Hoping to spearhead the development of a global market,...

Hoping to spearhead the development of a global market, high-profile deals such as the Japan-Australia Hydrogen Energy Supply Chain (HESC) project in Victoria plan to use ships to transport liquid hydrogen across continents.

Led by an industry consortium, the HESC project aims to produce 40,000 tonnes of hydrogen from brown coal per annum by 2030 for export to Japan. Australian state and federal governments have already each contributed $50 million to the $500 million project, which is now awaiting approval of the commercialisation stage following the completion of the pilot in early 2022.

The HESC project is one of many on a long list of hydrogen export announcements around the world that are struggling to get off the ground.

Despite the enthusiasm, no hydrogen trade industry exists anywhere in the world in 2024. Import deals lag far behind the scale of planned exports, and globally, almost all hydrogen continues to be produced and used in the same place.

This isn’t because transporting hydrogen is impossible. It’s because faced with the challenges of moving hydrogen long distances, there is almost always a better energy transition solution.

Why is this the case, and what does this mean for initiatives like the HESC project? Let’s look at the facts.

Shipping pure hydrogen

Pure hydrogen is extremely challenging to transport via ship. Taking up so much space at normal temperatures due to its extremely low energy density, the only way to move it long distances is to compress or liquefy it.

Shipping hydrogen as a compressed gas in large quantities is a non-starter. At the immense pressure of 150 bar, 15 ships of compressed hydrogen would be needed to carry the same amount of energy as one typical liquid natural gas (LNG) tanker.

Shipping liquefied hydrogen is almost as impractical, and rife with technical difficulties. It has been attempted in the real world just once to date as part of the HESC pilot project, resulting in a brief fire onboard the carrier ship.

One of the greatest technical challenges here is that hydrogen becomes a liquid at atmospheric pressure at minus 253 degrees Celsius – just above absolute zero, the lowest temperature possible.

Even at this temperature, it is still not very dense: fitting about 71 kilograms of hydrogen per cubic metre, and requiring 2.4 times the number of cargo ships to carry the same amount of energy in the form of liquefied hydrogen versus LNG.