogen Wastes Energy
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Fuel cell
Hydrogen is not a natural fuel; it is an energy carrier like electricity.
�
As an energy carrier it is wasteful, less than half �as efficient as electricity, suffering large energy losses during multiple conversions.
The three worst steps are:
1) during electrolysis
2) in transport & storage
3) in the fuel cell
Comparing energy losses at each step in transportation
power to wheels
Hydrogen is wasteful. Electricity is 2.3x better.
Many Hydrogen Subsidies
Many, many hydrogen subsidies* are available: for production, transportation, distribution and use. Unlike other renewable energy subsidies, these can be layered on top of each other like carrots.
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Clean Hydrogen: Big Plans, Few Takers
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June 13, 2024 https://www.youtube.com/live/w0Q9cuF8zKg
Water Used to Make Hydrogen
electrolysis, and to produce the electricity, including water used �to manufacture PV panels & wind turbines.
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20-30 liters of water is used to make 1kg of hydrogen, gray/blue or green (about 3 gallons per pound).
NM.gov Clean Hydrogen Fact Sheet Jan 2023
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1-3 M gal/day of water to make 850 metric tons of hydrogen
325,851 gal per acre-ft
Hydrogen Pipelines: Safety Issues with Blending
Jan 2023 Pipeline Safety Report from Pipeline Safety Trust Jan ‘23
New gas transmission pipelines* designed for exclusive hydrogen service
New smaller diameter gas transmission pipelines may be suitable for hydrogen service if knowledge gaps can be resolved, pipeline integrity can be demonstrated, and pipelines can be sited to ensure that failures will not result in deaths or injuries.
Hydrogen blending into gas distribution systems:
Should not be permitted at any level because of hydrogen’s ability to explode, especially in buildings. Downstream gas pipeline systems within buildings are not designed for hydrogen.
Hydrogen blending into gas transmission systems supplying gas distribution systems:
As most gas transmission pipelines feed into distribution systems—where blending is inappropriate— hydrogen blending should not be allowed in such existing gas transmission pipelines.
Hydrogen blending into limited gas transmission pipelines, not supplying gas distribution systems:
May be suitable for hydrogen blends that only service major industrial gas users, if knowledge gaps can be resolved and pipeline integrity can be demonstrated for hydrogen service.
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https://pstrust.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/PST-Hydrogen-Summary-for-Policymakers-1.pdf . 1,600mi of H2 pipeline in the US
*1,600 miles of hydrogen pipelines in the US- DOE
Ammonia Pipeline Risks
U.Penn-2023: The U.S. has about 3,100 miles �of ammonia pipelines.
Ammonia pipelines typically �operate at 250 psi. At �this pressure, ammonia �is a relatively heavy liquid.
Ammonia is toxic and a �high health hazard.
OSHA: Ammonia is considered a high health hazard because it is corrosive to the skin, eyes, and lungs. Exposure to 300 parts per million (ppm) is immediately dangerous to life and health. Ammonia is also flammable at concentrations of 15% to 28% by volume in air.
Safety- per the US DOT PHMSA - from 2002-2010, there were 53 incidents of ammonia pipeline leaks, 15% from vandalism. A Nov 2007 incident occurred in Florida in which “three teenagers drilled a hole into the pipe, immediately releasing product and a vapor cloud into the surrounding area, causing serious injuries to one of the teens and requiring the hospitalization of several fire fighters... 300 people were evacuated from their homes as a safety precaution.”
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https://kleinmanenergy.upenn.edu/research/publications/ammonias-role-in-a-net-zero-hydrogen-economy/
US Natural Gas Use to Decline
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https://www.mdd.com/forensic-accounting-articles/introduction-to-natural-gas/ https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/pdf/mer.pdf Heat pumps outsell gas furnaces in 2023 82% of new electricity is renewables
Gas is due to be replaced �by solar, wind, batteries and heat pumps.
Thus the push for hydrogen.
In 2021, the United States used about 30.28 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of natural gas, about 31.35 quadrillion British thermal units (BTU).
Natural gas is 90% methane
350NM Position on Hydrogen
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link
“Use electricity instead”
Backup
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link
TNA Hydrogen Info Summit 6-26-24
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Shiprock chapter house
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Michael Liebreich debunks Hydrogen
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June 13, 2024 https://www.youtube.com/live/w0Q9cuF8zKg
Cold liquid H2 is at -423F or -253C.
H2 gas at room temp has 850x more volume. 150kg would be 10,714 m3, or a cube 22 m or 24 yards wide.
13 m3
H2 Blending for Power is Dumb
Here is why blending clean #hydrogen into gas grids is such a colossally wasteful thing to do. “Basically you go to all the cost, effort, leakage risk, etc of making clean hydrogen, and then do a bunch of low-value things with it.
https://twitter.com/MLiebreich/status/1638461123014868992 “ - M Liebreich
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Hydrogen Blending Costs 66% more
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Blue H2
A 20% blend of blue H2 increases cost of electricity by 66%, from $70/ MWh avg to $116/ MWh.
Hydrogen’s heat energy is 68% lower than methane by volume, so blended H2 is largely a diluent.
A 20% H2, 80% methane blend is so diluted that 116% of the blend is needed to get the same heat energy as 100% natural gas.
80% Wasted in Power-to-H2-to-power
Some utilities are using plans for combusting hydrogen as a rationale to continue investing in new fossil-gas power plants, even though it will be costly to switch that infrastructure from burning fossil gas to burning hydrogen.
The fundamental problem lies in the laws of physics. Between 50 and 80 percent of the energy value of clean electricity is lost in the process of making hydrogen and then burning it to generate electricity.
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100% Hydrogen Power Plants Don’t Exist
Pure 100% hydrogen-burning power plants don’t exist.
GE, Siemens and Mitsubishi are designing turbines that can combust a mix of methane and hydrogen. For example 30% H2 in this one:
Entergy Texas is building the OCAPS �Orange County Advanced Power Station, �a 1,215-megawatt facility in Orange, Texas, �due to operate in 2026.
Mitsubishi Power is making the two turbines
for Entergy’s Orange County project, part of
a model the company is selling that can burn
30 percent hydrogen along with gas.
“The turbine equipment can support
conversion into 100% hydrogen-powered
operations in the future.”
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* https://www.entergy.com/entergypowerstexas/project/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/05/01/power-plants-hydrogen-climate-change/
https://www.power-technology.com/projects/orange-county-advanced-power-station-texas-usa/?cf-view
Orange County Advanced Power Station, a 1,215 megawatt facility in Orange, Texas. Construction started in early 2023, and the project is expected to be completed by 2026.
Ammonia & Methanol are bad fuels
June 6, 2023 - Michael Barnard, Clean Technica
When I was in Glasgow at Stena Sphere’s technical summit recently, methanol as a shipping fuel was central to the discussions of maritime decarbonization. Ammonia was smelling up the wings but not present, as an ammonia organization had declined to send a representative. Stena has not ruled out ammonia, but does have a joint venture with Proman for methanol, which means that stakeholders in the group are already somewhat committed to the pathway. That’s going to be challenge for them, but Maersk is much more committed.
Let’s start with the basics.
Ammonia isn’t an alcohol. It’s a nitrogen atom and three hydrogen atoms. We manufacture about 150 million tons of it as well, almost entirely for fertilizer, and also manufacture it mostly from natural gas. It’s not as good at burning as methanol, it has the advantage that it doesn’t have carbon, so no CO2, and the disadvantage that it has lots of nitrogen and so is more likely to create N2O with its global warming potential of 265 times that of CO2. Oh, and when it interacts with water it turns from a liquid whose fumes will screw a sailor up for life to a corrosive gas that will just kill them before turning into a third chemical that goes back to being really bad for human health.
As both ammonia and methanol are made from fossil fuels, they are both climate change problems.
Ammonia represents demand for about 30 million tons of hydrogen a year, and each ton of hydrogen drags 8-10 tons of CO2e behind it between upstream emissions and CO2 from steam reformation with natural gas. That’s about 7 tons of CO2e per ton of ammonia. it has a lower energy density than methanol, about 42% that of resid or diesel. That means that while it doesn’t produce CO2 when burned (no carbon in the NH3 molecule), ammonia’s actual carbon footprint per nautical mile is nearly six times that of resid or diesel today.
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Michael Liebreich debunks Hydrogen
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June 13, 2024 https://www.youtube.com/live/w0Q9cuF8zKg
Hydrogen Comes from Fossil Fuels
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link
99.9% of Hydrogen from Fossil Fuels
IEA global hydrogen review 2023: p.64
“Global hydrogen production reached almost 95 Mt in 2022, an increase of 3% compared to 2021 (Figure 3.1). As in 2021, production was dominated by the unabated use of fossil fuels. Natural gas without carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) accounted for 62% of global production, while unabated coal, mainly located in China, was responsible for 21% of global production. By-product hydrogen, which is produced at refineries and in the petrochemical industry during naphtha reforming, and often used for other refinery and conversion processes (e.g. hydrocracking, desulphurisation), accounted for 16% of global production.”
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IEA: 95 Mt of hydrogen was produced in 2022. 99.9% was from fossil fuels.
Only 0.1% (0.095 Mt) was produced from water & electricity (electrolysis)
0.1% of hydrogen comes from electricity
99.9 % fossil fuels
CCS Carbon Capture Real World Failure
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IEEFA CCS Fact Sheet https://ieefa.org/resources/fact-sheet-carbon-capture-and-storage
Claims of 95% capture are not supported.
Real world results show 45% capture.
IEEFA Blue Hydrogen Report
Only with best-best-best case assumptions can Blue hydrogen meet the 4:1 clean hydrogen standard for tax credits.
And 4:1 CO2e to H2 is NOT clean.
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GE Carbon Capture & Seq Design 2022
“But large-scale adoption of CCUS has been elusive, mainly because many projects struggle to be economically viable. Most of the carbon capture facilities around the world today are associated with industrial facilities. There are a few carbon capture demonstration projects with coal-fired power plants, but none are connected to operating gas-fired plants. A full-scale carbon capture facility would essentially require a new round of construction and maybe double the footprint of any power plant to which it’s attached. Adding a carbon capture system into a combined-cycle power plant requires integrating heat and steam.” - General Electric
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Bayotech: Gray Hydrogen
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No provision for carbon capture
US GHG Emissions ~6.3 GT / year
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This is our 15% of global GHG emissions
Transportation
Electricity
Industry
Agriculture
Commercial
Residential
Every Major Truck Maker Has an
Electric Semi Truck
nn
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Liebreich Associates June 13, 2024 https://www.youtube.com/live/w0Q9cuF8zKg
Freightliner, Volvo, Peterbilt, MAN, Mercedes-Benz, etc.
Hydrogen Science Coalition 3 principles
Three evidenced-based recommendations for Hydrogen's role in the energy transition to 2050
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TNA Hydrogen Summit Agenda
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link
TNA Hydrogen Info Summit
TNA, ToNizhoniAni, is hosting a Hydrogen Information Summit on Wed, June 26, 2024, from 8:30am-12:00pm, at the Shiprock Chapter house.
We are respectfully requesting your presence, either in-person or via Zoom, to conduct a presentation on the scientific facts of blue hydrogen production and the potential impacts of creating a 200+ mile long pipeline to carry blue hydrogen and ammonia, as the developers have stated is their plan. Our Navajo community members have been requesting more education in terms of potential impacts and scientific facts and we feel you both are best scientific experts on hydrogen.
A link to our FB event announcement in Shiprock- https://www.facebook.com/events/873051071486445/?ref=newsfeed
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Navajo Nation Discord Over Proposed Greenview Pipeline on NM Tribal Land
July 14, 2023
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Escalante Coal-to-H2 project
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“Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association closed its 253-megawatt coal-fired generating station at Prewitt near Grants at the end of 2020.
~100m West of Abq.
The closure eliminated 107 jobs at the plant, and potentially scores more at a nearby coal mine that supplies fuel for the generating station.”
Former 253MW Escalante Coal Power Plant in �Prewitt, NM, closed in 2020.
https://www.abqjournal.com/1408313/latest-business-news-107.html
Escalante Coal-to-H2 project
Must build new:
Cuts electricity output from
253MW to ~164MW, thus unprofitable per eH2 CEO.
Plans to sell the hydrogen:
- inject 5% into gas pipeline
- make ‘green’ cement (?)
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Former 253MW Escalante Coal Power Plant, Prewitt, NM, Closed in 2020.
The eH2 plan: spend $425M $600M on conversion, to produce hydrogen �from natural gas & hydrogen-electricity by 2025. Create 110 60 jobs
eH2 Escalante Coal-to-H2 project
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net 151 to
176 MW
Stated plans do not include H2 storage
water
Power to ASU
Power to SMR + CCS
Based on the Linde facility data, we infer that water consumed in hydrogen production ranges from 5.85-13.2 L H20 / kg H2.
Steam methane reformer plant with carbon capture at the Valero Refinery in Port Arthur, TX
CO2
Real-world capture rates run ~45%, accounting for emissions to power CCS - IEEFA.
ASU
2024 diagram
Escalante 200 MW Solar Project Built
This coal-heavy rural co-op utility is buying its first solar plants
Colorado-based Tri-State will soon serve half its customers’ electricity needs with renewable energy, thanks to new Inflation Reduction Act policies.
June 13, 2024
Tri-State reported that electricity was flowing from the largest third-party solar project it has contracted for thus far, a 200-megawatt site developed by Origis Solar at the former Escalante Station coal-fired power plant in New Mexico.
It will pay $7.1M in taxes to the county over its lifetime.
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200-MW New Mexico solar project replaces retired coal plant
The project will pay approximately $7,100,000 in taxes to the county and $2,400,000 in taxes to the school district over its lifetime.Gridworks, headquartered in Albuquerque provided construction services for the project, employing an estimated 400 people during that time. Origis Energy Services will provide long-term operations and maintenance services for the project, employing approximately four to six on-site jobs. Approximately 500,000 Boviet solar panels were used in the project. Array Technologies provided solar tracking systems and solutions.
IRA has a $10BN USDA program to shut down old rural co-op coal plants & replace them with clean energy
Emissions & Energy Use in Hydrogen
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IEA 2023 global hydrogen review:
Emissions from natural gas SMR w/o CCS = 12 kg CO2e / kg H2, from grid powered electrolysis = 24 kg CO2e / kg H2.
eH2: Funded by Tallgrass Energy
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“We own and operate more than 8,300 miles of natural gas pipeline, more than 850 miles of crude pipeline” - tallgrassenergy.com/About
https://www.tallgrassenergy.com/ In April 2020 Blackstone bought Tallgrass
Apr 16,2020
The Hydrogen Swiss Army Knife
Industry proposes to use hydrogen for �nearly everything.
But you wouldn’t build a house with a Swiss knife.
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Hydrogen must solve its climate problem
Hydrogen must solve its climate problem
Tom Solomon Op Ed published in the Abq Journal Aug 3, 2023 (responding to this Van Romero op ed on hydrogen)
Ever wonder why hydrogen is pushed as a climate solution and is it really?
The ‘why’ starts with the 2017 creation of the Hydrogen Council, a consortium of oil, gas and other industrial companies, formed to market hydrogen as a solution to the forecasted revenue declines from the clean energy transition. Their website includes such members as Exxon-Mobil, Shell, BP, Chevron, Saudi-Aramco and others. Second, per the International Energy Agency (IEA), 99% of global hydrogen is produced from fossil fuels, mostly from methane (ie natural gas). Yes, ‘green’ hydrogen is also produced from the electrolysis of water, but at less than 0.1%. Third, production of hydrogen is a serious climate problem, per the IEA, contributing over 2% of all global greenhouse gases. This is because 12 tons of CO2 are emitted per ton of hydrogen produced (IEA). So before hydrogen can be proposed as a climate solution, it must first solve its own carbon emissions problem.
Is there a proposed solution? Yes, it is to apply carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). There are at least two serious climate problems with that, besides the added cost:
1) CCS does not address the problem of upstream methane emissions from natural gas extraction, which has never been solved. According to the IPCC, methane emissions cause 25% of all global warming.
2) CCS, despite rosy claims of 90% + capture, has an actual history of failing to meet operational or economic goals over the dozen or so projects built, from Boundary Dam in Canada, to the now shuttered Texas Petra Nova project. See the 2022 IEEFA report, “Reality Check on CO2 Emissions Capture at Hydrogen-From-Gas Plants”.
As it stands today, producing more fossil hydrogen will make the climate crisis worse. All the marketing in the world won’t change that.
Tom Solomon is a retired electrical engineer and co-coordinator of the climate action non-profit, 350 New Mexico
Sources:
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The Hydrogen Economy Would Increase Electricity Demand over 50%
The Proposed Hydrogen Economy Increases Electricity Demand over 50% Tom Solomon Feb 2024
The so-called hydrogen economy is a solution proposed by the gas industry, not to climate change, but to the ‘problem’ of declining natural gas sales as the clean energy transition cuts the use of gas in water and space heating and in power plants. Industry plans for hydrogen will boost demand for natural gas in two ways. First is as a hydrogen feedstock, and second and more deceptively, by increasing total electricity demand by 62% just to make green hydrogen, providing them a reason to keep gas-fired electric plants operating when they would otherwise close. This white paper details how that will work.
First, let’s be clear on why we must care about natural gas, aka methane, or CH4.
According to NASA, methane pollution causes 20-30% of all global warming, because this heat-trapping gas is 85 times more powerful than CO2 and because methane is emitted into the air from gas and oil wells, pipelines and compressor stations all along the production and distribution chain. And it is building up in the atmosphere, increasing from 1800ppB in 2010 to over 1950 ppB per NOAA by 2023. We need to rapidly replace methane with clean energy, not find new ways to use it. The second reason to question hydrogen is that in many, many proposed applications there are solutions that are simply better, cheaper and faster to implement, mostly involving direct electrification. Spending today to push hydrogen into areas where it won’t compete risks wasting money on stranded assets.
The gas industry benefits from pushing hydrogen in two ways.
First, since 95% of all hydrogen today is made by steam reforming of methane (CH4), new markets for hydrogen mean new markets for methane, aka natural gas.
Second, the proposed ‘better’ way of producing hydrogen is to run clean electricity through water (H2O) in an electrolyser. That product is labeled as ‘green’ hydrogen. Ironically this will also benefit the gas industry by delaying the closure of existing gas-fired electric plants because of the very wasteful nature of using manufactured hydrogen as a fuel and the increase in electricity to make it. For example only 33% of the clean energy used to make green hydrogen is left to power the wheels of a fuel cell car after all the heat losses from electrolysis, transport and in the fuel cell. Compare that to an electric vehicle which preserves 77% of that clean energy because batteries and electric motors are 95% efficient.
The inefficiency of the hydrogen economy drives some huge numbers for clean energy.
-According to the “DOE Hydrogen Shot challenge” we’d need to produce 50 M Tonne per year of green hydrogen in 2050 and 10 MT by 2030. The green energy required to make 50MT of hydrogen is staggering, estimated at 2500 TWh (teraWatt hours). That is 50 TWh per Mt of H2. To put that in perspective, the electricity consumed in 2022 in the whole US was 4050 TWh. So just to make the green hydrogen for this proposed ‘hydrogen economy’, we’d need to build 62.5% more solar, wind and geothermal generators than we already must build to replace today’s dirty coal and gas power plants which are the #2 source of climate pollution.
-Will the electricity utilities and the gas industry use this 2500 TWh of extra demand to argue that ‘they can’t afford to close down their operating coal and gas plants’ because there’s too much demand for electricity? Of course they will. It’s already happening in Arizona.
-In addition, the economics of gray vs green hydrogen will likely boost the use of fossil gray hydrogen in the short term, despite promises and good intentions. Gray hydrogen today costs about $1.50 per kg ($0.98-2.93) per Bloomberg 2023 vs. green hydrogen which is about 5x more expensive at $4-12 per kg. Yes, predicted cost reductions for green hydrogen show it becoming cheaper than gray in the 2030’s if economies of scale kick in. Will that happen by then? Maybe. In the meantime expect the push to use fossil gray or blue hydrogen instead, with all the harmful climate impacts that implies.
There is one good reason to produce green hydrogen, which is to replace the US’s current 10MT per year production of methane-based gray hydrogen. (It is used in oil refining, to make ammonia fertilizer and various chemicals). That would require only one fifth of the DOE’s 50MT hydrogen shot.
Let’s prioritize cutting the main sources of climate pollution and help EJ communities and the climate crisis by closing coal and gas power plants.
That’s the better path forward.
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Blank slide
53
link
Updating
Fossil Blue Hydrogen
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www.350NewMexico.org
Tom Solomon, 350NM
updated June 2024
“Just use clean electricity”
1937: Hindenburg hydrogen airship explodes in New Jersey
Blue Hydrogen Lifecycle Emissions
Lifecycle emissions from making blue hydrogen from CH4 / methane:
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Data from table 1 in “How Green is Blue Hydrogen” https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ese3.956
Chart by Tom Solomon from data in Howarth - Jacobson’s paper, table 1.
63% is from fugitive methane
Powering SMR*
(even at 65% flue gas capture)
63% from fugitive methane (assuming 3.5% upstream emissions)
link to emissions chart
*SMR = Steam Methane Reforming
The Hydrogen Swiss Army Knife
Industry proposes to use hydrogen for �nearly everything.
But you wouldn’t build a house with a Swiss knife.
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GE Carbon Capture & Seq Design 2022
“But large-scale adoption of CCUS has been elusive, mainly because many projects struggle to be economically viable. Most of the carbon capture facilities around the world today are associated with industrial facilities. There are a few carbon capture demonstration projects with coal-fired power plants, but none are connected to operating gas-fired plants. A full-scale carbon capture facility would essentially require a new round of construction and maybe double the footprint of any power plant to which it’s attached. Adding a carbon capture system into a combined-cycle power plant requires integrating heat and steam.” - General Electric
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100% Hydrogen Power Plants Don’t Exist
Pure 100% hydrogen-burning power plants don’t exist.
GE and Siemens are designing turbines that can combust a mix of methane and hydrogen*.
This first in the US plant in Ohio announced in April 2022 that it will use a 5% hydrogen, 95% natural gas (methane) fuel blend.
GE’s best hydrogen turbine,
the DLN 2.6e, is designed to
burn a 50% hydrogen/
50% methane fuel blend.
Not 100% hydrogen.
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The Siemens Energy 12MW pilot plant Hyflexpower project in France might be the first 100% plant, starting with 30% hydrogen in 2023 link
Long Ridge 485MW power plant, Hannibal, OH
Hydrogen Blending Costs 66% more
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Blue H2
A 20% blend of blue H2 increases cost of electricity by 66%, from $70/ MWh avg to $116/ MWh.
Hydrogen’s heat energy is 68% lower than methane by volume, so blended H2 is largely a diluent.
A 20% H2, 80% methane blend is so diluted that 116% of the blend is needed to get the same heat energy as 100% natural gas.
27.9 Mt Hydrogen Needed per MWh
Let us consider an advanced class 60-Hz gas turbine rated at 400 MWe and 43% net LHV efficiency, with 400 / 0.43 = 930 MWth of heat (fuel energy) consumption (Fig 1). In other words, ignoring small changes in efficiency when changing fuel from natural gas to hydrogen, this gas turbine with a modern Dry-Low-NOx (DLN) combustor, if it could handle 100% H2 fuel (not possible presently), would consume 930 / 120 = 7.75 kg/s of H2 (with 120 MJ/kg LHV).
After some math this is 27,900 kg of H2 fuel per MWh.
Based on 2020 Linde facility data, we infer that water consumed in hydrogen production ranges from 5.85-13.2 L H20 / kg H2. (SMR). Let’s call it 10 L H20 / kg H2.
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eH2: Funded by Tallgrass Energy
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“We own and operate more than 8,300 miles of natural gas pipeline, more than 850 miles of crude pipeline” - tallgrassenergy.com/About
https://www.tallgrassenergy.com/ In April 2020 Blackstone bought Tallgrass
Apr 16,2020
Bayotech: Gray Hydrogen
62
No provision for carbon capture
Germany Disavows Fossil Hydrogen
“Germany will make no subsidies available for so-called “blue hydrogen”, which is created by using fossil gas and sequestering the resulting CO2 emission using carbon and capture (CCS) technology, said Patrick Graichen, Habeck’s state-secretary and right-hand man.
For proponents of blue hydrogen, the German plan makes for tough reading. Oil and gas industry representatives have come out strongly in favour of blue hydrogen and even the European Commission said it will be needed in the transition to a fully renewable-based hydrogen economy.”
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Paper #1: How Green Is Blue Hydrogen?
64
“To call it a zero-emissions fuel is totally wrong,” said Robert W. Howarth, a biogeochemist and ecosystem scientist at Cornell and the study’s lead author. “What we found is that it’s not even a low-emissions fuel, either.” They found that the greenhouse gas footprint of blue hydrogen was more than 20 percent greater than burning natural gas or coal for heat.
Very generous assumptions:
How Green is Blue Hydrogen, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ese3.956
H&J rebuttal to the the Romano rebuttal https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ese3.1154
Baseline assumptions for blue hydrogen:
link to emissions chart
Blue Hydrogen Lifecycle Emissions
Lifecycle emissions from making blue hydrogen from CH4 / methane:
65
Data from table 1 in “How Green is Blue Hydrogen” https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ese3.956
Chart by Tom Solomon from data in Howarth - Jacobson’s paper, table 1.
63% is from fugitive methane
Powering SMR*
(even at 65% flue gas capture)
63% from fugitive methane (assuming 3.5% upstream emissions)
link to emissions chart
*SMR = Steam Methane Reforming
Paper #2 Warns of Hydrogen Climate Impacts
66
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/11/18/hydrogen-fuel-greenhouse-gas-cop26/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306261921014215?via%3Dihub
Nov 18, 2021
Permian Basin Leakage: 9.4% of Production
Mar 23, 2022 Abstract: “We deploy a basin-wide airborne survey of O&G extraction and transportation activities in the New Mexico Permian Basin, spanning 35,923 km2, 26,292 active wells, and over 15 000 km of natural gas pipelines using an independently validated hyperspectral methane point source detection and quantification system. The airborne survey repeatedly visited over 90% of the active wells in the survey region throughout October 2018 to January 2020, totaling approximately 98,000 well site visits. We estimate total O&G methane emissions in this area at 194 (+72/–68, 95% CI) metric tonnes per hour (t/h), or 9.4% (+3.5%/–3.3%) of gross gas production. 50% of observed emissions come from large emission sources with persistence-averaged emission rates over 308 kg/h.”
With 2.7% emissions the coal break-even point (above which natural gas hurts the climate more than coal) this makes burning Permian natural gas 3X worse for the climate than running a coal plant.
67
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.1c06458#
https://www.abqjournal.com/2483153/aerial-methane-survey-detects-more-pollution-waste.html
leaks at 194 metric tons per hour =
9.4% of gross gas production
Actual leakage is much worse than the modeling
Permian Basin Super-Emitters
July 28, 2022: The Mako station, owned by a subsidiary of West Texas Gas Inc., was observed releasing an estimated 870 kilograms per hour of methane – an extraordinarily potent greenhouse gas — into the atmosphere. That’s the equivalent impact on the climate of burning seven tanker trucks full of gasoline every day.
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Blue H2: Still Bad w/ New Methane Regs
69
https://www.nrdc.org/experts/sheryl-carter/gas-leaks-and-its-worse-we-thought
*Howarth-Jacobson https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ese3.956 based on 20 studies
3.4% = Methane produced in the US is emitted/leaked (avg):
2.6% from
gas fields
+0.8% distribution + storage
The Gas Index Dec 2020 report at thegasindex.org
Even w/ new NM waste rule
2% = 2026 gas field emissions, �per OCD. Add 0.8% in distrib
= 2.8% emissions.
WISHH 4-State Hydrogen Hub
Dec 29, 2022: New Mexico – together with Colorado, Utah and Wyoming – are among 33 project developers now “encouraged” to continue with their “Western Inter-State Hydrogen Hub” initiative, which the four states formed as a joint partnership in February. WISHH members will now develop a detailed application about their collective plans for submission to the DOE in April, 2023 which could lead to up to $1.25 billion in federal funding for the initiative. The first grant awards will be announced next summer, said state Environment Department Secretary James Kenney.
Known New Mexico-based WISHH projects include:
70
4-state H2 WISHH MOU
H2 MOU w National Labs
H2 Exec order 2022-013
WISHH Projects in NM
The projects in the WIH2 H2Hub application are:
• AVANGRID will leverage its experience in renewables to produce
hydrogen in New Mexico (Navajo Nation in San Juan County and in Torrance County).
• Libertad Power will produce clean hydrogen in New Mexico to serve off-takers across the Southwest
in heavy haul transportation and power generation/storage (San Juan and Lea counties).
• Navajo Agricultural Product Industries (NAPI), a 275,000-acre Navajo Nation-owned
commercial farm is seeking to become energy self-sufficient and raise produce in greenhouses for the
benefit of Tribal members in the Navajo Nation and San Juan County, New Mexico.
• Tallgrass Energy will produce clean hydrogen serving the power, transportation, and other industrial
markets through its eH2 Power project in New Mexico and Front Range Hydrogen project in Colorado
and Wyoming.
• Xcel Energy Colorado will produce hydrogen on the eastern plains of Colorado using wind and solar
and will support hydrogen use in the electric sector and hard to decarbonize segments of the economy.
71
45V Tax Credits
“DOE looks forward to announcing the projects selected for award negotiations in fall 2023.”
Natural Gas Pipeline at Escalante
There is a natural gas pipeline next to the Escalante plant
72
Escalante
A Solar + 4hr Battery Alternative to eH2
73
link
A Solar + Battery alternative to eH2 Escalante would save $97M and provide the same electricity but at a profit
battery
solar
eH2
Fueling Stations: EV vs FCV
Electric Vehicle US charging network (Jan 2023)
https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/electricity_locations.html#/find/nearest?fuel=ELEC
Hydrogen Fuel Cell US fueling network
https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/hydrogen_locations.html#/find/nearest?fuel=HY
74
948 times more EV charging stations than Hydrogen FCV
180X more EV sales than Fuel Cell Vehicles;
Hydrogen is losing in transportation
607,567 to 807,180 total.
75
Light Duty Electric Drive Vehicles Monthly Sales Updates | Argonne National Laboratory (anl.gov) Jan 2023.
Tesla Model Y #1 EV
Toyota Mirai #1 FCV
Hydrogen is a Distraction from Job #1
76
100% in 2036
(4545GW)
Solar
Wind
7% in 2020 (339GW)
Add 2,000 GW by 2030
HGWT = Hydro, Geothermal, Wave & Tidal
339 GW
Backup
77
link
Cost of an Electric Power Plant - EIA
EIA: US capital cost in 2021 for the construction of gas-fired thermal power plants was $920 per kilowatt (kW) of capacity. For wind, $1,428 per kW and solar $1,561 per kW.
78
Lazard LCOE 2023
79
200
60
117
74
50
82
78
168
106
181
70
117
Avg
Cost of a Solar Electric Power Plant 2023
$1 per Watt capital cost
80
Australian Hydrogen Co in Abq
Oct 26, 2023
This is pure #hydrogenhype. Selling $10 bills for $25 each.
Why? Because it will take 10kWh of wind or solar energy to generate 4kWh of electricity. Round trip efficiency is under 40%
"Australian hydrogen company announces $100M investment in NM”
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Howarth 2022: Methane Leakage= 4.8%
Dec 2022 publication from Dr. Robert Howarth (Cornell) on methane emissions: 4.8% of methane leaks vs EPA claim of 0.93%. “Air and Waste Management Association, Methane Emissions from the Production and Use of Natural Gas” www.awma.org
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Head of H2 Lobby firm quits - industry making false claims
20 Aug 2021
Oil companies have used false claims over the cost of producing fossil fuel hydrogen to win over the UK Treasury and access billions in taxpayer subsidies, according to the outgoing hydrogen lobby boss.
Chris Jackson quit as the chair of a leading hydrogen industry association this week ahead of a government strategy paper featuring support for “blue hydrogen”, which is derived from fossil gas and produces carbon emissions.
He said he could no longer lead an industry association that included oil companies backing blue hydrogen projects, because the schemes were “not sustainable” and “make no sense at all”.
Jackson resigned from the UK Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Association on Monday, saying he could “no longer in good conscience” remain in a role in which he would be expected to hold a neutral stance.
83
IEEFA Report: CCS
Feb 2022
CCS technology has been around for decades, yet its actual, real-world implementation in either the large commercial hydrogen production sector or the utility-scale power production sector has been unreliable and far below the 90 percent to 95 percent capture rate that is considered the industry’s prime objective for CCS.
Accounting for added emissions from the power plant required to run the CCS equipment, real-world capture rates run in the 40% range.
(see: Air Products Port Arthur Hydrogen Plant)
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Carbon Capture Failed at Petra Nova, TX
Petra Nova CCS retrofit costs were reported to be $1 billion, or $4,200/kW
The post-combustion process is energy intensive and requires a dedicated natural gas unit to accommodate the energy requirements of the carbon-capture process.
85
Four Hydrogen Hub Bills Failed in 2022
86
* Jan 15, 2023 story: New Mexico Lawmakers aim to attract hydrogen investments
Another is planned for 2023
European Cities Scrap Hydrogen Buses
European cities are scrapping plans for �hydrogen buses (Jan 2023)
In Dundee, Scotland https://www.electrive.com/2022/12/19/dundee-scraps-hydrogen-fuel-cell-buses/
In Wiesbaden, Germany https://www.hydrogeninsight.com/transport/german-city-to-retire-its-one-year-old-hydrogen-fuel-cell-buses-after-2-3m-filling-station-breaks-down/2-1-1375568
In Montpellier, France https://cleantechnica.com/2022/01/11/french-city-cancels-hydrogen-bus-contract-opts-for-electric-buses/
the city calculates it would cost them 95 cents per kilometer for the hydrogen fueled buses versus �15 cents per kilometer for battery-powered buses. In addition, the cost of the fuel cell-powered buses was between €150,000 and €200,000 more than the cost of battery-powered buses.
87
link
Six times more expensive to run vs electric buses
Decarbonizing Industry, 23% of Direct Emissions
88
Summary: decarbonizing industry
(ie not agriculture or energy).
⅔ of emissions from industry come from steel, cement, plastics & fertilizer.
FF industry emissions counted in energy, not industry.
Four key decarbonization pathways:
1. material efficiency, ie use less
2. CCS
3. green hydrogen
4. direct electrification
Steel is 3.5B MT/yr CO2e. Solve with green H2, retire all blast furnaces and replace with direct reduction shaft furnaces. Replace some uses with aluminum which is much easier to decarbonize with a direct electrolytic process
Cement: 1) use less -50% overuse. 2) use 65% clinker vs 95%. 3) CCS.
Plastic/chems: 1) use less 2) tight regs to use only a few types to make useful recycling possible.
Fertilizer: green H2. Or Nitricity.
⅔ of emissions from industry come from steel, cement, plastics & fertilizer
Hydrogen will play a much smaller role than proponents claim..
Escalante Coal-to-H2 Chemistry
89
https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-production-natural-gas-reforming
These two units, plus the carbon capture unit, will consume 18-30% of the electric power from the converted Escalante plant, according to eH2 Power.
Report #3 Warns of Costs & ESG Risks
90
Nov 23, 2021
Shale Gas Is Driving Increased Methane ppb
Biogeosciences, 16, 3033–3046, 2019
https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-16-3033-2019
© Author(s) 2019.
“...we conclude that shale-gas production in North America over the past decade may have contributed more than half of all of the increased emissions from fossil fuels globally and approximately one-third of the total increased emissions from all sources globally over the past decade. “
91
C-footprint of blue hydrogen is over 20% higher than burning natural gas or coal for heat
Here we see that the carbon footprints of natural gas and coal are similar at 115-116 gCO2eq/MJ and the footprint of blue hydrogen is over 20% higher than both.
92
How Green is Blue Hydrogen https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ese3.956
return to lifecycle slide
20% higher
Hydrogen and EUR Gas Pipelines
“Russia is an autocratic petro state using oil and gas money to finance military aggression. It is weaponizing energy exports to hold Europe hostage to a price and supply crisis of Moscow’s making. It’s one more reminder of why we need to end our reliance on fossil fuels and speed the shift to cleaner, smarter energy sources that won’t condemn us to endless cycles of suffering and war while driving us headlong toward climate catastrophe.
“The industry attempt to lock future generations into decades more dependence on fossil fuels can do nothing to help the people of Ukraine today, but it would help to doom us to the worst consequences of climate change tomorrow. We must do better than that.”
93
https://cleantechnica.com/2022/02/27/time-to-stand-up-for-the-people-of-ukraine-locking-future-generations-into-fossil-fuels-wont-help/
Statement by Manish Bapna, president and CEO of NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council)
Mapping Europe’s Hydrogen Lobby
94
GAS
TriState / eH2 Power Escalante proposal
95
96
HB4 Hydrogen Hub Development Act
Tax incentives: production income tax credits, gross receipts tax deductions for producing hydrogen from fracked methane and emitting 4lbs of CO2 per lb of H2
Also for emitting 375 lbs of CO2 per MWh from hydrogen/gas electricity
97
‘clean’ hydrogen emits 2lbs of CO2 per lb H2
HB4 : 1st Hydrogen Hub Development Act
98
‘clean’ hydrogen emits 2lbs of CO2 per lb H2
HB4 Hydrogen Hub Development Act
99
Hydrogen Leakage & Global Warming
Scientists have warned that hydrogen could be a significant “indirect” contributor to the greenhouse effect when it leaks through infrastructure and interacts with methane in the atmosphere.
Hydrogen itself is an indirect contributor to global warming, said Steven Hamburg, chief scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). And its effect on the climate has so far remained largely unexplored.
“Hydrogen is a potent short-lived indirect greenhouse gas that is 200 times more potent than carbon dioxide at the time it is released, kilogramme for kilogramme,” Hamburg told EURACTIV.
Hamburg is a former professor of environmental science who served as a lead author for the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He says hydrogen is problematic because it interacts with methane in the atmosphere. “Hydrogen that leaks to the atmosphere is such a potent greenhouse gas because it extends the lifetime of methane in the atmosphere, causing it to stick around and continue contributing to the greenhouse effect,” he told EURACTIV. “Hydrogen reacts to form tropospheric ozone, which also contributes to the greenhouse effect. It also breaks down into water vapour in the stratosphere, which also contributes to the greenhouse effect,” he added.
100
H2 GWP-20 = 38x
H2 GWP-10 = 100x
Climate consequences of hydrogen emissions Feb 2022 https://acp.copernicus.org/articles/22/9349/2022/acp-22-9349-2022.pdf?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=eda61fbc-a830-4615-b6a2-6ea0cfbc9573
Talking Points
101
Tax subsidies for blue or gray hydrogen ARE fossil fuel subsidies
Blue hydrogen (H2) from methane is a fossil fuel program promoted by an industry consortium of oil and gas producers and users, heavily promoted by oil and gas marketing firm FTI consulting.
The proposals define ‘clean hydrogen’ as emitting 2 kg of CO2 per kg of H2 produced, and even that 'low value' can only be achieved by ignoring the real rates of upstream methane emissions, and by using a deceptively low methane global warming potential. The real emissions are much higher.
So "clean hydrogen" is not clean. Producing it will increase global warming pollution. By definition it cannot be a climate solution.
The carbon footprint of blue hydrogen is >20% worse than burning fossil natural gas directly, per scientific studies.
Hydrogen is a wasteful energy carrier, 2.3x worse vs electricity.
Electricity from hydrogen is costlier than solar or wind & unprofitable.
The entire premise of blue hydrogen as a climate solution is conceptually flawed. They would spike carbon emissions in the short term in the hopes of 'decarbonizing' some third order emissions sectors with hydrogen in the long term.
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Hydrogen Policy Letter to the Governor
103
link
US GHG Emissions ~6.3 GT / year
104
This is our 15% of global GHG emissions
Transportation
Electricity
Industry
Agriculture
Commercial
Residential
T: 29%
E: 25%
I: 23%
A: 10%
C+R: 13%
Water Consumption to make Hydrogen
105
Based on 2020 Linde facility data, we infer that water consumed in SMR hydrogen production ranges from 5.85 - 13.2 L H20 / kg H2. (SMR)
Water Used to Make Hydrogen
106
20-30kg (or liters) of water to make 1kg of hydrogen - green or gray
(~3 gallons per pound)
USE THIS
Based on 2020 Linde facility data, we infer that water consumed in SMR hydrogen production ranges from 5.85 - 13.2 L H20 / kg H2. (SMR)
NM.gov Clean Hydrogen Fact Sheet Jan 2023
107
Blank slide
108
link
NOx Emissions from H2 Combustion
H2 combustion can produce dangerously high levels of nitrogen oxide (NOx). Two European studies have found that burning hydrogen-enriched natural gas in an industrial setting can lead to NOx emissions up to six times that of methane (the most common element in natural gas mixes).xvii,xviii There are numerous other studies in the scientific literature about the difficulties of controlling NOx emissions from H2 combustion in various industrial applications.xix,xx
The point DOE makes is that at very low levels of H2 blending, the NOx emissions levels might be controllable. However, at higher levels, it is not only difficult to control NOx emissions but the currently developed technologies which attempt to control higher NOx levels remain unproven.xxi That research is years off.
Long-term exposure to NOx increases the risk of respiratory conditions and heightens sensitivity to allergens. NOx is also a precursor to the formation of fine particles and ground-level ozone, which are both associated with severe adverse health effects. This problem is especially urgent with the proven link between COVID-19 and air pollution exposure.
Multiple studies have drawn a clear link between pollution – both fine particulate matter, known as PM2.5, and nitrogen dioxide – and coronavirus mortality rates.xxix,xxx Urban communities of color are most burdened by these pollutants, which come from industry, transportation and power plants.xxxi,xxxii
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Hydrogen hype in the air
By renewableenergyworldcontentteam -12.21.2020
Bayotech Specs 9:1 CO2 to H2
Generically, 1kg of H2 requires these inputs
110
Summary
111
link
Tax subsidies for blue or gray hydrogen ARE fossil fuel subsidies
$62M for New EV Chargers in New Mexico
that's $62M for new EV charging stations in NM.
112
https://nmpoliticalreport.com/2021/11/19/state-utility-regulators-look-toward-increased-adoption-of-electric-vehicles/
NM Electricity Transmission is 96% efficient
Energy lost in transmission and distribution:
About 2% – 6% in transmission and
4% in distribution
Fun fact: Transmission and distribution losses tend to be lower in rural states like Wyoming and North Dakota. Why? Less densely populated states have more high-voltage, low-loss transmission lines and fewer lower-voltage, high-loss distribution lines.
113
Air is 78% Nitrogen, 21% Oxygen
114
link
Green Hydrogen Moral Hazard
115
link
Hydrogen fuel cell vs battery electric cars
BEV beat Fuel Cell in six out of nine metrics.
116
Electric Freight Trucks Coming
117
https://nacfe.org/emerging-technology/electric-trucks/
https://www.autoweek.com/news/green-cars/a36506185/electric-big-rig-semi-trucks/
AutoWeek, May 24, 2021 - “Big truck makers MAN and Scania have started pouring almost $2 billion into electric truck R&D. Volvo is actively putting its VNR Electric Class 8 trucks on the roads of Southern California at what it calls "an impressive pace right now," with order books open since Dec. 3, 2020. Tesla may or may not start cranking out a few trucks at its own factory once it figures out where to get enough batteries for them. And Daimler subsidiary Freightliner has a demo fleet of electric trucks 40 strong, and will introduce commercially available models in numerous classes next year.”
Electric Vehicles and the Grid
118
link
Tesla Model 3 BEV
Toyota Mirai FCV
Solving BEV Battery Issues
FUD over the issue of cobalt in batteries is based on a flawed premise: that cobalt is one of the “essential raw materials needed for the production of electric car batteries — and is now critical to retiring the combustion engine and weaning the world off climate-changing fossil fuels.”
Yes, cobalt is needed to produce electric car batteries for one class of car-battery chemistries, but others use little cobalt or none at all. Standard-range Tesla cars’ batteries use no cobalt. Battery leaders Samsung and Panasonic are designing out cobalt. The portfolio of these alternatives continues to improve and expand.
Another concern is that China’s near-monopoly on supermagnet rare-earths like neodymium could prevent the growing global shift to electric cars and wind turbines. But that’s nonsense.
A key substitution has entered the market: iron-nitride supermagnets using no rare earths but with comparable or potentially greater performance. But even without that magnet innovation, everything that permanent-magnet motors and generators do can also be done as well or better using two other innovations that require no rare earth minerals: control software and power electronics made of silicon, the most abundant solid element on Earth.
119
Rare Minerals In Batteries? Greener, Friendlier Alternatives Already In Use — RMI Reality Check
by Amory Lovins, RMI Dec 9, 2021
Lithium Supply
How a few geothermal plants could solve America’s lithium supply crunch and boost the EV battery industry
Published: March 21, 2022
Geothermal brines are the concentrated liquid left over after heat and steam are extracted at a geothermal plant. In the Salton Sea plants, these brines contain high concentrations – about 30% – of dissolved solids.
If test projects now underway prove that battery-grade lithium can be extracted from these brines cost effectively, 11 existing geothermal plants along the Salton Sea alone could have the potential to produce enough lithium metal to provide about 10 times the current U.S. demand.
120
US Lithium Mines
Center for Biological Diversity lithium mine tracker
121
link
All the Metals We Mined: 2.8B Tonnes
Lithium + rare earths + cobalt = 0.296M tonnes or 0.01% of the
2.8B tonnes of metals mined in 2021
122
Blending Hydrogen Dilutes Natural Gas
123
Example: Think of blending 20% ‘green fuel’ into 50 gal of gasoline. The 20% is 10 gallons.
That 10 gal of ‘green fuel’ is 7gal of water + 3 gal of gasoline. Put that mix back in to make 50 gallons again. You have 43 gallons of gas and 7 gallons of water. How is that a good deal?
Blending Hydrogen into Natural Gas
124
https://www.hydrogeneurope.eu/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/ENTSOG_GIE_HydrogenEurope_QandA_hydrogen_transport_and_storage_FINAL.pdf . Calorific heat content: https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/fuels-higher-calorific-values-d_169.html
Report from Hydrogen-Europe
Why not just use green electricity?
According to Platts hydrogen price assessments, conventional hydrogen prices in October 2020 averaged $1.25/kg in the US Gulf Coast versus $2/kg in California.
Blending Hydrogen: 33% Higher Costs
5-May-2022 Plans by fossil gas companies to blend
hydrogen into natural gas grids will drive up energy
costs while delivering minimal greenhouse gas (GHG)
reductions, according to a new report by the
International Renewable Energy Agency (Irena).
German climate think-tank Agora Energiewende calculated in a study last year that adding 20% hydrogen to the gas grid would increase consumer heating costs by 33% in 2030.
In addition to concerns over cost and the limited climate benefits, Irena explains that there are significant technical issues with hydrogen blending.
“Each component of the gas network has a different tolerance to hydrogen.
The limit for the network is defined by its least tolerant component. Existing has turbines, compressors, metering equipment, CNG [compressed natural gas] tanks and industrial users are among the most sensitive components.
“Most downstream [gas] users are tolerant to a few percentage points of hydrogen… This means that if any of these applications is on the network, the blending limit will be low. Similarly, “once the hydrogen is mixed into the grid, it cannot be directly used as hydrogen (eg, for fuel cells)”, the report adds.
125
Escalante Coal-to-H2 project
126
253MW Escalante Coal Power Plant, Prewitt, NM, Closed in 2020.
Air Separation Unit Diagram
127
Methane Leakage Rates by City
128
https://thegasindex.org/ Mcf gas is thousand cubic feet of gas
Hydrogen Not Viable for Road Transport
Feb 11, 2022:
A new study published in the journal Nature Electronics �(via Recharge) argues that hydrogen fuel cell cars and �trucks have little chance of becoming commercially �viable, and that the urgency of the climate crisis demands that decision-makers focus on battery-electric vehicles.
“Hydrogen will play a vital role in industry, shipping and synthetic aviation fuels. But for road transport, we cannot wait for hydrogen technology to catch up, and our focus now should be on battery-electric vehicles in both passenger and freight transport,” writes Dr. Patrick Plötz, of the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research (ISI). “The window of opportunity to establish a relevant market share for hydrogen cars is as good as closed.”
Plötz explains that, while long-haul trucking of more than 500 km per day “poses a challenge” for battery-electric trucks, European regulations require truck drivers to stop for a 45-minute break after every 4.5 hours of driving. “Within 4.5 hours, a heavy truck could travel up to around 400 km, and thus practical [battery] ranges of about 450 km would suffice, if high-power fast charging for battery-electric trucks was widely available.”
129
https://chargedevs.com/newswire/new-study-finds-hydrogen-unlikely-to-play-major-role-in-road-transport-even-for-heavy-trucks/
Every Major Truck Maker Has an
Electric Semi Truck
nn
130
Liebreich Associates June 13, 2024 https://www.youtube.com/live/w0Q9cuF8zKg
Freightliner, Volvo, Peterbilt, MAN, Mercedes-Benz, etc.
Tesla Semi – Battery Truck
131
Volvo FH Electric Heavy Duty Truck
Exceeds Expectations
The FH Electric has some impressive specs. It features a 540 kWh battery, 490 kW (657 hp) of continuous power, and over 2,400 NM (1,770 ft-lb) of torque. Fully loaded to its maximum legal gross weight of 40 metric tons (88,185 lb)
“These test results show that it is possible to drive up to 500 km during a regular work-day, with a short stop for charging, for example during lunch time,” explains Bergman. “The electric driveline is very efficient, making the all-electric truck a very powerful tool for reducing CO2 emissions.” Volvo Trucks anticipates 50% of its sales will be electric vehicles by 2030.
132
https://cleantechnica.com/2022/01/05/volvo-fh-electric-heavy-duty-truck-exceeds-expectations-on-test-run/
Clean Power NM
133
https://cleanpower.org/facts/state-fact-sheets/#download Select New Mexico
Global Plug-in EV Sales Doubled in 2021
Feb 10, 2022
Global EV sales took a giant leap in both volume and market share in 2021, per the International Energy Agency (IEA).
Automakers sold 6.6 million plug-in vehicles in 2021, more than double the 3 million sold in 2020, and more than triple the 2.2 million sold in 2019, according to the IEA. The broader definition of EVs as battery electric plus plug-in hybrids also claimed about 9% of the global new-car market, up from 4.1% in 2020 and 2.5% in 2019, the IEA said
134
https://www.teslarati.com/electric-vehicle-sales-2022/
https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1134999_global-ev-sales-more-than-doubled-in-2021-vs-2020-tripled-vs-2019
China
EUR
US
US EV sales were 434,879
2022 global EV sales were 7.8M
Global BEV - only Sales 2021
135
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1059214/global-battery-electric-vehicle-sales/
US EV Sales Growth
Through 2021 PEV sales in the light truck market were ‘zero’ with no EV trucks on offer.
In 2022 sales begin of the F-150 Lightning, Rivian R1T, GMC Hummer truck & ‘23 the Tesla Cyber truck
136
2021 US PEV sales were 434,879
in 2022 US PEV sales were 918,464 (up 483,585 or up 111%
in 2023 US PEV sales were over 1.4M vehicles, 80% were BEV
In 2022 US full electric vehicle (BEV) sales grew 33% from 607,567 to 807,180 total.
US EV Sales 2022
137
link
H2 Use Case Ladder
138
Ladder rev 4, 15-Aug 2021
The top of the ladder, level A, is all about replacing the use of grey hydrogen in the economy. Current uses of hydrogen - principally for fertiliser, oil refining and petrochemicals production - currently accounts for around 2% of global CO2 emissions. Clean hydrogen has to win here, as there is no alternative.
Energy per kg for Green Hydrogen
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https://www.spglobal.com/platts/en/market-insights/latest-news/electric-power/031920-cost-logistics-offer-blue-hydrogen-market-advantages-over-green-alternative
50 kWh per kg of H2
GWP-100: Global Warming Potential
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CO2 EQUIVALENTS
Charts and tables convert all greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions into CO2 equivalents so they can be compared.
Each greenhouse gas (GHG) has a different global warming potential (GWP) and persists for a different length of time in the atmosphere.
The three main greenhouse gases (along with water vapour) and their 20-year global warming potential (GWP) compared to carbon dioxide are: (1)
The ratio of the methane GWP of the 20 year to 100 year timeframes is 84/28 or 3:1
Air Pollution Causes 8.7M Deaths
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Feb 2021 journal Environmental Research
Utility Scale Installed Cost 2021
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link
For 164MW
$146M for ut tracking at $.89/W
Storage Cost – Tesla Megapack
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https://www.tesla.com/megapack https://seia.org/research-resources/solar-market-insight-report-2021-q2
The average 2024 price of a BESS 20-foot DC container in the US is expected to come down to US$148/kWh, down from US$180/kWh last year, a similar fall to that seen in 2023, as reported by Energy-Storage.news, when CEA launched a new quarterly BESS pricing monitor.
Hydrogen Needed per MWh
Let us consider an advanced class 60-Hz gas turbine rated at 400 MWe and 43% net LHV efficiency, with 400 / 0.43 = 930 MWth of heat (fuel energy) consumption (Fig 1). In other words, ignoring small changes in efficiency when changing fuel from natural gas to hydrogen, this gas turbine with a modern Dry-Low-NOx (DLN) combustor, if it could handle 100% H2 fuel (not possible presently), would consume 930 / 120 = 7.75 kg/s of H2 (with 120 MJ/kg LHV).
After some math this is 27,900 kg of H2 fuel per MWh.
Based on 2020 Linde facility data, we infer that water consumed in hydrogen production ranges from 5.85-13.2 L H20 / kg H2. (SMR). Let’s call it 10 L H20 / kg H2.
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Backup
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link
IEA: Stop New Oil, Gas & Coal Funding
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Hydrogen Debunking
“Fossil Fuel Companies Say Hydrogen Made From Natural Gas Is a Climate Solution. But the Tech May Not Be Very Green”
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lnik
Hydrogen Fact Sheets
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link
2020 Study: Methane Leaks 5X Worse
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“The EPA has been using equipment counts based on industry self-reporting and some studies from the 1990s, before fracking was used in extraction. ” -Arvind Ravikumar, Univ Texas-Austin
CCS - Carbon Capture & Sequestration
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link
IEEFA Report: CCS
Feb 2022
CCS technology has been around for decades, yet its actual, real-world implementation in either the large commercial hydrogen production sector or the utility-scale power production sector has been unreliable and far below the 90 percent to 95 percent capture rate that is considered the industry’s prime objective for CCS.
Accounting for added emissions from the power plant required to run the CCS equipment, real-world capture rates run in the 40% range.
(see: Air Products Port Arthur Hydrogen Plant)
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CCS - Carbon Capture and Storage
The 2nd law of thermodynamics explains why CCS has to be a hopelessly inefficient process.
You can't dig up, transport, refine and burn fossil fuel and then expect to put that carbon back into the ground without using ridiculous amounts of energy.
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link
CCS is like sewage treatment.
Fossil fuels create sewage and CCS treats it.
Solar and wind don’t create sewage.
Carbon Capture in China
The first CCUS project ran smoothly in 2005, and as the country's attention to climate issues has grown, CCUS technology has gained significant momentum in China, with about 40 projects currently in operation or running intermittently. In September 2020, China proposed a "double carbon goal" of achieving peak carbon by 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality by 2060. Compared to developed countries, China has only 30 years to reach peak carbon and become carbon neutral. As an important technology in the field of carbon emission reduction, CCUS is crucial to China's emission reduction. According to relevant research institutions, under the carbon neutrality target, China's CCUS emission reduction demand is 20- 408 million tons in 2030 and 0.6–1.45 billion tons in 2050. However, after fifteen years of development from 2005 to 2020, the total emission reduction from operating CCUS projects is only 3.298 million tons.
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Carbon Capture Tech
conventional amine scrubbing for CO2 capture will be a dominant technology for post-combustion capture.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780081005149000032
https://sequestration.mit.edu/pdf/David_and_Herzog.pdf
MIT - We found that carbon dioxide capture increases the busbar electricity cost (COE) from 5.0 to 6.7 ¢/kWh at IGCC plants, from 4.4 to 7.7 ¢/kWh at PC plants, and, finally, from 3.3 to 4.9 ¢/kWh at NGCC plants.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1750583617302931
CO2 capture from natural gas power plants using selective exhaust gas recycle membrane designs
by Richard W. Baker et al Nov 2017
This paper describes membrane processes to capture the CO2 produced by combustion gas turbines in natural gas combined cycle power plants. Because combustion turbines typically use a large excess of air, the resulting turbine exhaust gas is relatively dilute (only 3–4% CO2), making subsequent CO2 capture difficult and costly. Previously, we’ve shown that a membrane process can be used to selectively recycle CO2 to the combustion step, which significantly increases the CO2 content in the exhaust gas. In this way, selective exhaust gas recycle (S-EGR) makes CO2 capture energetically easier. Here, various membrane design concepts incorporating S-EGR are described and compared. A combination of S-EGR with non-selective exhaust gas recycle (EGR) is shown to offer advantages in reduced capital, while retaining most of the energy benefits of S-EGR alone. For all of the membrane designs analyzed, the energy and cost of capture vary with the capture rate. Generally, if flue gas compression is not used, the lowest capture cost ($/tonne CO2) for membranes occurs at partial capture rates of 60–70%. Of the process designs studied, the lowest cost of capture (∼$44/t) is achieved by an integrated turbine/membrane design that would require changes to existing turbines.
A variety of technologies are being considered to separate CO2 from combustion exhaust gases so that the CO2 can be sequestered or utilized. Amine absorption is the most mature technology (Rochelle, 2009) but it is costly, produces its own atmospheric emissions, requires careful operation and maintenance, and has a large footprint
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GE Carbon Capture & Seq Design 2022
“But large-scale adoption of CCUS has been elusive, mainly because many projects struggle to be economically viable. Most of the carbon capture facilities around the world today are associated with industrial facilities. There are a few carbon capture demonstration projects with coal-fired power plants, but none are connected to operating gas-fired plants. A full-scale carbon capture facility would essentially require a new round of construction and maybe double the footprint of any power plant to which it’s attached. Adding a carbon capture system into a combined-cycle power plant requires integrating heat and steam.” - General Electric
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San Juan Basin (SJB) CarbonSAFE Site
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CCS carbon storage & sequestration site 10 miles NE of Farmington
CCS Carbon Capture Real World Failure
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IEEFA CCS Fact Sheet https://ieefa.org/resources/fact-sheet-carbon-capture-and-storage
Claims of 95% capture are not supported.
Real world results show 45% capture.
IEEFA Blue Hydrogen Report
Only with best-best-best case assumptions can Blue hydrogen meet the 4:1 clean hydrogen standard for tax credits.
And 4:1 CO2e to H2 is NOT clean.
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GE Carbon Capture Design: Linde-BASF
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P109 https://netl.doe.gov/sites/default/files/2022-09/0919-Carbon-Capture-Technology-Compendium-2022.pdf
The key process components of the Linde-BASF technology are all at TRL 6. This includes absorber/stripper columns, heat exchangers and reboiler, stripper heat integration/recovery, emissions control, and the OASE blue solvent
Lazard LCOE 2023 - NGCC + CCS
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$1504 is avg NGCC+CCS,
adding $529 to NGCC (+54%)
Adding CCS to a natural gas power plant adds 54% to electricity costs.
Avg NGCC=$975
CCS Diagram - Enchant Energy SJGS Coal
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Figure 2 shows the process flow diagram for the CO2 recovery and solvent regeneration steps. In CO2 recovery, the cooled flue gas from the flue gas quencher is introduced at the bottom of the CO2 absorber. The flue gas moves upward through the packing while the CO2-lean solvent is supplied at the top of the absorption section where it flows down onto the packing. The flue gas contacts with the solvent on the surface of the packing, where 95% of the CO2 in the flue gas is absorbed by the solvent. The CO2-rich solvent from the bottom of the CO2 absorber is sent to the regenerator. The CO2-lean flue gas exits the absorption section of the CO2 absorber and enters the flue gas washing section of the CO2 absorber. The flue gas contacts with circulating water to reduce the carryover amine that is emitted from the top of the CO2 absorber.
EPRI - FLOUR CCS Design FEED study - a NGCC retrofit
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Carbon Capture Failures per GAO
“Federal Government Efforts to Reduce Emissions from Coal-Fired Power Plants” - March 10, 2022
Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS). CCS technology involves capturing carbon dioxide generated by human activities at its source—for example, coal-fired power plants or industrial facilities—and storing it permanently underground in geologic formations, such as depleted oil and gas reservoirs. However, implementing CCS technologies at coal-fired power plants—whether by building new facilities or retrofitting existing ones—has proven to be a challenge largely due to external factors that negatively affected their economic viability.
Since 2009, DOE has invested $1.1 billion in 11 projects to demonstrate CCS technology use at coal-fired power plants and industrial facilities.
However, the majority of these projects were not successful. Specifically, DOE initially committed to 8 coal projects—mostly new power plants with carbon capture equipment— but 7 were not built, largely because coal power became less economically viable than competing energy sources such as natural gas. We found that DOE also spent about $472 million—almost $300 million more than planned—on 4 coal facilities that were never built.
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Since 2009, DOE has invested $1.1 billion in 11 projects to demonstrate CCS technology use at coal-fired power plants and industrial facilities." However out of 8 projects, 7 were not built.
$472M was spent on on 4 coal facilities that were never built.
80% of Carbon Capture Projects Fail
Study of 39 Carbon Capture projects in the US, the largest sample ever studied
“While many projects essential to commercializing the technology have been proposed, most (>80%) end in failure.
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Study of 39 Carbon Capture Projects: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/abd19e/meta
Figure 5. Expert assessments of the outlook of the CCS industry over the next decade, in particular the distribution of volume of captured CO2
Carbon Capture - “It doesn’t work”
Nov 25, 2021. The gas industry is promising that carbon capture can eliminate most of the CO2 emissions associated with hydrogen production, but there is increasing evidence that carbon capture technology can’t deliver as promised and even if it could, it is very expensive.
Bloomberg recently reported that U.S. Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) played a powerful role in shaping the components of the infrastructure bill that support the use of fracked shale gas as a feedstock for hydrogen production. However, even Manchin has recently admitted that carbon capture — which is essential to blue hydrogen’s supposed climate credentials — isn’t a realistic solution.
“I’d love to have carbon capture, but we don’t have the technology because we really haven’t gotten to that point,” Manchin explained to E&E. “And it’s so darn expensive that it makes it almost impossible.”
More recently the CEO of Italian energy company Enel acknowledged the same truth about carbon capture, stating: “The fact is, it doesn’t work.” “We have tried and tried — and when I say ‘we’, I mean the electricity industry,” Francesco Starace told CNBC’s Karen Tso on Wednesday. “You can imagine, we tried hard in the past 10 years — maybe more, 15 years” . Enel’s Starace, however, seemed skeptical about carbon capture’s potential.“The fact is, it doesn’t work, it hasn’t worked for us so far,” he said. “And there is a rule of thumb here: If a technology doesn’t really pick up in five years — and here we’re talking about more than five, we’re talking about 15, at least — you better drop it.”
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Italian CEO of ENEL, Francesco Starace
Carbon Capture at Petra Nova, TX
Petra Nova CCS retrofit costs were reported to be $1 billion, or $4,200/kW
The post-combustion process is energy intensive and requires a dedicated natural gas unit to accommodate the energy requirements of the carbon-capture process.
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https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=33552
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-energy-carbon-capture/problems-plagued-u-s-co2-capture-project-before-shutdown-document-idUSKCN2523K8
PNM Opposed Carbon Capture
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The Challenges of Carbon Capture at the San Juan Generating Station
We have created the below infographic to help explain some of the challenges for PNM to move forward with a carbon capture project. These challenges also make a Purchase Power Agreement (PPA) from a third party from a “Carbon Captured San Juan Generating Station” exceedingly difficult and significantly more expensive for customers.
CCS Failures
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https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/carbon-capture/the-carbon-capture-project-that-couldnt-chevron-misses-targets-for-its-huge-australia-facility
Carbon Capture is a Global Failure
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CCS Honest (AUS) Government Ad
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSZgoFyuHC8
5 minutes of informative and hilarious debunking of CCS
(with swearing)
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Fossil Fuel Co’s Push CCS
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Real CCS escape rates
Mark Z. Jacobson July 22, 2021 https://twitter.com/mzjacobson/status/1418244206628245506
@mzjacobson
Real carbon capture escape rates are 2.1-4.5x those claimed (21-45% v 10%)
Escape rates
Boundary dam: 45%
Petra Nova: 30% P.47
https://osti.gov/servlets/purl/1608572
Quest: 21.2%
& rise to 80-90% when considering rest of system
https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/Others/19-CCS-DAC.pdf
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World’s sole coal capture project hits snag
“The world’s sole carbon capture project on a large power plant caught 43 percent fewer metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2021 compared with the year before, according to new data from the Canadian utility company operating the project.
SaskPower said the drop in captured emissions at the Boundary Dam Power Station near Estevan, Saskatchewan, stems from challenges with the main CO2 compressor motor — forcing its carbon capture and storage (CCS) facility to go offline for multiple months last year.
The plant’s backers say the technical issues have been addressed, but critics of carbon capture technology say they are a sign the technology shouldn’t be funded at large coal power plants.
Boundary Dam started operations in the fall of 2014 and became the world’s only power plant with carbon capture after NRG Energy’s Petra Nova facility in Texas went offline in mid-2020 (E&E News PM, July 28, 2020)”
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SaskPower's Boundary Dam project in Canada, the site of the world's first carbon capture project on a large coal-fired power plant. Wtshymanski/Wikipedia
By Carlos Anchondo | 01/10/2022 07:01 AM EST
How Hydrogen Benefits Fossil Fuel Interests
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link
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link
CDR Approaches - NOAA 2024
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Carbon Dioxide Removal: CDR methods can be divided into two main categories: land-based approaches and ocean-based approaches (also called marine CDR or mCDR), as illustrated in Figure 2.
CDR is capture from the air.
CCS is capture from a point source like a power plant.
Cost of CDR CO2 Removal - 2025
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link: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ada4c0 Integrated assessment of carbon dioxide removal portfolios: land, energy, and economic trade-offs for climate policy
DAC Direct Air Capture - limits
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This article and paper about limits to geologically adequate areas for carbon storage might be useful. "there may be only enough practical storage to potentially reverse between 0.4 and 0.7 degrees Celsius of warming — a tiny fraction of the five or six degrees experts previously estimated, the researchers said."
“This study should be a gamechanger for carbon storage,” coauthor Joeri Rogelj, director of research at the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London, said in a statement when the study was announced. “It can no longer be considered an unlimited solution to bring our climate back to a safe level. Instead, geological storage space needs to be thought of as a scarce resource that should be managed responsibly to allow a safe climate future for humanity.”
DAC What is Direct Air Capture
DAC from Climeworks
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429 ppm is �~4 parts CO2 in 10,000.
We’d need millions of plants much bigger than this.
The DAC ‘Mammoth’ Plant in Iceland
World’s Largest DAC from Climeworks
Designed to remove up to 36,000 tons of CO2 per year
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~1,400,000 of plants like this would be needed to remove 50 GT per year.
Current removal cost is ‘closer to $1000 per ton”
The DAC ‘Mammoth’ Plant in Iceland
World’s Largest DAC from Climeworks
Designed to remove up to 36,000 tons of CO2 per year
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~1,400,000 of plants like this would be needed to remove 50 GT per year.
Current removal cost is “closer to $1000 per ton”
The DAC Stratos Plant in Texas
Largest Planned DAC is Stratos
Designed to remove up to 500,000 tons of CO2 per year.
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~100,000 of plants like this would be needed to remove 50 GT per year.
Capital cost ~$1.15 B ea
100k plants would cost $115 T at 1.15B ea.
DAC Direct Air Capture
DAC Why Direct Air CO2 Capture and Storage (aka DAC CS) is a false climate solution - Tom Solomon July 2025
DAC is a greenwashing false solution that allows the fossil fuel industry to keep selling natural gas and emitting carbon pollution today while holding out the promise of future carbon drawdown, avoiding the obvious solution of a just transition to clean energy that costs them profits. Food and Water Watch makes that point in this 2023 post.
DAC uses huge amounts of electricity to remove small amounts of low concentration (429ppm or 0.04%) CO2 from the air.
If grid electricity is used, DAC causes increased CO2 emissions before it removes them, resulting in far lower reductions in net emissions than touted in DAC marketing materials.
The only way for DAC to generate the advertised net CO2 reductions is to use 100% renewable energy, with, at a minimum, the same “3 pillars” that green hydrogen requires: 1) new clean supply (additionality), 2) hourly matching and 3) deliverability (geographic correlation).
Some, including Rep. Meredith Dixon, point to the IPCC AR6 report section on carbon dioxide removal TS.5.7 as supporting mechanical DAC as a key element in their scenario for negative emissions. But a close reading of that section, which I have done, shows that their three mitigation pathways focus on
So DAC was a negligible portion of their solution set. DAC should NOT be conflated with carbon dioxide removal.
Also, see this article in Heatmap, The Climate Tech Investor Who Won’t Touch DAC for an investor’s view point.
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link:
On p 12 of CCS - An Offer they Can’t Accept
(AFOLU = Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Use)
DAC Direct Air Capture-
5 Things to Know About This Climate Scam
1. DAC Wastes Tons of Cash on a Few Drops in the Bucket
investing in solar and wind to reduce emissions would be fifteen times cheaper than using DAC to suck them from the sky.
2. DAC Emits More Than It Captures
capturing 1 ton of CO2 with fossil-powered DAC would emit the equivalent of 3.5 tons of CO2.
3. Carbon Capture Relies on Toxic Solvents
Capturing just a quarter of U.S. annual CO2 emissions would produce triple the amount of chlorine gas that we use globally.
4. “Long-Term Storage Solutions” are Super Risky
there’s no guarantee that “sequestered” carbon actually stays sequestered. The process faces leaks at every turn.
5. DAC Projects Subsidize and Power More Drilling
95% of our country’s captured carbon goes to enhanced oil recovery. This process injects CO2 and other chemicals into wells, to flush out the last dregs of oil.
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IPCC Statements on CDR: AR6.WG3.Ch12
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https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/chapter/technical-summary/ 2022 (AFOLU = Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Use)
TS.5.7 Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) & DAC
CDR is a key element in scenarios that limit warming to 2°C (>67%) or 1.5°C (>50%) by 2100 (high confidence). Implementation strategies need to reflect that CDR methods differ in terms of removal process, timescale of carbon storage, technological maturity, mitigation potential, cost, co-benefits, adverse side effects, and governance requirements. (Box TS.10)
“All the illustrative mitigation pathways (IMPs) assessed in this report use land-based biological CDR (primarily afforestation/reforestation (A/R)) and/or bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). Some also include direct air CO2 capture and storage (DACCS) (high confidence). Across the scenarios limiting warming to 2°C (>67%) or below, cumulative volumes 30 of BECCS reach 328 (168–763) GtCO2, CO2 removal from AFOLU (mainly A/R) reaches 252 (20–418) GtCO2, and DACCS reaches 29 (0–339) GtCO2, for the 2020–2100 period.” (note cum DAC =5%)
“Annual volumes in 2050 are �2.75 GtCO2 yr –1 for BECCS, �2.98 GtCO2 yr –1 for the CO2 removal from AFOLU (mainly A/R), and �0.02 GtCO2 yr –1 for DACCS. (Box TS.10)“�{12.3, Cross-Chapter Box 8 in Chapter 12}
Despite limited current deployment, estimated mitigation potentials for DACCS, enhanced weathering (EW) and ocean-based CDR methods (including ocean alkalinity enhancement and ocean fertilisation) are moderate to large (medium confidence). �The potential for DACCS (5–40 GtCO2 yr –1) is limited mainly by requirements for low-carbon energy and by cost ($100–300 (full range: 84–386) USD tCO2–1). DACCS is currently at a medium technology readiness level. EW has the potential to remove 2–4 (full range: <1 to around 100) GtCO2 yr –1, at costs ranging from 50 to 200 (full range: 24–578) USD tCO2–1. Ocean-based methods have a combined potential to remove 1–100 GtCO2 yr –1 at costs of USD40–500 tCO2–1, but their feasibility is uncertain due to possible side effects on the marine environment. EW and ocean-based methods are currently at a low technology readiness level. {12.3}
99.7% of CDR is non-DAC
DAC: Climeworks, Carbon Engineering
DAC from Climeworks
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429 ppm is �~4 parts CO2 in 10,000.
We’d need millions of plants much bigger than this.
Climeworks DAC Orca Plant
The Climeworks Orca facility in Iceland consists of eight collector containers, with an annual capture capacity of 500 tons each, totaling 4,000 tons of CO2/year. The containers are arranged around a central process hall. It uses 2,000 kWh per ton CO2 removed and became operational in 2021.
To remove even 1Gt per year of CO2 would require 250,000 Orca scale facilities.
That would use 2T kWh, or 50% of the electricity consumed in the US in 2022.
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Spiritus DAC at Nambe Pueblo
https://heatmap.news/technology/carbon-removal-orchard-one-spiritus
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link:
DAC Direct Air Capture: 2 MWh/tCO2
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https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/direct-air-capture-energy-use
Climeworks’ solid sorbent system estimates a long-term energy requirement of 7.2 GJ (or 2,000 kWh/tCO2) (=2MWh/tCO2) — equivalent to around one-fifth of a U.S. household’s annual natural gas consumption — while near-term energy needs would be a bit higher. Carbon Engineering has similarly estimated energy requirements of around 8.8 GJ/tCO2 (or 2,400 kWh/tCO2). Per WRI May 2022
Electricity Needed for Syn (DAC) Direct Air Capture: 8.8 to 14 GJ / ton CO2
Climeworks’ rival, US-based Carbon Engineering, believes it will require 8.8GJ per tonne of captured CO2, rather than the 14GJ-per-tonne figure used in Keynumbers’ calculations. With this lower number, the world would need a mere 284EJ (78,888 TWh) per year to capture global annual carbon emissions.
Eight million such plants would be needed to capture the world’s 32GT annual carbon emissions, at a cost of $80T-$120T.
That 448 ExaJoules is the equivalent of 124,444 TWh — more than five times the annual global electricity consumption in 2020 (23,177TWh, according to Enerdata). And that doesn’t even include the energy that would be required to then transport and store the captured CO2.
Note that 1GJ = ~278 kWh
So 8.8 GJ = 2.4 GWh per ton of CO2
The modeled 30 GT per year of direct carbon removal modeled by the IPCC in scenarios requiring ‘negative emissions’ would require 300 EJ or ¼ of all energy produced world-wide in 2080. To put it another way, it would be equivalent to the current annual energy demand of China, the US, the EU and Japan combined. https://www.carbonbrief.org/direct-co2-capture-machines-could-use-quarter-global-energy-in-2100
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https://www.rechargenews.com/energy-transition/the-amount-of-energy-required-by-direct-air-carbon-capture-proves-it-is-an-exercise-in-futility/2-1-1067588
IEA to Oil: Give up on CCS & DAC
Oil and gas industry needs to let go of carbon capture as solution to climate change, IEA says PUBLISHED THU, NOV 23 2023
One of the major pitfalls in the energy transition is excessive reliance on carbon capture, according to the report. Carbon capture is essential for achieving net zero emissions in some sectors, but it should not be used as a way to retain the status quo, according to the IEA.
An “inconceivable” 32 billion tons of carbon would need to be captured for utilization or storage by 2050 to limit climate change to 1.5 degrees Celsius under current projections for oil and gas consumption, according to the IEA.
The necessary technology would require 26,000 terawatt hours of electricity to operate in 2050, more than total global demand in 2022, according to the IEA.
It would also require $3.5 trillion in annual investment from today through mid-century, which equivalent to the entire oil and gas industry’s annual revenue in recent years, according to the report. (US budget revenue in 2024 was $4.92T)
U.S. oil major such as Exxon Mobil and Chevron are investing billions in carbon capture technology and hydrogen
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Carbon Capture / DAC debate
The Case for Waiting
1. To meet the urgency of the problem, we must spend limited budgets on the most cost-effective ways to curtail emissions now. Scientific American nicely illustrated the results of a meta-analysis that compared techniques for scrubbing carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, from reforestation and soil sequestration to biochar and bioenergy with CO2 capture. Costs per ton removed were 3–4 times higher for direct-air capture than for the other options. Indeed, the Nature Communications study reckoned that mass deployment of DAC systems would cost 1–2% of global GDP—many trillions of dollars—over the next few decades. That’s a hefty opportunity cost.
3. The demand for removals to offset emissions shows the moral hazard this technology creates for polluters. It’s easier to count and audit tons of CO2 squirted underground than emissions avoided. But, as WIRED’s story points out, the greenwashing problem that has plagued carbon-offset markets could undermine the effect of direct-air capture as well, by creating an easy out for big polluters. And the hazard is not just a moral one: there’s a real risk that CO2 could leak back into the air much faster than expected—particularly if a build-it-fast mentality lets CO2-injection companies operate with too little regulation and oversight. A slow-and-steady approach will allow regulators time to keep up with the evolving technology.
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Health & Climate Impacts of Carbon Capture
Why is CC technology not useful in a bridge to the future?
CC requires $ to purchase the equipment to run the CCS process
Energy is required to run the equipment and where does the energy come from? From fossil fuels. None of that carbon is captured.
The fuel to run the CCS equipment has to be mined, refined & transported which requires energy & none of that carbon is captured. 12% of all world energy is consumed by those steps.
If you count all of the upstream and related emissions, to run the CCS equipment, the natural gas upstream emissions, the combustion emissions and the uncaptured methane carbon emissions over a 20 year timeframe only 11% of carbon was captured. Not 90%.
If carbon is piped to an oil field for EOR then the CO2 is not captured but causes more CO2 emissions.
Importantly, you have more air pollution emissions because the CC equipment does not eliminate any air pollutants other than CO2. You still emit NOX, CO, NH3, etc.
Because you need additional polluting energy to run the CCS equipment you generate more pollution than without CCS.
Opportunity cost: If you took that money and just built wind or solar instead, you would eliminate emissions from mining and transport, from powering the CCS equipment and you’d eliminate air pollution instead of increasing it, and eliminate more carbon.
Even if the energy for CCS came from wind and solar, that clean energy would be better used to eliminate the fossil fuels in the first place. So there is no situation, as long as you have coal or gas plants around, where it is better to use CC equipment than to just replace the coal or gas. The social cost is always higher.
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Build the Renewables First
First we must turn off the CO2 and GHG emissions faucet.
How?
First: Build the renewable energy generation to replace and close the fossil fueled power plants. Solar, wind, geothermal and storage to add to existing hydro and nuclear. Then replace the nuclear.
Then Electrify. Use that renewable power to decarbonize transportation and industry. Decarbonize agriculture and the rest.
THEN we can decide if spending $Trillions on building millions of DAC plants is the right solution for drawdown, or if there is a better answer.
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link
Decarbonization vs Drawdown
Decarbonization - reduces emissions
IPCC AR6: Decarbonisation is, “Human actions to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from human activities.”
Drawdown - removes GHG from the atmosphere
The net removal of CO2 from the atmosphere, causing a drop in absolute ppm concentration of CO2.
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link
GHG emissions continue to increase globally.
Step 1: We must reverse and slash emissions from ~38GT CO2 /year, to zero by 2050.
Step 2: Draw down CO2 concentration in the air & return to <350ppm by 2100.
Rep. Dixon on Decarbonization
HB9 (CLIMATE, ENERGY & WATER DIVISION) at HCEDC 2-Feb-2024
Video clip 12:09:44 Dixon why so much opposition to HB9
Chair Gallegos - I am concerned that there's so many people opposed to that. Can you talk to me a little bit as to whether there was enough consultation, and I know you can't get everybody on board, but there seems to be a lot of opposition and concern.
Rep. Dixon: Thank you madam chair I can absolutely address that. I think what it is it's a fundamental disagreement on how to address climate change. In all of the international reports issued by the international Paris Climate Coalition, any major governmentally supported modeling of how we can address climate change, it is well understood that we are not going to solve climate change by simply relying on wind and solar. We have to decarbonize, and that means we have to look at direct air capture, we have to look at carbon capture sequestration, we have to look at hydrogen. Fundamentally that is, that is the disagreement. If you believe that we can solve climate change by shutting down the global economy tomorrow. Having nobody travel, having nobody by cars, because remember all of the car products are made with oil and gas or wind turbines are made with oil and gas are the batteries are extracted from Rare Earth minerals. If you believe that we can solve climate change by shutting down the economy across the world, and just rely on wind and solar, you're going to disagree with this bill. This bill believes that there is technology available and that there is technology that has not yet been developed and that New Mexico should be at the forefront of that. And that if we limit ourselves prematurely we are not going to do ourselves any favor. I believe that that is why there is fundamental disagreement on this bill.
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GE Carbon Capture & Seq Design 2022
“But large-scale adoption of CCUS has been elusive, mainly because many projects struggle to be economically viable. Most of the carbon capture facilities around the world today are associated with industrial facilities. There are a few carbon capture demonstration projects with coal-fired power plants, but none are connected to operating gas-fired plants. A full-scale carbon capture facility would essentially require a new round of construction and maybe double the footprint of any power plant to which it’s attached. Adding a carbon capture system into a combined-cycle power plant requires integrating heat and steam.” - General Electric
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Health & Climate Impacts of Carbon Capture
Why is CC technology not useful in a bridge to the future?
CC requires $ to purchase the equipment to run the CCS process
Energy is required to run the equipment and where does the energy come from? From fossil fuels. None of that carbon is captured.
The fuel to run the CCS equipment has to be mined, refined & transported which requires energy & none of that carbon is captured. 12% of all world energy is consumed by those steps.
If you count all of the upstream and related emissions, to run the CCS equipment, the natural gas upstream emissions, the combustion emissions and the uncaptured methane carbon emissions over a 20 year timeframe only 11% of carbon was captured. Not 90%.
If carbon is piped to an oil field for EOR then the CO2 is not captured but causes more CO2 emissions.
Importantly, you have more air pollution emissions because the CC equipment does not eliminate any air pollutants other than CO2. You still emit NOX, CO, NH3, etc.
Because you need additional polluting energy to run the CCS equipment you generate more pollution than without CCS.
Opportunity cost: If you took that money and just built wind or solar instead, you would eliminate emissions from mining and transport, from powering the CCS equipment and you’d eliminate air pollution instead of increasing it, and eliminate more carbon.
Even if the energy for CCS came from wind and solar, that clean energy would be better used to eliminate the fossil fuels in the first place. So there is no situation, as long as you have coal or gas plants around, where it is better to use CC equipment than to just replace the coal or gas. The social cost is always higher.
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CCS Carbon Capture Real World Failure
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IEEFA CCS Fact Sheet https://ieefa.org/resources/fact-sheet-carbon-capture-and-storage
Claims of 95% capture are not supported
IEEFA Report: CCS
Feb 2022
CCS technology has been around for decades, yet its actual, real-world implementation in either the large commercial hydrogen production sector or the utility-scale power production sector has been unreliable and far below the 90 percent to 95 percent capture rate that is considered the industry’s prime objective for CCS.
Accounting for added emissions from the power plant required to run the CCS equipment, real-world capture rates run in the 40% range.
(see: Air Products Port Arthur Hydrogen Plant)
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DAC Positive Case - WRI
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Carbon Capture Articles
Dec 25, 2023 - Dr. Robert Howarth/Cornell
The environment and economy can’t afford trillion-dollar carbon capture
The report from the University of Oxford finds that net-zero pathways that are heavily dependent on carbon capture and storage will cost at least $1 trillion more per year than scenarios involving renewables. It explains that oil and gas-producing countries pushing for carbon capture technology as a substitute for immediate emissions cuts are grossly underestimating the costs of carbon capture and storage.
February 7, 2024
Carbon capture suffers another blow as legislation fails in first committee
A bill focused on the geological sequestration of carbon failed in its first committee.
The Senate Conservation Committee voted 8-1 to table SB 215 on Tuesday after a presentation by bill sponsors Sen. William Sharer, R-Farmington, and Rep. Meredith Dixon, D-Albuquerque.
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Blue Hydrogen Paper from Oxford U
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Hydrogen Bills from Sen. Heinrich
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$8B for Hydrogen Hubs in BIF
Regional Clean Hydrogen Hubs in the “Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act”
Under the BIF, $8 billion is being provided to support the development of at least four clean hydrogen hubs across the United States in order to further development with respect to the production, processing, delivery, storage, and end-use of clean hydrogen.
The Regional Clean Hydrogen Hubs program includes diversity requirements for feedstock, end-use, and geography. Under the feedstock diversity requirement, there must be
Under the end-use diversity requirement, at least one hub must demonstrate hydrogen use in power generation, at least one hub must demonstrate hydrogen use in the industrial sector, at least one hub must demonstrate hydrogen use in residential and commercial heating, and at least one hub must demonstrate hydrogen use in transportation.
Finally, the geographic diversity requirement will result in the location of at least two hubs in regions of the US with the greatest natural gas resources.
DOE is required to solicit proposals for hubs within 180 days of enactment (ie mid April 2022) and select at least four regional hubs within one year of the application submission deadline.
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Hydrogen Hubs in BIL per DOE
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False claim in 2022 LFC Budget p87
It is false to state, above, that producing hydrogen from steam methane reforming does so without emitting greenhouse gases. Blue hydrogen from methane does emit CO2.
They are not proposing 100% carbon capture, nor is it in the legislation.
The Governor's bill HB4 explicitly defines the Orwellian term 'clean hydrogen' to allow CO2 emissions of 9kg of CO2 per kg of hydrogen, dropping to 3kg/kg by 2028.
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https://nmlegis.gov/Entity/LFC/Documents/Session_Publications/Budget_Recommendations/2023RecommendVolI.pdf
Bayotech tweets
https://twitter.com/350NM/status/1467259839541772290
BayoTech's website says they emit 9 tons of CO2 per ton of hydrogen produced. Yes, hydrogen is zero emissions where it is USED... but at the cost of HUGE upstream greenhouse gas emissions, like 9:1.
This is bad for the climate. @riogranderift
https://twitter.com/350NM/status/1467584254825492480
Bayotech's own website shows it emits 9,090 kg of CO2 for every 1,000kg of hydrogen it produces. Bad for the climate.
https://twitter.com/350NM/status/1467300597971881985
That is in response to the story of Bayotech's hydrogen hubs which use fossil methane gas to make hydrogen. Fossil gas leaks throughout it's production and distribution chain and accounts for 25% of global warming. #keepitintheground
https://twitter.com/350NM/status/1467262039391301638
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NM Greenhouse Gas Emissions
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NM Greenhouse Gas Emissions
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29%
German Government Nixes Blue Hydrogen
“Germany will make no subsidies available for so-called “blue hydrogen”, which is created by using fossil gas and sequestering the resulting CO2 emission using carbon and capture (CCS) technology, said Patrick Graichen, Habeck’s state-secretary and right-hand man.
For proponents of blue hydrogen, the German plan makes for tough reading. Oil and gas industry representatives have come out strongly in favour of blue hydrogen and even the European Commission said it will be needed in the transition to a fully renewable-based hydrogen economy.
“I think for an investor, blue hydrogen will look very risky,” explained Tom Baxter, co-founder of the Hydrogen Science Coalition, a think-tank.
When adding doubts surrounding CCS technology, many analysts and researchers are sceptical of blue hydrogen’s price credentials.
“We find that emissions from gas or coal based hydrogen production systems could be substantial even with CCS, and the cost of CCS is higher than often assumed,” writes a January study published in Applied Energy.
Lastly, there are concerns that supporting blue hydrogen will create a lock-in effect into fossil fuel infrastructure. “Once you’ve invested in blue hydrogen, you are invested for 30 years,” said Baxter. As a consequence, blue hydrogen “is not a stepping stone.”
“You’re not going to shut down blue hydrogen when green hydrogen comes along.”
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https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/german-government-disavows-blue-hydrogen/
Responsibly Sourced Gas (RSG)
Unlike the label “organic” used in the U.S. food industry, there are no government-established standards defining what can be called responsibly sourced natural gas. Since certifying organizations each have their own metrics, critics warn the industry can essentially just set its own low bar and meet it, setting it up for a concerning lack of transparency and potential conflicts of interest.
“This is all private; this is not government. There is no agreement on what the heck responsibly sourced gas means,” said Sierra Club’s Bottorff. “It’s just the companies saying ‘trust us.’”
Founded in 2019, Project Canary sells its own monitoring tech, the so-called “canary,” a solar-powered device that can detect even small leaks. Its chief rival is MiQ, a nonprofit focused exclusively on methane emissions.
But under a voluntary standard such as Project Canary’s, companies can hand-pick their best gas fields for certification, advertise them as responsibly sourced in the market and never disclose the carbon footprint for the rest of their wells, Bottorff said. She also questions private firms’ ability to work as independent auditors without oversight from a larger governing body. “They get paid by being able to say, ‘Yes, this is responsibly sourced stuff.’ So it causes, in my opinion, a questionable relationship between client and company.”
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19-Jan-2022
Responsibly Sourced Gas
HOUSTON & DENVER, June 29, 2022--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Chevron Corporation (NYSE: CVX) announced that the company’s participating North American upstream assets earned Project Canary’s highest ratings on operational and environmental performance. Project Canary’s independent analysis was conducted on Chevron assets in Texas and Colorado by the Denver-based climate tech and environmental assessment company.
As a result of the certification process, 82 wells achieved "Platinum" status and 3 wells received "Gold" status, Project Canary’s highest ratings and confirmation of Chevron’s industry-leading practices, including continuous monitoring. Chevron plans to market RSG from the certified assets in the second half of 2022.
Project Canary defines Platinum and Gold standards here: https://www.projectcanary.com/private/trustwell-and-rsg-definitional-document/
TrustWell™ responsibility scoring and certification targets:
This is what they say on their website, https://www.projectcanary.com/services/responsibly-sourced-gas/
"Responsibly Sourced Gas is produced by companies that have undergone third-party assessments to verify that their operations have utilized the highest standards and practices in all phases of their operations, and are committed to continuous monitoring. It is also referred to as Certified Low Emissions Gas or Certified Gas.
Buying Responsibly Sourced Gas can reduce emissions by 80%+ and carbon footprint by up to 18%."
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Lazard LCOE Hydrogen Analysis
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Blue Hydrogen = Expensive Electricity
11-July 2022 Because hydrogen contains roughly 30% as much energy as methane by volume, about 3.3 cubic metres of H2 would be required to deliver the same amount of energy as 1 cubic metre of natural gas. In other words, burning gas-derived hydrogen requires 3.3 times more fossil gas than if the latter was burned directly.
Even Jorgo Chatzimarkakis, the bullish CEO of trade body Hydrogen Europe, stated at the recent Eurelectric Power Summit that “blue hydrogen doesn’t sell, it’s too expensive”.
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Cost of Hydrogen
As of 2020
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_economy#:~:text=As%20of%202020%20green%20hydrogen,at%20%241%E2%80%931.80%2Fkg.
Cost of Electricity from Hydrogen
As of 2020
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Breakthrough for Electric Aircraft
Researchers have achieved a world-leading energy density with a next-generation battery design, paving the way for long-distance electric planes. The lithium-air battery, developed at the Japanese National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS), had an energy density of over 500Wh/kg. By comparison, lithium-ion batteries found in Tesla vehicles have an energy density of 260Wh/kg. According to the researchers, the battery “shows the highest energy densities and best life cycle performance ever achieved” and marks a major step forward in realising the potential of this energy storage. “Lithium-air batteries have the potential to be the ultimate rechargeable batteries: they are lightweight and high capacity, with theoretical energy densities several times that of currently available lithium ion batteries,” according to a release posted by NIMS. 500Wh/kg is viewed as an important benchmark for achieving both long-haul and high-capacity flights.
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https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/battery-electric-plane-lithium-air-b2000981.html
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/01/220120140724.htm
Jan 26, 2022
41% of Ocean Shipping is Fossil Fuels
QUARTZ January 14, 2022
In 2018, the total tonnage for coal, oil, gas and petrochemicals was nearly 4,500M tons of the 11,000M tons of total maritime shipping.
That's 41% of shipping decarbonized with clean energy.
No #hydrogen needed.
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$20B in Federal Subsidies to Oil & Gas
Conservative estimates put U.S. direct subsidies to the fossil fuel industry at roughly $20 billion per year; with 20 percent currently allocated to coal and 80 percent to natural gas and crude oil. European Union subsidies are estimated to total 55 billion euros annually.
Intangible Drilling Costs Deduction (26 U.S. Code § 263. Active). This provision allows companies to deduct a majority of the costs incurred from drilling new wells domestically. In its analysis of President Trump’s Fiscal Year 2017 Budget Proposal, the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) estimated that eliminating tax breaks for intangible drilling costs would generate $1.59 billion in revenue in 2017, or $13 billion in the next ten years.
Percentage Depletion (26 U.S. Code § 613. Active). the JCT estimated that eliminating percentage depletion for coal, oil and natural gas would generate $12.9 billion in the next ten years.
Credit for Clean Coal Investment Internal Revenue Code § 48A (Active) and 48B (Inactive). These subsidies create a series of tax credits for energy investments, particularly for coal. In 2005, Congress authorized $1.5 billion in credits for integrated gasification combined cycle properties, with $800 million of this amount reserved specifically for coal projects. In 2008, additional incentives for carbon sequestration were added to IRC § 48B and 48A. These included 30 percent investment credits, which were made available for gasification projects that sequester 75 percent of carbon emissions, as well as advanced coal projects that sequester 65 percent of carbon emissions. Eliminating credits for investment in these projects would save $1 billion between 2017 and 2026.
Nonconventional Fuels Tax Credit (Internal Revenue Code § 45. Inactive). Sunsetted in 2014, this tax credit was created by the Crude Oil Windfall Profit Tax Act of 1980 to promote domestic energy production and reduce dependence on foreign oil. Although amendments to the act limited the list of qualifying fuel sources, this credit provided $12.2 billion to the coal industry from 2002-2010.
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Hydrogen Production is 2.3% of Global CO2 emissions
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Today hydrogen is mainly used in the refining and chemical sectors and produced from fossils, accounting for 6% of global natural gas use and 2% of coal consumption and being responsible for 830 MtCO2 of annual CO2 emissions.
FF and industry CO2 emissions were 36.6 MT/yr so 0.83 is 2.3% of that.
36.6
Decarbonizing Industry
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Decarbonizing Portland Cement
CO2 emissions arise about half each from:
CaO + CO2
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https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/cement/
https://www.nrdc.org/experts/sasha-stashwick/cut-carbon-and-toxic-pollution-make-cement-clean-and-green
Thus a carbon-free source of heat is required for the kiln. But combusting blue hydrogen for that heat is NOT decarbonizing it. It is a case study of the scientific conclusion from the Howarth/Jacobson paper that, “the greenhouse gas footprint of blue hydrogen was more than 20% greater than burning natural gas or coal for heat.”
1510°C
Decarbonizing Cement 100%: Sublime Systems (MA)
Sublime Systems uses a room temperature electrochemical process to create zero carbon cement that meets industry standards, with no emissions from heating and no process emissions.
As of 2023 they have an operating ‘100 tonne’ pilot plant, target a thousand tonne plant in 2026 and a megatonne plant in 2028.
They use: “ambient temperature electrochemical calcination. This breakthrough, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in September 2019, allows us to extract calcium using low-cost electricity rather than heat.”
They use a different source material to create the lime (CaO), which is non-carbon basaltic rock (10% Ca), not limestone (CaCO3).
They dissolve the Calcium-containing basaltic feedstock in an ionic electrolyzer with a strong pH gradient. The lime precipitates out in a continuous process which is then used to make cement.
2023 Medium Article on Sublime Systems
Volts podcast on Sublime Systems cement
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Decarbonizing Cement is not really a use for hydrogen
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World's largest cement manufacturer commits to science-based targets and net-zero pathway
Companies pursuing decarbonized cement:
Reports on decarbonizing cement
Decarbonizing Cement (NRDC)
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H2 for Steel Production
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https://www.evwind.es/2021/06/23/ssab-lkab-and-vattenfall-first-in-the-world-with-hydrogen-reduced-sponge-iron/81420
No carbon capture needed for steel production
Hydrogen for Steel Production
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZdX5Hhk9r0 Just Have a Think
HD-R process - a 97% CO2 reduction
Clean energy
water
Instead of using carbon to remove the oxygen from iron ore (Fe2O3) and make CO2, use hydrogen to remove the oxygen from FeO3, turning it into H2O.
Electrochemistry for 98% Pure Iron
ElementZero has an electrochemistry process using green electricity to reduce iron ore into 98% pure iron (Fe)
Based in Australia.
No hydrogen required.
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Blank slide
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LCOE CAPEX
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Three Climate Solutions Right Now
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US GHG emissions sources 2021
Three actions now to cut 2/3 of GHG emissions:
www.350NM.org/electrify-new-mexico/
Annual Global Hydrogen Production
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https://www.globalccsinstitute.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Circular-Carbon-Economy-series-Blue-Hydrogen.pdf
60% is pure H2, 40% is CH4 syngas
Currently approximately 120Mt of hydrogen is produced annually; around 75Mt of pure hydrogen with the remainder being mixed with other gases, predominantly carbon monoxide (CO) in syngas (synthesis gas). The pure hydrogen is used mostly in refining (39Mt) and ammonia production (33Mt). Less than 0.01Mt of pure hydrogen is used in fuel cell electric vehicles. The syngas containing the remaining 45Mt of hydrogen is used mostly in methanol production (14Mt), direct reduction iron making and other industrial processes including as a source of high-heat (IEA 2019; International Energy Agency (IEA) 2020 2020a). Approximately 98% of current hydrogen production is from the reformation of methane or the gasification of coal or similar materials of fossil-fuel origin (eg petcoke or ashphaltene). Only about 1% of hydrogen production from fossil fuels includes carbon capture and storage (CCS). Approximately 1.9% of hydrogen is produced as a bi-product of chlorine and caustic soda production. The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that less than 0.4% of hydrogen is produced by the electrolysis of water powered by renewable electricity. Approximately 98% of global hydrogen production is emissions intense, emitting around 830Mtpa of CO2 (IEA 2019; Global CCS Institute 2020).
Emissions from Hydrogen Production
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Blue hydrogen under microscope over emissions, role as transition fuel, 29-Sept-21
Emissions from Industry: 23%
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other
Decarbonizing Industry, 23% of Direct Emissions
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Summary: decarbonizing industry
(defined as not agriculture or energy).
⅔ of emissions from industry come from steel, cement, plastics & fertilizer. Fossil fuel industry emissions are counted in the energy sector.
Four key pathways:
1. material efficiency, ie use less
2. CCS carbon capture and storage
3. green hydrogen
4. direct electrification
Steel is 3.5B MT/yr CO2e. Solve with green H2, retire all blast furnaces and replace with direct reduction shaft furnaces. Replace some uses with aluminum which is easier to decarbonize with a direct electrolytic process
Cement: 1) 50% overuse, so use less. 2) use 65% clinker vs 95%. 3) CCS. Or 4) Sublime Cement.
Plastic/chems: 1) use less 2) tight regs to use only a few types to make useful recycling possible.
Fertilizer: green hydrogen
⅔ of emissions from industry come from steel, cement, plastics & fertilizer
Volts podcast: Rebecca Dell on decarbonizing heavy industry
https://qz.com/2113243/forty-percent-of-all-shipping-cargo-consists-of-fossil-fuels/
41% of ocean shipping is fossil fuels
Green hydrogen and CCS will play a small part
Decarbonizing Industry
Feb 14 Volts podcast with Rebecca Dell
Industry is ⅓ to ¼ of global emissions, I/4 if you only count direct emissions (eg smokestacks at factories) with the rest to get to ⅓, emissions from the electricity they consume.
“Industry”, defined as the material economy, ie not agriculture or energy. Mining, construction, manufacturing, waste processing.
Three sectors are responsible for the majority of GHG emissions: steel, cement & commodity chemicals, like 10 chems which are precursors for two products: plastics and ammonia fertilizer.
So really, steel, cement, plastics & fertilizer account for ⅔ of emissions from industry.
In the ‘other ⅓’ landfill gas and lighter manufacturing are big contributors.
None of the fossil fuel industry is counted in the global tally, as those emissions are counted in energy. But they ARE counted in the US tally.
Steel at 3.5B tonnes/yr CO2e, is such a big contributor because 1) we make it in huge quantities, billions of tons per year. Also 2) these industries all include the key step of transforming a raw material into a useful molecule which generates direct emissions.
All are primary commodity processing industries.
Aluminum is also a big one.
~1000lb of steel per person/yr for 7b people
Fe2O3 to Fe using coal. Could use H2 instead, see Vattenfall. Process emissions, meaning from anything except combustion.
A few important decarbonization pathways:
1. material efficiency, ie use less. 2. CCS, 3. hydrogen, 4. direct electrification 5. bio-energy (but there is not enough biomass to go around)
The US already uses less steel since most of our infrastructure is built. Also steel is quite recyclable which might satisfy any increase in demand, but demand should continue.
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⅔ of emissions from industry are from steel, cement, plastics & fertilizer
Decarbonizing Industry
14-Feb-22 Volts podcast w Rebecca Dell, p2
Making steel w/H2 is the smallest increment of new tech needed to decarbonize steel. 90% of steel make by coal fired blast furnace at integrated steel mills; 7% use direct reduction shaft furnace with methane may be convertible to hydrogen instead.
Direct electrification for steel: molten oxide electrolysis, heat up the iron ore in presence of huge electric field to pull apart the iron and oxygen, similar to how we make aluminum. Use the least direct energy. Now at pre-commercial phase. Wait a year. Industry uses 7-8% of all energy in the globe.
Steel mills were located because they had best access to energy and raw materials.
10,000 employees typical, so a big employer.
CCS if it worked, would be the easiest way to re-use old integrated mills. Over 30yrs all blast furnaces will have to be retired.
New green steel will be 25%-200% more expensive, but steel is so cheap it will not add much to end use costs.
Cost of steel is 0.45% of price of a car. Green steel might add $200 to cost of a $37k car.
Only two pots of money in the economy, consumer $ and tax $. What ratio do we use?
Sweden green steel now at Hybrit, Vattenfall.
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Decarbonizing Industry
14-Feb-22 Volts podcast w Rebecca Dell, p3
Cement - first cook calcium carbonate at 1500C into Calcium oxide clinker which emits 40% from burning fuel for heat, plus 60% that burns off as direct process emissions.
Even if we don’t like CCS, the most likely place to use it is in the cement industry. One big pipe, 25 employees. Also could use less clinker like 65% instead of 95%, well demonstrated. 30% right there! Also could just use less; we are so wasteful! Studies of commercial buildings looked at cement actually used vs what’s required by code and typically find about 2x used vs needed. Because it is so cheap vs labor costs, etc.
A mixer truck of concrete is $1000 vs $5000 per hour in total labor. Cement is ~0.5% of total building cost not including land. So even if the green version is 2x the cost it would only make the end product 0.5% more expensive. So mandates could work.
Chemical processing - Industry is very diverse. But of BASFs’ 100,000 products, 80% of emissions come from literally 20 products (not 20%). They are the building blocks of other products, mostly fertilizer and plastics. Clean hydrogen solves fertilizer. Simple
Plastics - same solutions- we should use less. Some of the fossil fuels are burned to make the energy, the rest goes into the plastic. Most plastic waste goes into mixed garbage and decomposes anaerobically into methane landfill gas. Per the EPA only 9% of plastic in the US is even collected, of which ~half is recycled at all, most is mixed plastic, downcyced into low quality plastic. Solution is to use less, plus tight regulation requiring use of only use of only a few types, making real and useful recycling possible.
Bio-plastics are real, but not a meaningful portion, also not enough biomass to go around.
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Decarbonizing Industry
14-Feb-22 Volts podcast w Rebecca Dell, p4
Chemical processing - Another idea - take C from CO2 but requires a huge amount of energy. CO2 is what’s left after you take out all the energy from big complex molecules. Chem industry is the most energy intensive industry of all. To produce the basket of chems but using only CO2 would require 19TWh per year. More than half of all energy produced would be required. So really got to just use dramatically less plus vastly better recycling. Since 2015 the rate at which total plastic production is increasing has stopped accelerating, but is still getting worse.
Industry is just at an earlier stage vs electricity, so have to go faster. What we have to do is entirely within our capacities, in the US and globally. But the scale of the challenge is huge.
Biden actions… In the BIL, biggest $$ going into the DOE, $0.5B to a few $B going into industry. Abs needs public money. In BBB from $4B to much more.
Biden Exec order on federal sustainability to but low GHG building materials, called Buy Clean. Half of all cement is purchased with federal dollars - think a runway or bridge. BBB has money to implement Buy Clean. If Feds do it, makes it easier and cheaper for local Gov’s to do it. Takes care of all the fixed costs so makes the next participant easier.Calif passed these laws. Covers mostly cement and steel. But not cement in CA because of lobbying. If enough states join it could lead to a sea change in low GHG building materials. Goal is to create a virtuous circle of GHG ambition, involving the EPA.
On investment side could do credit subsidies or direct subsidies or direct federal investment, in clean production. Governance issues, a lot of industries and market have poor enforcement of existing regulations on labor standards and GHG emissions.
Have hollowed out expertise on industrial policy in the US compared to other countries. We pretend we don’t do it but we do, just in a way that makes it easy for industry capture. $3B per year in Germany on the Fraunhofer institute. Our closest is the Advanced Mfg office with $0.4B per year for an economy 5X their size. Trade as instrument of decarbonization. US and EU working to turn our steel and Al tariffs into policy that could help reduce GHG. Still have a lot of work to do to figure out the right policy. Businesses hate regulations that they have to comply with but their competitors don’t.
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Decarbonizing Industry - Antora Energy
Both Industrial Heat and Power
Creating mini-suns using renewable energy to store energy by heating carbon materials and converting light radiated from these mini-suns into electricity using satellite-grade PV. At the same time, recycling waste light energy by reflecting it back to mini-sun. i.e. carbon bank/ heat storage unit. https://youtu.be/XYd3GGV07UE
https://antoraenergy.com/
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Blue Hydrogen: Is It Green or Gray
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Feb 22, 2022 analysis by Matthew Gentry, PhD. Molecular biologist
Hydrogen will primarily be used in heavy industry and transport, with very little being used in buildings. Source: IEA (2021), Global Hydrogen Review 2021, IEA, Paris https://www.iea.org/reports/global-hydrogen-review-2021
Underfunded Agencies Can’t Cut Methane Leaks
A 2019 state climate report said that methane emissions accounted for almost a third of New Mexico’s greenhouse gas emissions, compared to 10% nationally.
Starting in April 2022, oil and gas operators will need to reduce the volume of gas flared or vented annually in order to meet the 98% gas capture goal by 2026.
Sarah Propst, the department’s cabinet secretary, is requesting a $3.1 million increase to the Oil Conservation Division’s budget, part of which would add 25 more full-time staff, including eight more inspectors.
Satellite data analyzed by the Howard Center revealed that oil and gas operators on federal lands in New Mexico flared more than 138 billion cubic feet of gas, nearly half of the gas burned off in the state between 2012 and 2020.
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The Oil Conservation Division, according to its staff directory, and confirmed by the division, the state employs 11 inspectors, who are responsible for checking about 51,000 active wells.
OCD has 11 inspectors to monitor 51,000 wells.
Universal Hydrogen in Abq for Aircraft
https://edd.newmexico.gov/pr/universal-hydrogen-picks-new-mexico-for-major-manufacturing-hub/
https://www.bizjournals.com/losangeles/news/2022/03/11/universal-hydrogen-expand-albuquerque.html
https://twitter.com/Universal_H2
Our first product is a conversion kit for existing regional aircraft, starting with the ATR72 and the De Havilland Canada Dash-8, to fly on hydrogen. This consists of a fuel cell electric powertrain that replaces the existing turboprop engines. It also accommodates, in the rear of the fuselage, our proprietary, lightweight, modular hydrogen capsules that are transported from green hydrogen production sites to the airport and loaded directly into the aircraft
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link
Airbus H2 jet concept
Hydrogen Aircraft
Manufacturing costs: One example had the assumption that they would have firmed electricity at least 60% of the time at US$15 per MWh their cost. That’s 1.5 cents per kWh for reliable electricity, radically under any realistic price for delivered, firmed electricity at an industrial facility.
A hydrogen fueled Airbus 321 would need about 7.4 tons of liquid hydrogen. There would be a traffic jam a dozen kilometers long if hydrogen were delivered by truck. There are no hydrogen pipelines to airports. If delivered as gas by pipeline they’d require on-site electrified liquefaction.
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Loss of Oil Demand with Rise in EVs
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SEC to Require Climate Risk Disclosure
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Gov Exec Order 13
Clean Hydrogen Development Initiative
Notes for 5.16.22 hydrogen meeting.docx - Google Docs
On the same day – March 10, 2022 -- that Governor Lujan Grisham held a meeting in Albuquerque with hydrogen developers and announced the $10M LEDA loan to Universal Hydrogen, the Governor also issued Executive Order 13. The EO continues efforts to allow NM utilities generating electricity by burning hydrogen to qualify under the RPS by providing definitions of clean hydrogen, no-carbon hydrogen, zero-carbon hydrogen. The EO also instructs her agencies to:
NB that these agency assignments track closely with the oil and gas industry policy measures contained in the red-line New Mexico Climate Change Task Force Draft Plan sent out by Camilla in an email to our climate group on May 10th; i.e., state primacy for permitting carbon storage wells, legislation on ownership of pore space, and Hydrogen Hub Act legislation.
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Nitricity
Pulling fertilizer out of thin air with PV
Nitricity has developed an experimental plasma reactor that uses PV electricity to produce competitively priced, environmentally clean, nitrogen fertilizer. Its onsite fertilizer production eliminates emissions from transport, and provides a viable alternative to fossil-based nitrogen fixation methods like the Haber-Bosch process.
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Home | Nitricity https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/01/19/pulling-fertilizer-out-of-thin-air-with-pv/
Demand Evidence that Blue Hydrogen Promises Are True
Like a banker reviewing a loan, we should demand very specific up front collateral which will be sacrificed if and when their promises can't be met. We must define the collateral (clawbacks?). But before any government support is approved for fossil hydrogen, let’s demand that they show:
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The atmosphere is the ultimate score keeper on methane and we are losing
Blue Hydrogen - Power Industry Analysis
Analyses have shown that hydrogen becomes the low-cost, low-carbon solution in a majority of potential end-use markets at $2/kilogram (kg) H 2.
Currently, fossil-based hydrogen without carbon capture, known as “gray” hydrogen, can deliver less than $1.50/kg H 2 costs while carbon capture can add $0.10/kg to $0.30/kg. Green hydrogen currently delivers approximately $5/kg unit costs, although these estimates are dropping sharply with advances in electrolyzer manufacturing and oversupply of renewable power expected to achieve $2.60/kg prices by 2030 and less than $1.50/kg by 2050.
Hydrogen production requires abundant, low-cost water or simple hydrocarbons (primarily methane). Green hydrogen consumes at least 9 kg of water per kg of H2 while gray and blue H 2 requires half as much (when produced via steam methane reforming with a subsequent water-gas shift).
While hydrogen is viewed as a solution to renewable curtailment, converting excess power to hydrogen that can be later reclaimed in a turbine or fuel cell (power-to-gas-to-power) can amount to a 70% energy loss. For most grid storage needs—typically several hours at most—the less than 10% roundtrip losses of battery storage represent a considerable advantage.
Chemical energy storage (including hydrogen) does represent the only technically feasible and widely scalable approach to inter-seasonal storage of renewable energy, but the demand for this duration only becomes meaningful for renewable penetration greater than 70% of demand.
The predominant mode of gray hydrogen production, steam methane reforming with a water-gas shift reaction, will need to be retrofitted to capture two streams of CO 2: a flue gas from natural gas combustion for heat and a process gas stream under pressure. Alternatively, a shift to auto-thermal reforming would make CO 2 capture considerably simpler, albeit with decreased hydrogen yields, and provide blue hydrogen with lifecycle emissions comparable to those of green hydrogen from wind and solar.
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FTI Consulting Started the EU Hydrogen Council
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US EPA - Methane Emissions
Methane emissions occur in all sectors of the natural gas industry, from production, through processing and transmission, to distribution. They primarily result from normal operations, routine maintenance, fugitive leaks, and system upsets. As gas moves through the system, emissions occur through intentional venting and unintentional leaks. Venting can occur through equipment design or operational practices, such as the continuous bleed of gas from pneumatic devices (that control gas flows, levels, temperatures, and pressures in the equipment), or venting from well completions during production. In addition to vented emissions, methane losses can occur from leaks (also referred to as fugitive emissions) in all parts of the infrastructure, from connections between pipes and vessels, to valves and equipment.
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“Renewable Natural Gas”
RNG or “Renewable Natural Gas“ is methane from waste
Per the website for renewable natural gas: https://www.rngcoalition.com/
“RNG projects capture this methane from existing food waste, animal manure, wastewater sludge and garbage, and redirect it away from the environment, repurposing it as a clean, green energy source.”
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Pure Hydrogen Power Plants Don’t Exist
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Hydrogen has one third the volumetric energy density of methane. This is an important distinction as adding small amounts of hydrogen to the fuel (on a volumetric basis) will have a smaller impact on carbon dioxide emission reduction. Using this information, the relationship between the amount of H2 in the fuel (by volume) and CO2 emission reduction can be defined (See Figure 5). Due to the nonlinear nature of this curve, attaining a 50% reduction in CO2 emissions requires a blend that is ~75% (by volume) hydrogen.
1st Pilot Hydrogen Power Plant, in France
April 2022: HYFLEXPOWER will be an �industrial power plant at a paper factory �in Saillat-sure-Vienne in France.
An EU-funded project, HYFLEXPOWER is driven by a consortium of several companies and institutions. It is designed to eventually fire 100% green hydrogen but will start out co-firing 30% hydrogen by the end of this year (2022). Combining renewables, an electrolyser for hydrogen production, hydrogen storage as well as gas turbines, it will have a capacity of 12MW.
When commissioned in 2023, HYFLEXPOWER will be the world’s first industrial-scale hybrid power plant.
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A Siemens Energy pilot plant 12MW Hyflexpower project in France might be the world’s first 100% H2 plant, starting with 30% hydrogen in 2023 link
The Hydrogen Science Coalition
H2 Science Coalition, H2sciencecoalition.com to counter H2 #hopium
For hydrogen sanity, to counter the bags of money going into hydrogen PR that is contrary to elementary physics & economics.
CleanTech talk podcast with Paul Martin Part 1, 1-Mar-2022. Part 2, 19-Mar-2022
https://h2sciencecoalition.com/data-resources/
EXCELLENT Hydrogen Science FAQ
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@H2coalition
Paul Martin
Honest Hydrogen Categories
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Hydrogen Science Coalition 3 principles
Three evidenced-based recommendations for Hydrogen's role in the energy transition to 2050
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Dr. Howarth Testimony: Congress 29Jul22
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New US Factory Announcements
First U.S. Rare Earth Manufacturing Facility Slated for Oklahoma
In Oklahoma, USA Rare Earth announced the establishment of the nation’s first integrated rare earth metal and sintered neo-magnetic manufacturing facility, which will begin operations in Stillwater. The new $100 million manufacturing facility will convert rare earth oxides into metals, magnets and other specialty materials. Startup on 2023; employment 100
Also tracked here by DPCC
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The Opportunity Cost of Green Hydrogen
from coal and gas power, use that clean energy to 2) decarbonize transportation, �and 3) decarbonize natural gas emissions from building heat and gas appliances, then anything that delays grid decarbonization worsens the climate crisis. Because the ticking carbon clock shows the 1.5C budget is consumed in 2029 and the compounding damages of global warming, near term emissions cuts do more to avert the climate crisis than future cuts. Near term cuts slow the carbon clock, granting more time to decarbonize HtD sectors.
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EXCELLENT Hydrogen Science FAQ
Blank slide
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Lifecycle Emissions/GJ of Hydrogen
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Liebrecht Keynote at the World Hydrogen Congress Oct 13, 2022
“If we do the German steel industry
[ie, replacing fossil fuel use with
green hydrogen], that takes up 60% of
current German wind and solar output.
Hydrogen’s lower volumetric energy density�compared to liquid hydrocarbon fuels means �three times as many vessels would be needed �to ship the same amount of energy as LNG, �and energy loss from cooling and liquefying it would push that up to four.
94 million tonnes of grey and black hydrogen made from unabated natural gas and coal were produced each year, emitting 830 million tonnes of carbon.
Just replacing this dirty hydrogen — used mainly in chemicals production and oil refining — with green H2 made from renewable energy would require 143% of all the wind and solar installed globally to date.
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Escalante Hydrogen from Methane
Per the EIA:
“Using natural gas to create hydrogen is very energy intensive.
Even the U.S. Department of Energy notes that “it takes more energy to produce hydrogen (by separating it from other elements in molecules) than hydrogen provides when it is converted to useful energy.”
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Blue Hydrogen and IRA Tax Credits
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Blue Hydrogen and IRA Tax Credits
How bad are the blue hydrogen lifecycle emissions in various leak rate scenarios?
Blue H2 lifecycle emissions (CO2e) include upstream methane leakage plus uncaptured CO2 emitted from SMR plus others.
This is a best-case sample calculation of just those two:
a. 3.6kg of methane is required to make 1kg of grey hydrogen.
b. If only 1.4% of that upstream methane leaks (per the EPA),
c. that amounts to 0.0504kg of leaked CH4 per kg H2,
d. which, under the 25x GWP 100yr in the GREET model,
e. is 1.26kg of CO2-eq
f. As each kg of grey hydrogen results in about 10kg of CO2 emissions,
g. a 90% capture rate
h. emits 1kg of CO2 per kg of blue H2.
i. Add CO2e from upstream methane, to CO2 emitted from 90% CCS to get (1.26+1= 2.26kg) CO2e per kg H2.
j. There other sources of emissions that were modeled in the H-J paper, 'How Green is Blue Hydrogen?". Per H-J, emissions from SMR energy are comparable to upstream CH4.
There are many worse scenarios.
So how bad are the blue hydrogen lifecycle emissions in various scenarios?
The factors are:
1) GWP of methane w/ 2 main flavors: lifetimes of 20yr (25x) or 100yr (82.5x)
2) Methane leak rates w/3 values: 1.4%, 3.5% and 9%
3) SMR CCS % capture w/2 values: 90% or 62%
The new clean hydrogen tax credits outlined in the US -IRA will only be available to projects that can demonstrate lifecycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of less than 4kg of CO2-equivalent (CO2e) per kg of H2 produced.
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Michael Liebreich
1. Shipping liquid hydrogen is not going to be a thing. To understand why, you need to understand that hydrogen is basically liquid, -253C escapey, explodey expanded polystyrene
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Michael Liebreich
What this means is that any comparison with LNG is, ahem, bollox. We cracked LNG shipping, but it's the most expensive gas on the market. And shipping the same BTUs as liquid hydrogen would require 3-4 times as many ships. Because of physics, not lack of learning, scale, etc.
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Michael Liebreich- Lightness of H2
3. Liquifying hydrogen is also a complete bear. It currently consumes 35% to 45% of the Lower Heating Value of the input. If you don't know about LHV and HHV, or about ortho-para isomer conversion, please read more and tweet less about liquid hydrogen! https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2022/ee/d2ee00099g…
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Michael Liebreich- Lightness of H2
Dec 12, 2022 BNEF: The Unbearable Lightness of Hydrogen
On a volumetric basis, hydrogen’s energy density is a quarter that of jet fuel, and only 40% of that of LNG. Since ships are volume constrained (think Suez Canal, Panama Canal, etc.), this inevitably means more trips. Even if Kawasaki Heavy Industries was to scale its hydrogen carrier to the same size as a Q-Max, it would need to make 2.5 deliveries to carry the same amount of energy as one cargo of LNG. You don’t need to know anything at all about shipping to know that 2.5 times the trips are going to cost you 2.5 times as much.
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https://about.bnef.com/blog/liebreich-the-unbearable-lightness-of-hydrogen/
Libertad Power
Libertad Power addresses customers in three basic categories: transportation providers, electrical power utilities and industrial consumers of power and/or fuel.
For transportation, we are primarily focused on decarbonizing heavy haul freight traffic between the mega-regional economies of California and Texas. Toward this end, we are collaborating with Diesel Direct and Hyundai Motor Company to establish the Southwest Clean Freight Corridor.
In electrical power generation and energy storage, we provide utilities with options to reduce GHG emissions while enhancing the reliability of the regional power system. Libertad's pioneering hydrogen power model sets a new standard for generators as utilities in the Western Interconnection add more renewable wind and solar capacity along with wider market integration.
Our industrial customers are generally seeking decarbonization solutions for large facilities and/or specific processes. Specific examples include GHG emissions-free, contingent power supply for mission-critical facilities and the production of decarbonized ammonia.
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Green Hydrogen in Questa, NM
Green hydrogen study underway in Questa (Taos News, Sep 15, 2022)
A feasibility study is underway to determine if Questa is a suitable location to build a green hydrogen production facility.
Questa was among 24 communities across the country that received a technical assistance grant from the U.S. Department of Energy earlier this year to explore clean energy development projects.
The main ingredients of any future green hydrogen project will be land, water and fossil-free power.
In partnership with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Sandia National Labs, Los Alamos National Labs, Chevron and Kit Carson Electric Cooperative, the village and the Questa Economic Development Fund are looking at the former Questa Mine tailings site next to the village as a possible site for a future hydrogen facility.
Chevron was tightlipped about the possibility of a green hydrogen facility being built on portions of the former mine tailings site or on environmentally unaffected properties it owns north of Questa. And the company is currently engaged in a battle with the Office of the State Engineer over a significant amount of water rights that the state declared invalid due to non-use, a ruling that spurred the company to pull back on proposed donations and discounted sales of some of its water rights to the Village of Questa and several nearby landowners.
Water to supply a hydrogen production facility could also come from treated wastewater produced by the ongoing remediation of the underground workings at the closed Questa Mine or a municipal wastewater treatment plant.
In a brief statement, the company told the Taos News that, “while Chevron will continue to make surplus land and water rights associated with the former Questa Mine available for the economic development of the Village of Questa and surrounding communities, we cannot speak directly to potential commercial activity related to renewable energy at this time.”
The third ingredient necessary for a green hydrogen production facility — clean renewable energy — is already available in Questa, thanks to Kit Carson Electric Cooperative's green energy initiatives.The co-op, which earlier this year achieved its goal of supplying customers with 100 percent solar-derived electricity during non-cloudy daylight hours, thinks hydrogen could play a role in achieving its 100-percent clean energy goals.
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Earlier this year Questa was one of 24 communities in the U.S. that received a technical assistance grant from the U.S. Department of Energy. The funds are being used to explore the possibility of developing clean energy projects.
No Cops on the Beat
The sheer number of well sites in the Permian is staggering — about 31,000 active wells in New Mexico alone. In some areas, hundreds of pumpjacks stretch to the horizon, a fractional part of the pipes, hoses and tanks that pull an average of more than 1.6 million barrels of oil and 2 trillion cubic feet of natural gas from New Mexico’s depths each day. The oil and gas industry as a whole produces more than 50 percent of the state’s total greenhouse gas emissions.
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WISHH Hydrogen Hub Projects in NM
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2022 IEA Global Hydrogen Review
From p67 of the 2022 IEA Global Hydrogen Review:
With hydrogen-fired power plants likely being large hydrogen consumers, they can provide economies of scale for hydrogen production infrastructure from which small consumers can also benefit. For example, a 500 MW combined-cycle gas turbine plant, when fully operating on hydrogen at an annual average 15% capacity factor, consumes around 35 kt H2 per year, which would require an electrolyser capacity of 400 MW (at a 50% capacity factor).
A little math shows that this assumes using 1,753 GWh of green electricity to produce 657 GWh of electricity from combusting hydrogen, an energy efficiency of 37.5%, or conversion losses of 63.5%.
35 kt of H2 per year consumed
500 MW CCGT plant on 100% H2
15% capacity factor
8766 hours per year
657,450 MWh produced
400 MW of electrolyzer capacity
50% capacity factor
8766 hours per year
1,753,200 MWh produced
37.5% efficiency
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NM.gov Clean Hydrogen Fact Sheet Jan 2023
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NM.gov Clean Hydrogen Fact Sheet Jan 2023
Shortcomings of the the NM Clean Hydrogen “fact sheet”
The statement “Steam methane reformation with carbon capture uses natural gas to produce hydrogen while capturing the carbon byproduct”, implies it captures all of the carbon. It should say “while capturing some of the carbon byproduct”. Because published studies on carbon capture show past projects capture well below 90%.
It also fails to say that it will increase the use of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas with emissions from wellhead to customer, which is causing 25% of all global warming.
And it fails to note that there will be increased CO2 emissions from the fuel consumed to power the SMR and carbon capture processes.
The section on water has this useful disclosure on water usage: that their four hydrogen hub projects would consume 3 to 9 acre-feet of water daily, to produce about 850 metric tons of clean hydrogen. (=0.977M to 2.933M gal/day)�The higher value of 9 acre-ft per day amounts to 1.07B gallons per year, which is 7.7% of the 14B gallons per year used for fracking. That is the amount of water used for 21,267 households.
The p2 section on resource needs states that state agencies will require state funding of $24.2M over the next 4-6 years and calls out how much, to which agencies.
This one I would call out as just false:
That state agencies are providing ‘over $10M in financial resources to support clean hydrogen projects from industry leaders like Bayotech and Universal Hydrogen’.
Everything we know about Bayotech is that they produce only grey hydrogen with no carbon capture and directly emit 9kg of unabated CO2 into the air for every kg of H2 produced. Bayotech DOES NOT produce clean hydrogen. https://bayotech.us/
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Hydrogen Fact Sheet San Juan County- Feb 2023
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link
San Juan Basin (SJB) CarbonSAFE Site
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CCS sequestration site about 10 miles NE of Farmington
San Juan County Comm mtg 4-2-2024
Presented by asst. prof. William Ampomah from NM Tech, Petroleum and Natural Gas Engineering
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vP3Q-tA77s8 at 30:35 San Juan Commission meeting April 2, 2024
San Juan County Comm mtg 4-2-2024
Presented by asst. prof. William Ampomah from NM Tech, Petroleum and Natural Gas Engineering
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vP3Q-tA77s8 at 30:35 San Juan Commission meeting April 2, 2024
San Juan County Comm mtg 4-2-2024
Presented by asst. prof. William Ampomah from NM Tech, Petroleum and Natural Gas Engineering
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vP3Q-tA77s8 at 30:35 San Juan Commission meeting April 2, 2024
San Juan County Comm mtg 4-2-2024
Presented by asst. prof. William Ampomah from NM Tech, Petroleum and Natural Gas Engineering
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vP3Q-tA77s8 at 30:35 San Juan Commission meeting April 2, 2024
San Juan County Comm mtg 4-2-2024
Presented by asst. prof. William Ampomah from NM Tech, Petroleum and Natural Gas Engineering
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vP3Q-tA77s8 at 30:35 San Juan Commission meeting April 2, 2024
blank slide
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Farmington Map
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Paul Martin Hydrogen Coalition
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DOE
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DOE H2 Report "Pathways to Commercial Liftoff of Clean Hydrogen"
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DOE
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link
DOE
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DOE H2 Report
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DOE
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Lazard LCOE 2023
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200
60
117
74
50
82
78
168
106
181
70
117
Avg
Lazard LCOE 2023 - NGCC + CCS
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$1504 is avg NGCC+CCS,
adding $529 (54%) to NGCC
Adding CCS to a natural gas power plant adds 54% to capital cost.
Avg NGCC= $ 975
Three Pillars of Green Hydrogen
https://rmi.org/hydrogen-credit-catalyst/
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link
Federal 45V Clean Hydrogen Tax Credit
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CARBON INTENSITY (kg CO2/ kg H2) | MAX HYDROGEN PRODUCTION TAX CREDIT ($/KG H2) |
4–2.5 | $0.60 |
2.5–1.5 | $0.75 |
1.5–0.45 | $1.00 |
0.45–0 | $3.00 |
The Clean Hydrogen Production Tax Credit creates a new 10-year incentive for clean hydrogen production tax credit with up to $3.00/kilogram. Projects can also elect to claim up to a 30% investment tax credit under Section 48. The level of the credit provided is based on carbon intensity, up to a maximum of four kilograms of CO2 to kilogram of H2 equivalent. The credit provides a varying, four-tier incentive depending on the carbon intensity of the hydrogen production pathway. The credit measures emissions up to the point of production using the Argonne National Laboratory Greenhouse gases, Regulated Emissions, and Energy use in Technologies (GREET) Model:
45V tax credit range is $0.60 to $3.00 per kg H2 produced, depending on carbon intensity from 0.45 to 4.0 kg CO2 per kg H2
45V Tax Credit for Clean Hydrogen
26 U.S. Code § 45V - Credit for production of clean hydrogen link
(a)Amount of credit
For purposes of section 38, the clean hydrogen production credit for any taxable year is an amount equal to the product of—
(1)the kilograms of qualified clean hydrogen produced by the taxpayer during such taxable year at a qualified clean hydrogen production facility during the 10-year period beginning on the date such facility was originally placed in service, multiplied by
(2)the applicable amount (as determined under subsection (b)) with respect to such hydrogen.
(b)Applicable amount
(1)In general For purposes of subsection (a)(2), the applicable amount shall be an amount equal to the applicable percentage of $0.60. If any amount as determined under the preceding sentence is not a multiple of 0.1 cent, such amount shall be rounded to the nearest multiple of 0.1 cent.
(2)Applicable percentage
For purposes of paragraph (1), the applicable percentage shall be determined as follows:
(A)In the case of any qualified clean hydrogen which is produced through a process that results in a lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions rate of—
(i)not greater than 4 kilograms of CO2e per kilogram of hydrogen, and (ii)not less than 2.5 kilograms of CO2e per kilogram of hydrogen, the applicable percentage shall be 20 percent.
(B)In the case of any qualified clean hydrogen which is produced through a process that results in a lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions rate of—
(i)less than 2.5 kilograms of CO2e per kilogram of hydrogen, and (ii)not less than 1.5 kilograms of CO2e per kilogram of hydrogen, the applicable percentage shall be 25 percent.
(C)In the case of any qualified clean hydrogen which is produced through a process that results in a lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions rate of—
(i)less than 1.5 kilograms of CO2e per kilogram of hydrogen, and (ii)not less than 0.45 kilograms of CO2e per kilogram of hydrogen, the applicable percentage shall be 33.4 percent.
(D)In the case of any qualified clean hydrogen which is produced through a process that results in a lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions rate of less than 0.45 kilograms of CO2e per kilogram of hydrogen, the applicable percentage shall be 100 percent.
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Ammonia & Methanol are bad fuels
May 2023 - Methanol is an alcohol that is manufactured from natural gas right now. My sources suggest 170 million tons of annual market, but the Proman representative Peter Schild used 120 million tons as the figure. Regardless, between 100 and 200 million tons of methanol is already manufactured around the world.
Ammonia isn’t an alcohol. It’s a nitrogen atom and three hydrogen atoms. We manufacture about 150 million tons of it as well, almost entirely for fertilizer, and also manufacture it mostly from natural gas. It’s not as good at burning as methanol, it has the advantage that it doesn’t have carbon, so no CO2, and the disadvantage that it has lots of nitrogen and so is more likely to create N2O with its global warming potential of 265 times that of CO2. Oh, and when it interacts with water it turns from a liquid whose fumes will screw a sailor up for life to a corrosive gas that will just kill them before turning into a third chemical that goes back to being really bad for human health.
Neither ammonia or methanol can share tanks with other fuels.
peer-reviewed independent assessments put it at 1.4 tons of CO2e per ton of methanol.
Every ton of fossil-derived methanol burnt produces over three tons of CO2. Oops. That means using methanol today results in about 4.5 tons of CO2e for every ton of methanol burned. That’s worse than burning resid or diesel by a lot, as they have emissions of about 2.7 tons of CO2 per ton of fuel.
And then there’s the kicker. Methanol has about 45% the energy density by mass as resid or diesel. That 4.5 tons becomes 10 tons. Yeah, burning methanol instead of more directly burning fossil fuels results in 3.7 times the CO2 emissions for the same distances traveled. In its current form, methanol isn’t remotely a solution, it’s an amplification of the problem by a factor of four.
Unabated methanol used today in marine engines would result in full-lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions 3.7 times that of burning current maritime fossils fuels. It’s much worse for ammonia, with 6.4 times the full-lifecycle emissions.
But what they leave out of their stories — and remember I listened to the Proman pitch personally this week — is that using current methanol or ammonia that’s been made from natural gas would be a climate disaster and that the maritime industry investing in capital expenditures in ports and on ships to use methanol and ammonia are locking themselves into vastly more expensive future operating costs for fuel. And they leave out the reality that biodiesel is going to get a lot cheaper as it scales massively.
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Green Hydrogen Round Trip Efficiency
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US Lacks Solar Panel Capacity
In 2022, the U.S. produced a paltry �5 gigawatts of solar panels or modules, �according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, while importing 29 gigawatts of modules from China, Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand.
And with the pace of solar installations projected to surge, the challenge of scaling manufacturing to match that demand isn’t going to get any easier.
While 17 gigawatts of total solar capacity was installed in the U.S. last year, according to the Department of Energy, a whopping 358 gigawatts of new solar capacity is expected to be deployed between 2023 and 2030, driven by the incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act, according to the latest New Energy Outlook from BloombergNEF. Annual installations could balloon to more than 100 gigawatts per year by 2030, according to some projections.
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Massive Growth in Wind & Solar
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100% in 2036
Solar
Wind
7% in 2020
We need to add ~2,000GW by 2030
HGWT = Hydro, Geothermal, Wave & Tidal
Huge WWS Install Rate for 100% CRE
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385 GW/yr by 2030
Solar
Wind
GW / year installed
2010-2020 growth rate was 27%/yr for Solar PV and 17%/yr for Wind
2000 GW total
36 GW/yr
Build 349 New ‘Giga-Factories’ in 9 Years
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100% of factories built by 2030
Solar
Wind
# of 1GW ‘factories’ built per year
4GW factory in Viet Nam
GWT = Geothermal Wave & Tidal CSP = concentrated solar power
BHP: Battery Trucks Cheaper Than Diesel, H2
BHP says battery electric cheaper than hydrogen as it dumps diesel for haul trucks JUNE 23, 2023
BHP has unveiled plans to replace its fleet of diesel trucks with electric trucks, in a staged transition that will not only reduce the company’s scope 1 emissions but also provide huge savings on operational costs.
“Each year our Australian operations use roughly 1,500 mega litres of diesel in over 1,000 pieces of equipment,” said vice president of planning and technical minerals Australia Anna Wiley.
“Over half of this is used in our truck fleets. Electrification is the preferred pathway to eliminate this diesel. Part of the reason for this is energy efficiency.”
BHP says the future of big trucks is electric, not hydrogen
Wiley went on to explain the huge differences in energy efficiency between diesel, hydrogen and electric trucks (shown in the table on the right in the image below).
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EVs are >3X More Efficient
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link
Emissions from Hydrogen Production
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Hydrogen must solve its climate problem
Hydrogen must solve its climate problem
Tom Solomon Op Ed published in the Abq Journal Aug 3, 2023 (responding to this Van Romero op ed on hydrogen)
Ever wonder why hydrogen is pushed as a climate solution and is it really?
The ‘why’ starts with the 2017 creation of the Hydrogen Council, a consortium of oil, gas and other industrial companies, formed to market hydrogen as a solution to the forecasted revenue declines from the clean energy transition. Their website includes such members as Exxon-Mobil, Shell, BP, Chevron, Saudi-Aramco and others. Second, per the International Energy Agency (IEA), 99% of global hydrogen is produced from fossil fuels, mostly from methane (ie natural gas). Yes, ‘green’ hydrogen is also produced from the electrolysis of water, but at less than 0.1%. Third, production of hydrogen is a serious climate problem, per the IEA, contributing over 2% of all global greenhouse gases. This is because 12 tons of CO2 are emitted per ton of hydrogen produced (IEA). So before hydrogen can be proposed as a climate solution, it must first solve its own carbon emissions problem.
Is there a proposed solution? Yes, it is to apply carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). There are at least two serious climate problems with that, besides the added cost:
1) CCS does not address the problem of upstream methane emissions from natural gas extraction, which have never been solved. According to the IPCC, methane emissions cause 25% of all global warming.
2) CCS, despite rosy claims of 90% + capture, has an actual history of failing to meet operational or economic goals over the dozen or so projects built, from Boundary Dam in Canada, to the now shuttered Texas Petra Nova project. See the 2022 IEEFA report, “Reality Check on CO2 Emissions Capture at Hydrogen-From-Gas Plants”.
As it stands today, producing more fossil hydrogen will make the climate crisis worse. All the marketing in the world won’t change that.
Tom Solomon is a retired electrical engineer and co-coordinator of the climate action non-profit, 350 New Mexico
Sources:
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The Hydrogen Economy Would Increase Electricity Demand over 50%
The Proposed Hydrogen Economy Increases Electricity Demand over 50% Tom Solomon Feb 2024
The so-called hydrogen economy is a solution proposed by the gas industry, not to climate change, but to the ‘problem’ of declining natural gas sales as the clean energy transition cuts the use of gas in water and space heating and in power plants. Industry plans for hydrogen will boost demand for natural gas in two ways. First is as a hydrogen feedstock, and second and more deceptively, by increasing total electricity demand by 62% just to make green hydrogen, providing them a reason to keep gas-fired electric plants operating when they would otherwise close. This white paper details how that will work.
First, let’s be clear on why we must care about natural gas, aka methane, or CH4.
According to NASA, methane pollution causes 20-30% of all global warming, because this heat-trapping gas is 85 times more powerful than CO2 and because methane is emitted into the air from gas and oil wells, pipelines and compressor stations all along the production and distribution chain. And it is building up in the atmosphere, increasing from 1800ppB in 2010 to over 1950 ppB per NOAA by 2023. We need to rapidly replace methane with clean energy, not find new ways to use it. The second reason to question hydrogen is that in many, many proposed applications there are solutions that are simply better, cheaper and faster to implement, mostly involving direct electrification. Spending today to push hydrogen into areas where it won’t compete risks wasting money on stranded assets.
The gas industry benefits from pushing hydrogen in two ways.
First, since 95% of all hydrogen today is made by steam reforming of methane (CH4), new markets for hydrogen mean new markets for methane, aka natural gas.
Second, the proposed ‘better’ way of producing hydrogen is to run clean electricity through water (H2O) in an electrolyser. That product is labeled as ‘green’ hydrogen. Ironically this will also benefit the gas industry by delaying the closure of existing gas-fired electric plants because of the very wasteful nature of using manufactured hydrogen as a fuel and the increase in electricity to make it. For example only 33% of the clean energy used to make green hydrogen is left to power the wheels of a fuel cell car after all the heat losses from electrolysis, transport and in the fuel cell. Compare that to an electric vehicle which preserves 77% of that clean energy because batteries and electric motors are 95% efficient.
The inefficiency of the hydrogen economy drives some huge numbers for clean energy.
-According to the “DOE Hydrogen Shot challenge” we’d need to produce 50 M Tonne per year of green hydrogen in 2050 and 10 MT by 2030. The green energy required to make 50MT of hydrogen is staggering, estimated at 2500 TWh (teraWatt hours). To put that in perspective, the electricity consumed in 2022 in the whole US was 4050 TWh. So just to make the green hydrogen for this proposed ‘hydrogen economy’, we’d need to build 62.5% more solar, wind and geothermal generators than we already must build to replace today’s dirty coal and gas power plants which are the #2 source of climate pollution.
-Will the electricity utilities and the gas industry use this 2500 TWh of extra demand to argue that ‘they can’t afford to close down their operating coal and gas plants’ because there’s too much demand for electricity? Of course they will. It’s already happening in Arizona.
-In addition, the economics of gray vs green hydrogen will likely boost the use of fossil gray hydrogen in the short term, despite promises and good intentions. Gray hydrogen today costs about $1.50 per kg ($0.98-2.93) per Bloomberg 2023 vs. green hydrogen which is about 5x more expensive at $4-12 per kg. Yes, predicted cost reductions for green hydrogen show it becoming cheaper than gray in the 2030’s if economies of scale kick in. Will that happen by then? Maybe. In the meantime expect the push to use fossil gray or blue hydrogen instead, with all the harmful climate impacts that implies.
There is one good reason to produce green hydrogen, which is to replace the US’s current 10MT per year production of methane-based gray hydrogen. (It is used in oil refining, to make ammonia fertilizer and various chemicals). That would require only one fifth of the DOE’s 50MT hydrogen shot.
Let’s prioritize cutting the main sources of climate pollution and help EJ communities and the climate crisis by closing coal and gas power plants.
That’s the better path forward.
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IEEFA Blue Hydrogen Report
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Blue Hydrogen: Not Clean, Not Low Carbon, Not a Solution
IEEFA Blue Hydrogen Report
Only with best-best-best case assumptions can Blue hydrogen meet the 4:1 clean hydrogen standard for tax credits.
And 4:1 CO2e to H2 is NOT clean.
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IEEFA Blue Hydrogen Report
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CCS Carbon Capture Real World Failure
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IEEFA CCS Fact Sheet https://ieefa.org/resources/fact-sheet-carbon-capture-and-storage
Claims of 95% capture are a fantasy
CCS Carbon Capture
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IEEFA CCS Fact Sheet https://ieefa.org/resources/fact-sheet-carbon-capture-and-storage
Report: The Hydrogen Industry Agenda
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Hydrogen Fuel Cell Buses?
First, there is nowhere to fuel them. Kind of a problem.
EV buses on the other hand, use readily available electricity, vs fuel cell buses which are much more expensive.
Second, if you google "fuel cell buses cancelled" you will find multiple examples of cities that tried HFC buses and regretted doing so.
City cancels order of 50 hydrogen buses after realizing electric buses make so much more sense
Good quote: "However, hydrogen would be six times more expensive than with electric buses. So, for the moment, we are giving up on hydrogen buses, we will see in 2030 if hydrogen is cheaper.”
Or this one, "German city to retire its one-year-old hydrogen fuel-cell buses after €2.3m filling station breaks down"
Also in Poland.
In Dundee
Dundee scraps hydrogen fuel cell buses
https://www.electrive.com/2022/12/19/dundee-scraps-hydrogen-fuel-cell-buses/
Are Fuel Cells Now a Viable Option for School Buses?
https://stnonline.com/special-reports/are-fuel-cells-now-a-viable-option-for-school-buses/
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link
Hydrogen Demand Is Going To Fall
Oct 2023.
New projection is slightly under 80 million tons.
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Hydrogen Fact Sheet
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Bayotech: Gray Hydrogen
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No provision for carbon capture
2024 Legislature - Hydrogen bills
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NMED/NMDOT Hydrogen Fueling
Transportation Supercenter Hub
In this NMED recording at 38:40
“So what we’re looking for, with this Transportation Supercenter Hub, is potentially to form a coalition application with other states, sort of connecting the CA and TX economies along the I-40 corridor with hydrogen fueling stations and electrification to support those trucks as well as LDV’s, anyone who is traveling those areas - let’s make sure we have the infrastructure in place so that they are able to do so.” – Kolt Vaughn NMED CCB
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link
SB275 is the Capital Outlay bill
IEEFA Report: Bad News for Blue Hydrogen (Dec ‘23)
Only 9% of heavy-duty trucks are engaged in long haul trucking, defined by DOE as more than 250-mile-long truck trips.
The cost of hydrogen fuel is a problem. Hydrogen Insight recently determined that hydrogen fuel prices at California’s largest hydrogen fuel retailer, True Zero, have almost tripled, rising from $13.15 per kilogram (kg) in April 2021 to $36/kg in September 2023. The analysis concluded it is almost 14 times more expensive to drive a Toyota Mirai (FCEV) in California today than a comparable Tesla battery electric car using public charging stations. BEV owners who charge at home would benefit from even cheaper costs.
In an amicus brief recently filed in federal court seeking to overturn a California regulation mandating transition to zero-emission trucks, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the American Trucking Associations and other trade associations said no hydrogen fuel cell tractor trucks are available commercially in North America or Europe. The brief also argued: “[T]hat technology is not likely to be developed within the next ten years.”
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Bad News for Hydrogen Trucking
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link
IEEFA fact sheet:
Hydrogen for transportation: Don't bet on it
IEEFA fact sheet Jan 16, 2024
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Drawdown vs Decarbonization
Tom Solomon
Feb 19, 2024
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Carbon Clock (Feb 2024) 1.5C scenario
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By mid-2029 the 1.5C budget is consumed. 2047 for 2.0C
The Atmosphere & Bathtub Analogy
If we think of our atmosphere as a bathtub into which we are pouring CO2,
1. There is a faucet (manmade and natural processes) putting water (greenhouse gases) into the bathtub (the atmosphere).
2. There is also a drain (natural processes) removing the water. Currently, mankind's activities are putting more water in the bathtub than the drain can handle, thus filling the bathtub.
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1st turn off the faucet
Decarbonize to reduce emissions
Drawdown to reduce ppm
Natural Carbon Sinks & Carbon Cycle: �CO2 Levels Will Drop if Emissions Stop
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The Keeling Curve of CO2 ppm
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We add ~38 GT/yr of CO2 to the atmosphere, mostly by burning fossil fuels
(Total GHG = 59 Gt/yr)
Each part per million (ppm) of CO2 in the atmosphere represents about 2.13 gigatonnes of carbon, or 7.82 gigatonnes of CO2. Link
GHG levels in the air hit 425 ppm CO2 in Feb 2024.
IPCC: Global GHG Emissions 2019
59 GT/yr, GHG all in:
38 GT/yr CO2, FF+Indus
7 GT/yr CO2, LULUCF*
11 GT/yr CH4
3 GT/yr N2O
1 GT/yr F-gases
64% GT fossil fuels+ind
18% Methane/CH4
11% LULUCF*
4% Nitrous oxide/N2O
2% F-gases
*LULUCF = land use, land use change & forestry
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Net with all greenhouse gases
40 Years of blah, blah, blah
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link:
Global temps keep rising because the fossil fuels we burn increase GHG levels in the air, by about 38 GT of CO2 /year.
With other GH gases plus land use changes, we add 59 GT of C02e per year.
GHG levels in the air hit 425 ppm CO2 in Q1 2024.
GHG Emissions by Sector
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US GHG Emissions ~6.3 GT / year
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This is our 15% of global GHG emissions
Transportation
Electricity
Industry
Agriculture
Commercial
Residential
We Can Return to <350ppm
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Jacobson’s plan for 80% WWS by 2030 could return CO2 to <350ppm by 2100.
This is a prerequisite for a safe climate.
Let’s Look at the Alternative
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link:
If we don’t turn off the tap
Hydrogen is a Distraction from Job #1
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100% in 2036
(4545GW)
Solar
Wind
7% in 2020 (339GW)
Add 2,000 GW by 2030
HGWT = Hydro, Geothermal, Wave & Tidal
339 GW
GridLab Study HB6 Clean Future
Three core strategies: cleaning up and setting:
New Mexico can achieve science- based climate pollution limits with household energy costs that are almost identical—within a few percent—to business as usual for the coming decades. By 2050, we found no difference in per-capita cost between the decarbonization case and business as usual. In fact, we found that New Mexicans could spend 12 percent less on energy costs if the state takes bold action on building retrofits and energy efficiency measures.
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Wind and Solar Expanding Rapidly
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https://www.nathanielbullard.com/presentations
PV Prices Dropped 50% in 2023
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https://www.nathanielbullard.com/presentations
Exponential Increase in Solar
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https://www.nathanielbullard.com/presentations
$1.8T for the Energy Transition
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https://www.nathanielbullard.com/presentations
Two TeraWatt Interconnection Queue
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https://www.nathanielbullard.com/presentations
Natural or White Hydrogen
Scientific American May 8, 2024
'Hydrogen Fever’ Erupts after Discoveries of Large Deposits of the Clean Gas
Using current knowledge on natural hydrogen production, trapping and migration, Ellis and his colleague at the USGS have built an unpublished model to estimate how much hydrogen might be actually stored underground. They came up with an estimate of somewhere between thousands and billions of megatons, with the most probable number hovering at “about five million megatons,” Ellis says. With the 2022 global hydrogen demand standing at 95 megatons that seems huge. But, Ellis admits, “there is a lot of uncertainty about all the inputs that go into this model.” What’s more, most of these hydrogen deposits would be unusable from a commercial perspective. “It’s likely going to be too far offshore or just too deep or something that’s just too small, so that it would never be economic to be produced,” Ellis says.
Australia’s Gold Hydrogen has estimated that the quantity of hydrogen it might recover from sites on Yorke Peninsula and the nearby Kangaroo Island to be about 1.3 megatons. In Spain another company hopes to produce up to 70,000 metric tons per year, beginning in 2029.
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Aug 2024 REDPC Hydrogen / CCS slides
Alternative Energy: Hydrogen and Carbon Capture
Economic and Rural Development Committee 8.22.24
Mark Pedrotty https://www.co2rescue.com/ & Senator William E. Sharer
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Batteries vs Hydrogen
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Solar + Storage is Cheaper than Gas
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Solar+Storage only adds $8 or 30% to cost of solar alone.
Prelim WELC map of CCS 16-Dec-24
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link
DOE Report on CCS Carbon Transport
Also San Juan CarbonSAFE
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CCS - Then a Miracle Occurs
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link
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link
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link
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link