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• Japanese and Australian ministers met earlier this year to agree on a future of hydrogen trade, to supply the resource-poor Asian nation with hydrogen.
• The term “hydrogen economy” was first coined in 1970 by the chemist Prof John Bockris, who had a vision of a world powered by solar- and nuclear-generated hydrogen.
• The illustrations, with numbered captions from one to three, show how hydrogen could be made, moved and used.
• The Dow Jones Industrial Average finished the first month of 2023 in rebound mode, above its 50-day line and sharply off its mid-October lows, as the stock market continues to rebound.
• Ultimately, fuel costs are expected to have the biggest impact on future hydrogen prices, meaning the most significant drivers of the relative success of green and blue hydrogen will be future electricity and gas costs.

This is still a niche strategy that only exists on a small scale, but there has been industry interest given the potentially useful applications of its carbon by-product. Beyond the basic palette of colours, there are a handful of other production methods – some of them low-carbon – that could contribute to future hydrogen demand. Moreover, hydrogen production consumes 6% of all the world’s gas and 2% of all coal and generates 830MtCO2 each year, slightly more than the annual emissions of Germany.

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Hydrogen gas has long been recognised as an alternative to fossil fuels and a potentially valuable tool for tackling climate change. On costs, recent analysis shows hydrogen for heat would be around three times more expensive than gas, whereas heat pumps are as cheap to run as gas boilers in some circumstances. A report on net-zero opportunities for the UK power sector by the National Infrastructure Commission concludes that producing hydrogen from curtailed electricity “could help to reduce system costs in highly renewable mixes”.

Hydrogen features more strongly in BP’s latest energy outlook, building on “more comprehensive modelling of the role that hydrogen and bioenergy may play in the energy transition”. Former UK government adviser Guy Newey has argued that “in many ways hydrogen the big winner” after the UK raised its ambition from an 80% emissions cut by 2050 to 100%. This is supported by research showing a correlation between a scenario’s ambition and hydrogen uptake. Acknowledging the “flurry” of recent national hydrogen strategies in a recent Environmental Audit Committee hearing, UK business secretary Alok Sharma said the government expected to release its own “early on next year ”. Under pressure to keep up with European neighbours, UK ministers have said they will soon announce a “world-leading” hydrogen strategy to help reach its 2050 net-zero goal.

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Hydrogen can also be produced using biomass, although the IEA concludes the need for complex processing and lack of sufficient cheap and sustainable biomass makes this less appealing than other “low-carbon” techniques. The agency also notes in its hydrogen report that SOECs are the “least developed electrolysis technology” and are yet to be commercialised. Using nuclear power to produce hydrogen was a popular idea in the early days of hydrogen research and is still being advocated by France, Russia and the US, nations that already rely on nuclear for much of their power supply. According to the IEA there is “no established colour” for hydrogen produced via nuclear power, but reports have variously referred to it as “yellow”, “pink” and “purple”.

This means businesses will need to seek low-carbon hydrogen sources in order to decarbonise. Burning hydrogen could reach the high temperatures needed to manufacture cement, avoiding fossil fuel combustion which currently accounts for a third of its emissions. However, green steel is likely to still need considerable support from governments, potentially including an emissions trading scheme that supports the switch and quotas for green steel. Scaling up low-carbon hydrogen production for these existing sources of demand alone would be a significant undertaking, due to the sheer volumes required. Nevertheless, the fact that this demand already exists means some of these sectors could be relatively “low-hanging fruit” for decarbonisation. To get there, the gas they use must be replaced with hydrogen from low-carbon sources.

As the chart below shows, in long-distance shipping, ammonia in particular is likely to be cheaper than hydrogen, largely due to lower storage costs . While hydrogen is difficult to liquify, ammonia is easily stored as a liquid at modest pressures and temperatures. Yet, despite various early-stage projects using hydrogen-based fuels in shipping, this capital-intensive industry is gripped by “deadlock”, what does issuing bonds mean 2021 according to a report by Shell. He also emphasises that while batteries are expensive and have limited lifetimes, the fuel stacks in hydrogen cars “will keep running and running”, meaning they can be re-sold. Meanwhile, electric cars, which were very expensive during the early days of fuel-cell vehicles, have seen costs drop considerably and extensive charging infrastructure rolled out.

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As with shipping, the European Commission report concluded that for any of these options to scale up and compete with alternatives such as biofuels, a long-term policy framework and significant research funding will be required. According to the IEA, if every car, truck and bus currently in operation was replaced with a fuel-cell vehicle, hydrogen demand could reach 300Mt each year, more than four times current levels for all uses. The hydrogen-powered Toyota Mirai costs £66,000 ($88,015), compared to the battery electric Tesla Model 3 at around £45,000 ($60,010), or a medium-sized conventional UK car which tends to fall in the range of £22,000-£36,000 ($29,338-48,008). There is enthusiasm from many industry actors for hydrogen to succeed in the transport sector and it is already being applied in some niche markets. This section breaks down how hydrogen could be applied in transport, industry, heating and the power sector to help them achieve net-zero emissions.

Hydrogen in ships could be either burned in engines or used to generate electricity in fuel cells, but both options would require expensive new infrastructure to transport and store the gas on ships. For regular buses, electric vehicles are already dominating the transition away from fossil fuels. According to thinktank Carbon Tracker, 59% of bus sales in China last year were electric. The focus on using hydrogen as an alternative to fossil fuels in transport has a history dating back to the earliest waves of enthusiasm, when it was promoted as an alternative to oil.

There is also uncertainty over government and policy support for hydrogen, though a growing list of countries are developing dedicated hydrogen strategies . Can be used as a fuel, to transport energy from one place to another, as a form of energy storage or as a chemical feedstock. In between these two extremes, there is still the potential for hydrogen to play a hugely significant role in reaching net-zero emissions, requiring a dramatic scaling up of its production and use.

He said, in addition, that nations such as Saudi Arabia and Russia may be among those that end up dominating the market. Saudi energy minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman recently outlined his plans to ensure the nation is the “biggest exporter of hydrogen on earth”. Others have warned that the “slow and incomplete globalisation” of gas markets suggests the hydrogen trade may not take off as fast as some assume.

Higher carbon capture rates exceeding 90% are possible according to the IEA, especially if an alternative hydrogen production method termed autothermal reforming is used instead of the more conventional steam methane reforming. Julian Critclow, director general of energy transformation and clean growth in the UK’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy has said it has “a role in the middle times”. At the energy outlook’s launch, BP group chief economist Spencer Dale said focusing exclusively on green hydrogen would “constrain the pace at which the hydrogen economy can grow”. Therefore, in each round of interest, whenever oil costs have dipped or new fossil fuel supplies have been unlocked, the excitement around hydrogen has tended to subside.

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. The figure below shows why electric vehicles are several times more efficient than hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, or those running on synthetic fuels derived from hydrogen. Methanol was “rarely mentioned”, with only 10% saying they saw it as important for the future. However, these demonstration projects, both of which used hydrogen ultimately derived from fossil fuels, are currently the upper limit of hydrogen’s progress in these sectors. A report by the UK’s Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult on the potential of offshore wind to generate hydrogen estimated – based on “conservative assumptions” – that green hydrogen could be cheaper than blue hydrogen by 2050.

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Hydrogen can be stored by compressing it into underground salt caverns or depleted fossil fuel sites, blended with fossil gas or used to produce other fuels. It can then be converted back into power when required, or used for other purposes in the energy system, such as transport fuels. One estimate from BloombergNEF, shown in the chart below, suggests green hydrogen could compete with the most expensive coal-based steel by 2030, assuming a cost of around $2/kg for the hydrogen. Such estimates rely on a considerable fall in the cost of electrolysers and extensive renewable deployment. While it still requires more space than fossil fuels, ammonia is more energy dense than hydrogen and is already transported around the world on ships.

Beating the performance of the S&P with less risk is the goal of nearly every portfolio manager, hedge fund and private investor. Be sure to follow Scott Lehtonen on Twitter at@IBD_SLehtonen for more on Dow Jones stocks and the stock market. The Dow Jones Industrial Average finished the first month of 2023 in rebound mode, above its 50-day line and sharply off its mid-October lows, as the stock market continues to rebound. The top Dow Jones stocks to buy and watch in February 2023 are Apple , Chevron , Goldman Sachs , JPMorgan Chase and Microsoft . However, making use of curtailed power has been proposed as a strategy that makes sense not only to cut emissions, but to save money. It also makes more sense for larger-scale storage requirements, which would require “immense” numbers of batteries compared to the space taken up by hydrogen storage, according to the IEA.

The term “hydrogen economy” was first coined in 1970 by the chemist Prof John Bockris, who had a vision of a world powered by solar- and nuclear-generated hydrogen. BNEF’s new energy outlook expects hydrogen use to be split between the power sector (30%), industry (30%), transport (25%) and buildings (15%), as shown in the chart below. The chart below shows the share of final energy supplied by hydrogen, in 2050, in deep decarbonisation pathways for the world , the EU and the UK .

By 2070, in a scenario keeping warming well-below 2C, the IEA sees hydrogen meeting 13% of final energy demand, with this total spread unevenly between sectors. Hydrogen would meet large shares of energy use in shipping and aviation, but hardly any for buildings, as shown below right. Graphic by Tom Prater.Some advocates for a hydrogen economy describe an expansive vision of the future where it replaces most of the societal, economic and geopolitical positions now occupied by fossil fuels.

“If demand for low-carbon hydrogen grows, the market will see an upsurge in growth. But we have not seen that explosion yet,” Wood Mackenzie notes, in an unfortunately worded press release. An additional 45Mt of hydrogen is used in industries, such as steel and methanol production, in a mixture with other gases. The company’s outlook adds that this “may reflect that many of the IPCC scenarios were compiled before the increase in policy and private-sector interest in hydrogen over the past few years”. Low rates of hydrogen use in any particular model or scenario might reflect outdated assumptions about its cost or technical potential, relative to other decarbonisation options for each end use.

It may be cheaper to connect them to the grid, where production will be constant, but the electricity costs will be higher and will include paying for the grid connection. Unless the grid is completely decarbonised, this would also mean the hydrogen could not be called “green”. While hydrogen from some renewable sources may already be cost-competitive in certain applications, it still has a long way to go before it edges out its fossil fuel-derived equivalents. Turquoise hydrogen has potential as a low-emission option if the process is powered by renewables or nuclear and the resulting carbon is stored.

The past year has seen Japan launch the first ocean-going liquid hydrogen carrier ship, dubbed Hydrogen Frontier, and seen the first hydrogen-powered small passenger plane take flight. Auke Hoekstra, a senior advisor in smart mobility at the Eindhoven University of Technology, found that in a scenario comparing its costs to other options from an IEA report on trucking, the electric truck came out on top. Fuel https://day-trading.info/ cells do have advantages over batteries, not least their far shorter refuelling times. Some have suggested that people living in dense East Asian cities are less likely to have space to charge an electric car overnight and will instead opt for hydrogen. This is evident from the policies that have been brought in to support hydrogen, which are predominantly directed at cars, refuelling stations and buses.