Elon musk called Hydrogen, hydrogen as energy storage and hydrogen fuel cells ‘dumb’ in a recent interview.
Elon Musk knows batteries. He builds them to power automobiles and trucks at one bookend and grid-scale behemoths that stabilise and store electricity for hundreds of homes at the other.
But is there any truth in his views against hydrogen? To answer this, we need to first understand hydrogen.
Let’s start with the basics.
The element hydrogen is at the very top of the periodic table. It is the most plentiful element in the universe, and it can even be found in our sun and stars.
In the outer space it’s in its free atomic form or in plasma state. But back on earth it’s not freely available, you’ll usually find it bound up with other elements – for example with oxygen in water.
We must break these bonds if we are to obtain pure hydrogen. Electrolysis is a simple method for accomplishing this.
All you have to do is dissolve some baking soda in water to improve conductivity.
When a current is passed through this solution, bubbles form along the wires. These bubbles are of hydrogen and oxygen gas. This is the process by which water splits into hydrogen and oxygen.
Because water, or H2O, is made up of two hydrogen atoms but only one oxygen atom, there should be twice as much hydrogen released as oxygen.
There are two ways to harness energy from the hydrogen that is being released here at an industrial scale.
For starters, it’s flammable, so you could simply burn it to use as fuel in steel plants.
Second, you could use it to power something called a fuel cell. A fuel cell works exactly opposite in that it utilizes Hydrogen and oxygen to produce electricity and water. This electricity could be used to power our cars, trucks, trains, ships and planes.
The only by-products are heat and water.
But why aren’t we already using hydrogen as fuel and fuel cells as a source of electricity?
Though fuel cell was invented back in the 1800s, it didn’t have any commercial value at the time. Today, almost all the hydrogen we produce is used to make other things like fertilizer or petroleum products. Hydrogen never made it big as an alternative fuel to gasoline or diesel, which are cheaper to produce.
But why is hydrogen in the news now?
Net Zero… With net zero, everyone must contribute. Companies and entire countries are committing for it. That means you’ll need solutions for areas where electricity won’t suffice.
That is where we see hydrogen’s sweet spot. Consider the steel industry, it consumes a lot of energy and accounts for about 8 percent of global CO2 emissions. For a long time, it was assumed that only fossil fuels could power the chemical reactions required to transform iron ore into steel. But hydrogen can also do the job while being clean-burning and leaving only water behind.
Few steelmakers are developing fossil-free steel, which they claim will be ready for market by the middle of the decade.
Hydrogen can also be used to reduce heavy transportation emissions. Almost all container ships travelling between Asia and North America could be powered by hydrogen fuel cells. It is possible that they only need to reduce cargo space by 5% or add a refueling stop.
While there are currently no hydrogen-powered ships on the high seas, some promising pilot projects are underway.
The same is true for aviation. The first commercial-size hydrogen-powered plane took off in 2020. Airbus, a major aircraft manufacturer, is working on three hydrogen models that it claims will be ready for deployment as early as 2035.
Long-distance flights will almost certainly be difficult. However, studies claim that even short- and medium-haul hydrogen flights could reduce aviation emissions by up to a third.
Coming to heavy trucks on roads. Trucks can be moved to hydrogen to make a significant dent in vehicular emissions.
Hyzon Motors is a company in Rochester, New York, that develops fuel cells and builds trucks. After researching for 20 years, Hyzon has come up with fuel cell stacks that have the highest power in the world, are lighter in weight by about half, and are cheaper by half.
In this way, hydrogen can help reduce emissions in some of our most polluting industries.
So, the world would require tens of billion cubic meters of hydrogen to make a considerable dent in demand for coal, petroleum and natural gas.
This is where the difficulty arises. Production of hydrogen is an energy intensive process. And there is an array of Hydrogens, each produced differently.
Grey hydrogen, made from fossil fuels, primarily natural gas, makes up the vast majority of all hydrogen produced today—nearly 90% of it.
This brings us back to the claim of hydrogen being the path to Net Zero future. We must first clean up the process of producing hydrogen if we want to use it as a clean fuel.
One way to go about this on a massive scale is by producing blue hydrogen.
Blue hydrogen is made from natural gas in a process called steam methane reforming. Which in fact produces CO2. Instead of allowing these emissions to escape into the atmosphere, manufacturers claim they can capture them and store them underground or convert them into materials that can be used for other purposes.
Experts claim that the oil and gas industry often promise to be able to remove around 90 percent of emissions when making blue hydrogen. But ground reality looks otherwise. According to the human rights NGO Global Witness, Shell’s blue hydrogen facility in Canada only captures about half of the emissions it generates.
Despite this, blue hydrogen has made its way into the official hydrogen strategies of major economies such as the United Kingdom, the United States, Japan, and the European Union.
According to reports, there was some serious lobbying from the oil & gas industry.
Though few from the industry are coming forward to invest on greener options for producing Hydrogen, the majority of them are focused on converting natural gas to hydrogen.
This brings us to the second way and cleaner way of producing hydrogen, which is green hydrogen.
To produce green hydrogen, you simply have to carry out electrolysis of water powered by renewable energy, like wind or solar.
This produces no emissions, resulting in truly clean hydrogen.
But where are we now in terms of green hydrogen production? Really not much. Only a tiny fraction of hydrogen is green, and it is still quite expensive in comparison to the other forms.
This is expected to change.
Firstly, the Electrolyzers are getting cheaper. According to industry experts, the economies of scale will see the capital cost of electrolyzer units fall by over 85% from around $1,400 per kW to $340 per kW by 2030.
Secondly, renewable energy prices have consistently declined – and continue to do so. And we can produce millions of tons of hydrogen with it.
Storage of Hydrogen
The relatively low energy density of hydrogen remains a significant challenge. When compared to natural gas, you need roughly three times the amount of space to store the same amount of hydrogen.
So, depending on how much hydrogen we need, we’ll probably need to build a lot of new storage facilities.
Coming back to what Elon Musk thinks about Hydrogen. Yes, hydrogen has its limitations.
Battery-powered electric vehicles are phenomenally efficient. Depending on the model, they can boast a well-to-wheel efficiency of around 70 to 80 per cent. Well-to-Wheel is the first step in comparing the efficiency of different solutions towards Greenhouse Gas emissions.
By comparison, a hydrogen fuel cell-powered electric vehicle is positively parsimonious, with an overall efficiency of somewhere around 30 to 35 per cent.
The fact remains that converting electricity to hydrogen only to then convert it back is never going to be as efficient as directly feeding a battery.
Conclusion
Hydrogen has many applications, but that doesn’t mean it should be used for all of them. We should be able to find the balance between where we use batteries and where we use hydrogen.
For instance, trucks can be run on hydrogen fuel cells. It was long believed that batteries weren’t going to work here. To move heavy trucks, you’d need loads of them which take up valuable cargo space. And long charging times aren’t really great for business either.
While hydrogen on the other hand, with its shorter refueling time, low weight and occupying comparatively low cargo space is a good replacement for diesel run trucks.
Hydrogen is not a panacea that will solve all of our problems. However, in some cases, it makes sense.
Despite Elon Musk’s condemnation of hydrogen, it appears that hydrogen will play a special role in energy storage, transportation and steel industry. Medium and large-scale hydrogen projects are being planned or are already in operation, and further innovation will solidify hydrogen’s value as a niche component of a low-carbon future.