Sceptics will point out that scientists working on nuclear fusion have been claiming it’s a decade or so away for much longer than a decade. And we have already have technologies which can produce clean, cheap and limitless electricity from the sun, wind and waves.

But, while they don’t dispute the urgency of renewable investment and that there are still obstacles to overcome, nuclear fusion advocates can point to a scientific breakthrough and growing momentum to suggest star power could help the world get and stay off fossil fuels, particularly towards the middle and end of this century.

What is nuclear fusion?

When we talk about nuclear power plants and nuclear bombs, we’re talking about nuclear fission. That’s splitting one nucleus into two, producing a load of energy which you can either use to spin a turbine to produce electricity or let off in an explosion.

Nuclear fusion produces energy by smashing hydrogen nucleuses together to produce heat and to spin a turbine to make electricity. Minus the turbine, it’s how the sun and others stars produce the energy which powers life on earth. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) nuclear fusion professor Dennis Whyte says that pursuing nuclear fusion is just listening to “Mother Nature”.

“It’s very important to listen to her,” he said in a TED talk. “She’s already told us that fusion is the power source of the universe.”

Is it clean?

Kind of. Whereas burning fossil fuels produce greenhouse gases, nuclear fusion produces only helium. That doesn’t cause climate change and it’s safe to breathe in. Millions of parents let their children take it into their lungs in order to talk in a funny high-pitched voice.

Like nuclear fission, nuclear fusion produces radioactive material which has to be stored until the radioactivity wears off.

Nuclear fusion advocates say the waste is not “long-lived” but how long is long?

International nuclear fusion project Iter say it can be recycled or reused within 100 years and the Max Planck Institute says that after 100-500 years, the radioactivity drops to a similar level to coal ash.

That’s similar to claims made by the nuclear fission industry – that, while their waste is “weakly radioactive for a few hundred thousand years, the radioactivity from the main component of the waste which could cause health problems will have decayed to safe levels within a few hundred years”.

Is it safe?

Yes. University of Oklahama research has shown that Americans associate “nuclear energy” with words like “dangerous”, “radiation” and “explosion”.

They’re thinking here of nuclear fission, which was responsible for mass destruction when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed and when Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded.

But, leaving aside debates about fission’s safety, fusion advocates say it is intrinsically much safer than nuclear fusion.

Nuclear fission reactors have to be kept cool. The Chernobyl, Fukushima and Three Mile Island nuclear fission plant failures were all because  cooling measures failed. Similarly, the current fear for Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia power plant is that cooling systems will be disabled.

On the other hand, nuclear fusion reactors have to be kept very hot, around 100 million degrees C. If the outside world intrudes at all on a reactor, Whyte said, it won’t blow up. The reaction will fizzle out instantly.

Is it cheap to build?

Not yet. 30,000 construction workers are working 24/7 for Iter to build a fusion reactor in the south of France. It’s estimated to cost €20bn ($20bn) and was supposed to open in 2016.

Whyte’s students at MIT have made a breakthrough that he says will make reactors dramatically smaller, cheaper and faster to build.

To get a powerful reactor, you have to keep the stuff inside it (plasma) stable. The sun does that with its own magnetic field created by its sheer size.

To do that on earth, fusion reactors use very powerful donut-shaped magnets. The more powerful the magnets, the more powerful the reactor.

But the power of the magnets is limited because they run on electricity which is transported through copper wires. If the magnets are turned on for more than a few seconds, the electricity will burn the copper up.

Whyte presented his MIT students with this problem and they came up with the solution of replacing the copper with materials which don’t heat up known as superconductors.

Using these superconductors, an MIT spin-off called Commonwealth Fusion Systems hopes to build more powerful magnets to harness the plasma.

As they’re more powerful, the magnets can be smaller than Iter’s 17 m tall ones and the reactors also smaller, cheaper and quicker to build.

Is it cheap to run?

Not yet. As its not been produced commercially yet, it’s difficult to predict how much nuclear fusion could eventually cost.

Its advocates say, one the technology is sorted out, it will be cheap because its fuel is abundant.

When they say that, they are talking about deuterium. It’s found in any water source and costs just $13 a gram.

Whyte says the top inch of Boston harbour would provide all the deuterium necessary to power Boston with nuclear fusion for 100 years.

To make nuclear fusion energy, you smash deuterium into another type of hydrogen called tritium.

That’s much harder to get. Very little of it is present in nature and, while it can be made artificially, it currently costs about $30,000 a gram. An 800 MW nuclear fusion reactor would need around 300 grams a day. That would cost over $3bn a year to power just 130,000 homes.

Whyte told Climate Home that tritium is “not the fuel” and is “much more like a catalyst”.

In other words, you don’t need to keep feeding tritium into the reactor, you just need a little bit at the start and then the fusion reaction itself will produce more.

There’s about 30kg of tritium around now, mostly in Canada. “That’s sufficient to basically start the fusion economy going,” he said.

That’s in theory though. In practice, he said the technology “has not been demonstrated at scale yet”, although there are experiments at MIT and in the UK currently working on this problem.

Lithium is also needed. It lines the walls of a nuclear fusion reactor and scientists hope it will interact with the hydrogen to keep that tritium going around.

Compared to tritium, lithium is relatively abundant and is produced for electric vehicle batteries.

When will it be up and running?

The nuclear fusion developers timelines vary but all are uncertain.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems, who Whyte works with, hope to have a demonstration plan up and running in 2025 and electricity created and sold to the grid by the early 2030s.

The US government is working with private companies a plan to get pilot plants by around 2030 despite the government’s official scientific advisors recommending a 2035-2040 target.

China has a fusion programme too, whose timeline is unclear, while the mainly EU-funded Iter plans to generate “industrial-scale” fusion energy by 2050.

The UK’s new post-Brexit Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) want to beat that by getting fusion power on the grid by 2040.

Is it popular?

It’s too early to tell, as no public opinion surveys have been done.

But Kuhika Gupta, who researches public views of nuclear fission at Oklahoma University told Climate Home that “most people would be open to the idea of fusion”.

She suspected that support would be similar to levels for so-called “advanced fission” reactors, which are more popular than existing nuclear fission reactors.

“A lot of these initial views would be based on technological optimism and the positive idea of innovation,” she said, “but as the technology develops and advocacy coalitions supporting and opposing fusion take shape, we could expect those initial views to shift”.

Some nuclear fusion supporters want to brand it as “fusion technology” to avoid the negative connotations the word “nuclear” has.

Who will get rich off it?

Rich people. Nuclear fusion is being backed financially by governments and big corporations and billionaires from the wealthy world. They include fossil fuel companies like Chevron and Eni, US technology giant  Google and Japanese conglomerate Sumitomo.

Silicon Valley venture capitalists have bet on it too, like tech investor Sam Altman, Amazon boss Jeff Bezos and Donald Trump-supporting billionaire Peter Thiel.

Because of its size and complexity, fusion plants aren’t likely to be owned by local communities or regular individuals like solar and wind farms can be.

The post Nuclear fusion: Why Silicon Valley is betting on man-made star power appeared first on Climate Home News.

Citizens want enough electricity to keep the lights on and governments have tried to give them that by supplying enough electricity to meet demand. But people’s demand for electricity is not constant, it goes up and down throughout a day and throughout the year.

In richer countries, many people fire up their air conditioning, switch on their lights and plug in their electric vehicle when they get back from work. After dinner, they turn on their dishwasher and they open the fridge during the advert break for Game of Thrones.

Governments have to provide enough electricity to meet not just the average electricity use but the peak electricity use – half-time in the Superbowl on a boiling hot day. They can make this easier by flattening out the peaks, by getting people to use electricity when demand is low and not when it’s high.

That doesn’t work for every use. Nobody wants to watch television at 3am or run their air conditioning when it’s cold. But people can run their dishwashers and washing machines at night-time. Industrial customers like aluminium smelters can often be flexible with their electricity use too.

That can help avoid power cuts and it can stop desperate grid operators paying extortionate prices for electricity to keep the lights on. When a heatwave hit Europe recently and spiked air conditoning use, the UK’s grid operator paid 5,000% more than usual to import electricity.

What’s all this got to do with climate change?

For the next few decades, electricity will be supplied by a mix of clean electricity and dirty electricity. Grid operators will use the clean electricity when they can and fossil fuel-powered electricity when that doesn’t fully cover demand.

For example, California gets most of its electricity from zero-carbon sources. But, it is building new gas generators which are only to be used when the supply of clean electricity can not meet demand. So the less demand outstrips supply, the less fossil fuels it will use.

More important than that though, according to Brattle Group analyst Ryan Hledik, is that demand response will make electrification and decarbonisation cheaper. If you can charge up your electric vehicle with cheap electricity at night rather than expensive electricity at 6pm then you are more likely to tell your friends to swap their gas-guzzler for an electric vehicle.

In many parts of the developing world, there’s not enough electricity to go around even before electric vehicle and electric heat pumps are rolled-out. So, as countries develop and homes and transport are electrified, demand response is key to keeping the lights on.

How is demand response done?

The simplest way to encourage consumers to shift their electricity use is to offer them discounts on their electricity bill if they do so through ‘time of use rates’. This works like ‘off peak’ fares on public transport or ‘happy hours’ at a bar, encouraging customers who can shift their demand to do so.

Currently, these rates have been targetted at electricity-guzzling businesses rather than households – as this is where demand response can have the most impact for the least amount of outreach work. (CHECK WITH SOURCES)

Hledik says that demand response is most advanced in North America. In the Canadian province of Ontario, for example, electricity costs different amounts at different times of the day. Andrew Dow, from Ontario’s grid operator IESO, said it’s cheaper at night because it’s not being used as much.

Big electricity users pay their electricity bills proportionately to their use in the five highest demand hours of the year. “So these businesses are incentivised to monitor electricity demand throughout the year and, when they see something that could be one of the top five peaks of the year, businesses are incentivised to reduce their use,” Dow explained.

South Africa takes similar measures. Malcom Van Harte works for their grid operator Eskom. He told Climate Home that 22 large industrial electricity customers are incentivised to shift their peaks by ‘time of use’ rates. When electricity is scarce, households get adverts over the television and radio asking people to switch off non essential equipment

A twist on ‘time of use’ is that electricity users are asked to switch off 10-20% of their electricity when demand looks like outstripping supply. If they accept this request, the customer is then exempted from the planned outages which plague South Africa, known as ‘load shedding’.

In the US state of Vermont, an utility called Green Mountain Power is deploying Tesla powerwall batteries to peoples’ homes. Most of the year, the resident gets to use this battery as a backup generator, to absorb excess power from their solar panels or to reduce their bill on a ‘time of use’ rate. But, for the few days a year when Green Mountain Power is desperate for electricity, it can take control of the battery and use its electricity to power the grid. “It’s a win-win situation”, said Hledik.

In the future, electricity users could even be paid to give the electricity from their vehicle’s battery back to the grid at peak times. This is known as ‘vehicle to grid’ power and, Hledik said, is still at the pilot phase. “It’s still very much at a point where the technology and the commercial business case are being tested and proven,” he said, “whereas the simpler ‘time of use’ rate concept is something that’s available at scale.

How will the energy transition affect demand response?

As electricity systems become increasingly based on renewables, daily and seasonal patterns of supply will shift. Fossil fuel power plants can pump out electricity whenever 24/7 and 365, as long as you can keep feeding them fossil fuels. But the sun and wind come and go.

The first chart shows wind (purple) and solar (yellow) potential vs demand (orange) throughout the year in the US. The second shows the same but throughout a summer’s day in the US. (Tong et al)

The same figures as above, but for South Africa, which has southern hemisphere seasons

Hledik said that parts of the US with high solar deployment like California and Arizona are already seeing this shift. Previously, grid operators have tried to delay electricity use from the post-work peak of 6pm to more like 8pm.

Now they have more electricity than they need between midday and 2pm when the sun is at its highest. So they’re trying to get dishwashers and washing machines on in the middle of the day rather than in the late evening. Luckily, the sun’s power dips at night which is when demand for electricity is also at its lowest.

The post Demand response: A win-win solution to climate and energy price crises appeared first on Climate Home News.

That means keeping tabs on power stations, solar farms and wind turbines. It means watching the weather forecast to predict when people will turn the heating on and the TV schedules for when sports fans will open the fridge for a half-time drink.

As our sources of electricity change from fossil fuels to renewables, grid operators are changing the way they work too. “It’s a big technical challenge,” says Montana State University electrical engineering professor Rob Maher.

Under the old model, fossil fuels are burned in power plants. These are usually built close to where that electricity is needed, in cities or industrial hubs, and ramp generation up and down to meet demand. Vast amounts of coal, oil and gas are transported from mine or well to power plant by road, rail, canal and sea.

In the new world of increasing renewable penetration, where and when electricity is generated shifts. Solar panels are distributed across rooftops, while large-scale wind and solar plants are sited in windy and sunny spots, which may not be close to urban centres. As climate delayers love to point out, the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow.

The old ways were not perfect for energy security. Supplies of fossil fuels have been disrupted by frozen pipelines, blocked canals, terminals on fire, strike action, conflict and international sanctions. A mechanical failure at a conventional power plant can take a big chunk of supply offline.

Renewables are more resilient in many ways, but raise different challenges, calling for different solutions. With the G7 countries planning to completely decarbonise their power systems by 2035, flexible storage and grid upgrades are key.

Electricity storage

Part of the answer is to store the power from when the sun is shining and wind is blowing so that it can be used when they are not. Batteries can store energy in this way. That’s how your battery-powered remote control works without relying on any power station or solar panel.

Doing this on a large enough scale is a challenge. The International Energy Agency estimates that the world needs 585 gigawatts of battery storage by 2030 to reach net zero by 2050. Currently, it has 17GW.

According to Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air analyst Xing Zhang, battery technology is currently “not mature enough to provide a base load of electricity to step up when needed”. The IEA says “a rapid scale-up is critical… to address the hour-to-hour variability of wind and solar”.

Another way of storing electricity is pumped hydro. This is where water is pumped from a lower reservoir to a higher reservoir when electricity is in abundant supply. It’s then released when electricity supply is low. It spins a turbine to generate electricity. This is how the US stores 95% of its energy and the department for energy says it’s “vital to grid reliability”.

Transmission lines

Variability can also be managed by connecting one grid to another. So, if the UK needs to buy some electricity because the wind isn’t blowing then it can buy some from France, where there may be an excess of power.

Grids are linked to each other through high-voltage cables called interconnectors. The UK’s has links to France, Belgium, Norway and the Netherlands and is building a new one to Denmark.

China has built thousands of kilometres of ultra high-voltage transmission lines to transport electricity from wind and solar farms in the west to where most people live in the east.

A recent Princeton University report found that the US needs to double the rate at which it builds transmission lines to fulfill the potential of its Inflation Reduction Act climate legislation.

Similarly, a report from the Center for Social and Economic Progress, found that India needs to build transmission lines to bring solar power from the west and wind power from the south to the rest of the country. This will be made easier, it found, by the fact that India has only one grid.

In February 2021, the US state of Texas showed what can happen when your grid is not connected. The US regulates electricity grids which are connected to other grids. To avoid regulation from Washington, Texan politicians decided not to connect their grid with others.

Then the weather turned unusually cold. Demand for power skyrocketed and energy infrastructure froze, causing power outages across the state and leaving Texans shivering in their homes. Because their grid wasn’t connected to the other states, they found it harder to buy in much-needed electric power.

While these outages were mainly caused by failures in fossil fuel infrastructure, the lesson was that an isolated grid is an insecure one.

Backup generators

As well as pursuing these improvements to the grid’s ability to handle renewables, many governments around the world are looking to non-renewable sources to provide backup power. This can be anything which isn’t weather-dependent and can be turned up and down by humans, usually by making their turbines spin faster.

There are options which don’t contribute to global warming including nuclear and geothermal power. Hydropower is vulnerable to drought, but as long as there is enough rainfall to keep the level of reservoirs up, can be dispatched on demand.

Polluting options include fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas. Their effects on the climate can be lessened, although not eliminated, with expensive carbon capture and storage technology.

Governments have justified a range of projects on the basis of backup power. According to Zhang, China allows renewables developers to build coal-fired power stations alongside their solar or wind farms for this reason, classifying the combined projects as green energy.

The idea is that the coal-fired power stations can run at a very low generation rate when their power is not needed, Zhang says. “But, to be honest, you can’t go too low”, she says, comparing it to turning the cooking gas down to the lowest setting and it going out completely.

In California, Governor Gavin Newsom’s administration has built gas plants and diesel generators for use as a last resort, when renewable production is too low to meet energy demands.

“They are essentially like big aircraft engines,” Maher says. “The advantage is that they can be throttled up and down very quickly. But if what your goal is is to have more renewables sources then relying on natural gas turbines is perhaps not the most desirable outcome. But right now, that’s kind of the way it has to be done.”

South Australia, on the other hand, is tantalisingly close to proving that a grid mostly powered by wind and solar can run without fossil fuel backup. The market operator cut the number of gas generators from four to two last year and is looking to reduce it to one.

While critics of renewables focus on what happens when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing, there is a flip side. When the sun shines hard and demand for power is low, grid operators can sell it cheap or even pay businesses or households to use it.

Increasingly, smart technology allows business customers and even households to play an active role in balancing the grid, through demand response.

“The most important thing is to think about the cost-efficient integration of renewables,” says E3G researcher Vilislava Ivanova. “You can do that most efficiently with flexible power systems and that allows the consumers, providers and network operators to manage demand better in the future.”

Demand response will be explored in full in the next article in our four-part series on the future of energy. Main image: Stephen Edmonds/Flickr.

The post Scaling up renewables means big changes to electricity networks appeared first on Climate Home News.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) says that to reach net zero emissions by 2050, the global energy system will need 150 million tonnes of “low carbon” hydrogen a year by 2030 and 520 million tonnes by 2050.

Currently, production of low-carbon or zero-carbon hydrogen is negligible. Even if all the world’s announced industrial plans are realised, the IEA says there will only be around 17 million tonnes of low-carbon hydrogen produced a year by 2030.

[add units to graph]

This Climate Home News explainer will answer questions like: What is hydrogen and how is it made? What is it used for, what can it be used for and what should it be used for? How will it change our world?

What is hydrogen and how is it produced?

Hydrogen is a colourless, odourless gas with the chemical symbol ‘H’ and is the most abundant chemical substance in the universe.

It occurs naturally and can be produced in various ways, with different environmental impacts.

The vast majority of purpose-made hydrogen is made using fossil fuels. Around three-quarters is derived from methane gas and a quarter from coal. It can also be captured as a byproduct of industrial processes.

[no need for “Current” in headline as you have the year]

Coal is the dirtiest feedstock. The coal is heated up to produce a gas with hydrogen, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide and the hydrogen is captured to sell.

Producing hydrogen this way has a carbon footprint, according to the IEA, of around 20 kilogrammes of carbon dioxide (Co2) per kilogramme of hydrogen. Making hydrogen from methane gas, by processing it with steam, has around half the carbon footprint.

Both these methods release carbon dioxide. Some of this can be captured and stored so that it does not damage the atmosphere.

How much can realistically be captured is disputed. Companies like Equinor and Engie claim to capture 95% of it but Stanford engineering professor Mark Jacobsen told Climate Home the figure was at most 79%.

(Source: International Energy Agency)

The only zero-carbon way to produce hydrogen is by using electricity which has been produced in a carbon-free way like through using renewables or nuclear power.

Hydrogen is colour-coded depending on how it is made (Photo: Applied Economics Clinic)

The hydrogen is produced through a process known as electrolysis. An electric current is passed through water, splitting H2O into hydrogen (H2) and oxygen (O2). The hydrogen is captured and the oxygen is released into the atmosphere.

While it is zero-carbon, it can still have an environmental impact as it requires fresh water. IEA’s hydrogen researcher Jose Miguel Bermudez-Menendez warns that the regions with the biggest potential to generate surplus renewable energy generally have the least fresh water.

Regulations are needed so that green hydrogen producers don’t use fresh water but instead desalinate their own water, he says. That doesn’t significantly increase the producers’ costs, so “shouldn’t be a challenge” as long as rules are in place.

At the moment, dirtier forms of hydrogen are cheaper to produce. According the IEA’s 2021 hydrogen review, green hydrogen costs $3-8 per kilogramme. Making hydrogen from gas and capturing and storing some of the Co2 emissions costs $1-2 per kg. Making hydrogen from gas and not capturing the Co2 emissions costs $0.5-1.7.

This disparity is expected to reduce. In a 2050 net zero scenario, the IEA models that green hydrogen costs will fall to $1.2-3.5 per kg by 2030 in places with good renewables resources. High carbon prices would help make green hydrogen competitive against dirty alternatives.

By 2030, clean hydrogen will be closer to competitive with dirty hydrogen (Photo: IEA/Screenshot)

The IEA’s Bermudez-Menendez told Climate Home that production of “low-carbon hydrogen” is likely to increase “very fast”.

“Now whether this very fast is aligned with a [global] net zero emissions scenario [by 2050], that’s a different question”, he added.

Under the IEA’s global net zero by 2050 scenario, in 2050 around 60% of hydrogen is produced by electrolysis (mainly from renewables) and 40% is produced by gas with carbon capture.

What can it be used for?

Hydrogen can replace fossil fuels in transport, industry and heating buildings. Between them, these three sectors make up around 41% of the world’s emissions.

Just because it can be used in all these areas though, it doesn’t mean it should be. E3G hydrogen analyst Eleonora Moro said: “It should only be used in end uses where no alternative, and especially no more energy efficient decarbonisation options are available”.

Energy analyst Michael Liebriech has categorised potential uses of hydrogen from most to least desirable. At the most desirable, he has products which are very difficult to make another way – like fertiliser and chemicals. At the least desirable, he has sectors which can be easily electrified – like cars, heating and trains.

Michael Liebriech’s hierarchy of hydrogen uses. (Photo: Michael Liebriech)

This distinction is clearest in transport. The larger a vehicle gets and the further and faster it has to travel, the bigger and more powerful electric batteries have to be and the more suitable hydrogen fuel cells are as an alternative.

On land, hydrogen is more suitable for buses and trucks than for passenger cars.

On the sea, short-haul ferries can charge up electric batteries at their destination but a battery won’t take long-haul cargo ships to their destination. They are more likely to use hydrogen or hydrogen-derived fuels like ammonia in the future.

In the air, the power required to keep a plane in the air would require a battery that is too heavy for flight. The aviation industry is mainly focussed on “sustainable aviation fuel” made from biological material like trees, plants and algae. E-kerosene, made from refining hydrogen, is an alternative which does not cause deforestation or compete with food sources.

Transport and Environment’s aviation director Andrew Murphy told Climate Home E-kerosene was more sustainable than biofuels. However, it is currently far more expensive than jet fuel and needs a bigger tank, taking up space from passengers.

In both the US and EU, hydrogen-derived fuels (orange, blue, green) are expected to remain more expensive than today’s jet fuel (black), unless carbon taxes (diagonal stripes) are imposed.
(Photo: ICCT)

As with cars, heating and cooking are areas where hydrogen can replace fossil fuels like gas but is usually not the best option. Peter Taylor, chair of the UK Energy Research Centre, said that this was an early focus for hydrogen but “the story has moved on” and they’re likely to be electrified with heat pumps instead.

Hydrogen can replace fossil fuels in industry too. The low-hanging fruit is converting the industries which already use hydrogen – like oil refining and chemical production – from grey hydrogen to green hydrogen.

Oil refineries turn crude oil into various oil-based productions like petrol and use hydrogen to improve the oil and to remove impurities. About a third of the hydrogen they use is produced as a by-product of other processes and the rest is made specially.

Making chemicals like plastics and fertilisers also involves hydrogen in the form of ammonia. Demand for hydrogen for plastics is expected to grow and green hydrogen could meet it – although doing so is currently more expensive.

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Heavy industries like iron, steel, cement and glass-making are harder to switch to green hydrogen. All these products need to produce a high heat to turn something into something else – iron into steel, sand into glass, clinker into cement. Fossil fuels are the primary source of this heat with around 65% coming from coal, 20% from gas and 10% from oil.

Most iron and steel is made in a blast furnace using coal and coke, which emit carbon dioxide. The industry produces 11% of global emissions, more than the European Union.

Efforts are underway to come up with economically viable ways of making carbon-free steel with hydrogen but the IEA says this is a “longer-term” ambition if the “technological challenges” can be overcome.

“In the long term it should be technically possible to produce all primary steel with hydogen,” the IEA says. But doing so would require vast amounts of hydrogen and, if that is to be green hydrogen, vast amounts of renewable electricity. Very low renewable electricity prices would be needed to make it competitive with traditional steel-making methods.

Another long shot is cement. It is the key ingredient in concrete and produces 4-8% of global emissions. To make cement, a mix of materials called clinker is heated up, usually by burning coal.

Taylor said: “While hydrogen has the potential to replace at least some of the coal used in cement making, there are still significant technical and economic challenges to be overcome and so it is unlikely to make a major contribution in the next 10 years”.

Hydogen can also be used to make electric power. Taiwan recently forecast getting 9-12% of its electricity from hydrogen in 2050.  Bermudez-Menendez said electric power is not an immediate priority for hydrogen.

“It is more a complement for the latest stages of the decarbonisation process, for the latest bit of the power system that would be very difficult to decarbonise. In the short term, renewables and batteries are the urgent thing to do for power and industry and long-distance transport in hydrogen,” he said.

(Photo: IEA)

How will it affect geopolitics?

Fossil fuels, particularly oil and gas, are unevenly distributed around the world. Some countries – like Saudi Arabia, Russia, Norway and Venezuela – have lots of them. Others, like Europe and Japan, have relatively little.

About 80% of the world’s proven oil reserves are in just 14 countries, according to the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). These are the countries which stand to lose out from green hydrogen replacing oil and gas, although some (like Saudi Arabia) are also trying to embrace it.

The imbalance in fossil fuel reserves creates tensions that sometimes escalate into conflict. Countries with the fossil fuels can use them as political leverage, as Russia has been accused of doing to Europe recently and as Saudi Arabia did to the West in 1973. Countries without many fossil fuels may resort to violence when the supply is disrupted.

Renewable resources, and therefore green hydrogen potential, are more evenly distributed around the world. The International Renewable Energy Agency (Irena) projects that the “hydrogen business will be more competitive and less lucrative than oil and gas” and that “clean hydrogen will not generate returns comparable to those of oil and gas today”.

The German foreign office, which co-funded the Irena report, has a hydrogen diplomacy strategy to stimulate a global market. Hinrich Thoelken, a special advisor, told a conference in Berlin they were trying to create “a world where energy can less easily be weaponised”.

While some regions do have greater renewable capacity than others, most countries have either sun or wind. Regions which could produce green hydrogen cheaply include Chile, Australia, the Middle East and North Africa and South and Central Asia. Regions where green hydrogen production is more expensive include the far north and tropical rainforests.

The cost of producing green hydrogen. Red is the cheapest and blue is the most expensive (Photo: International Energy Agency)

Today, hydrogen is mainly produced close to the point of use, with very little global trade. There are no hydrogen export terminals. By 2030, the IEA expects 60 under its net zero by 2050 scenario. By 2050, it forecasts 150 around the world.

Creating a global market will depend on the cost of transport and development of standards.

The International Renewable Energy Agency (Irena) foresees a “dual market” for hydrogen. A regional market, where hydrogen is traded through pipelines and a global market for liquified hydrogen or ammonia, which can be shipped as a liquid and re-gasified at the destination.

Existing gas pipelines could be repurposed to carry hydrogen. But this is technically difficult and expensive, involving adaptations to the compressors and valves. And the geographic distribution of hydrogen producers and consumers does not map onto the methane gas network.

Gas-producing areas like northern Russia and Canada are linked to Europe and North America respectively through pipelines. But these areas are among the least promising for green hydrogen production. On the other hand, regions with high green hydrogen potential – like sub-Saharan Africa – have very few gas pipelines.

The world’s gas pipelines (Photo: Global Energy Monitor/Screenshot)

Where there are no pipelines, hydrogen can be turned from a gas into a liquid and loaded on to ships. The first such ship, carrying coal-made hydrogen, shipped its first cargo in January. A lot of fossil gas is transported in the same way, as liquified natural gas.

Hydrogen can also be converted to ammonia, a liquid, and transported. This ammonia can either be turned back into hydrogen gas or the ammonia can be used in some industries like for making chemicals or as a shipping fuel.

As well as transportation, a lack of standards could prove an obstacle to global trade as the buyer of hydrogen needs to know that it was produced in a zero-carbon way.

Despite the barriers to trade, wealthy countries in Europe, North America and East Asia are looking for sources of hydrogen.

For example, Germany’s economy and climate minister Robert Habeck signed deals in the first half of 2022 with countries including UAE and India to support green hydrogen development. But countries like the UAE are unlikely to be hydrogen superpowers in the same way they are fossil fuel powers now.

Irena’s map of planned hydrogen trade routes (Photo: Irena/Screenshot)

The post Over the rainbow: The role of hydrogen in a clean energy system, explained appeared first on Climate Home News.