VUL megathread, page-682

Recently released report by Carbon Brief;

30 November 2020 8:00
In-depth Q&A: Does the world need hydrogen to solve climate change?
https://www.carbonbrief.org/in-dept..._medium=email&utm_source=Revue newsletter

some excerpts from not far into the report;

The IEA says: “Hydrogen-based fuels could take advantage of existing infrastructure with limited changes in the value chain, but at the expense of efficiency losses.”

The Economist says hydrogen is “inescapably inefficient”, while the Energy Technology Institute’s chief engineer wrote in 2018: “A strategy to enforce comprehensive adoption of hydrogen across the economy looks grossly inefficient based on current understanding of the relevant technologies.”

Electric vs hydrogen cars? Battery electric cars are at least three times more efficient than hydrogen fuel cell cars due to energy losses.

It is a similar story when comparing electric heat pumps with hydrogen boilers, or when looking at the efficiency of storing excess electricity in the form of hydrogen for later use.

The IEA explains:

“All energy carriers, including fossil fuels, encounter efficiency losses each time they are produced, converted or used. In the case of hydrogen, these losses can accumulate across different steps in the value chain. After converting electricity to hydrogen, shipping it and storing it, then converting it back to electricity in a fuel cell, the delivered energy can be below 30% of what was in the initial electricity input.

“This makes hydrogen more ‘expensive’ than electricity or the natural gas used to produce it. It also makes a case for minimising the number of conversions between energy carriers in any value chain. That said, in the absence of constraints to energy supply, and as long as CO2 emissions are valued, efficiency can be largely a matter of economics, to be considered at the level of the whole value chain.”

Indeed, conventional energy systems based on fossil fuels are already highly inefficient, with combustion engine cars returning as little as 20% of the energy in petrol as useful forward motion. Similarly, the average efficiency of coal-fired power plants is just 33%.

This suggests low efficiency is not a fundamental barrier to the use of hydrogen. Instead, low efficiency may hold back hydrogen via higher costs and the need for a larger energy supply.

Finally, although cost, efficiency and technical performance are all important factors for hydrogen to address, “there are some really critical drivers beyond techno-economics”, says Thomas Blank, senior principal for industry and heavy transport at the Rocky Mountain Institute.

Referring to the EU’s recently published hydrogen strategy (see below), he tells Carbon Brief:
“Ultimately for the EU, it’s not necessarily driven by cost, it’s driven by security of energy supply, reduction of exposure to Vladimir Putin [for Russian oil and gas imports], job creation. Those aspects of the hydrogen opportunity are underplayed at the moment and they are what is going to drive things forward.”

My comment: the push to a hydrogen economy appears to have came out of Davos, 2017. My guess is that is primarily an attempt to shift the economy to a sustainable basis while maintaining existing arrangements of the globalised economy -- ie largely preserving existing roles for resource producers (such as Australia) and resource consumers and manufacturers (such as Japan and China). But, from excerpts from the report above, locally produced and consumed electricity (wind and solar) appears to win hands-down over hydrogen for many uses (if not for air transport) helping to co-evolve more local economies.