Widespread car adoption won’t be the first use.
Initially Green Hydrogen will (is) being used to a) store and transport energy, mostly on a seasonal scale — it doesn’t lose charge or degrade like a battery, b) for large things where battery weight is problematic e.g. ships, trains, large industrial stuff, and c) industrial heat as a replacement for carbon fuels.
People see there is a hole in our efforts to decarbonise the entire economy with things like process heat and shipping being particularly problematic for batteries to handle. Hydrogen will help fill that gap significantly, being used in different ways.
Right now we make H2 cheaply but in a very carbon dirty way — the Haber Bosch process. This H2 is only ~$1/kg, but dirty as heck. It is referred to as brown hydrogen.
As we decarbonise, we will use dedicated farms and excess generation to simply make H2 with electrolysers. You can make electrolysers that are quite efficient at many scales. This will be a very very green ‘fuel’/energy carrier.
The problems today are:
1) the cost of making Green H2 at the moment, which is about $7/kg, and really the biggest part of that is just there is no large scale infrastructure or manufacturing of the stuff you need. All the stuff you can buy at the moment is comparatively niche. We need a few large industrials pumping out electrolysers on a large scale. A very large company I work with recons simply ramping up to the existing demand for a country like Australia would reduce the cost down to in the order of $2/kg. Pair that with a revolution in electrolyser/fuel cell research and it isn’t hard to see how it can become cost competitive with brown. Then add in (hopefully) carbon taxes and it becomes obvious.
2) Infrastructure — You need the same thing we have today for petrol but for H2. This is why it is sometimes criticised as being a back door for big oil because for them it’s just slight different engineering standards. Essentially as they will roll into H2 infrastructure as hydrocarbons become less viable/acceptable/cost effective (carbon taxes). This is probably what will eventually happen, you’ll get H2 from Shell or whatever, but before that Hydrogen infrastructure will be focussed in hubs like ports, industrial estates and the like. This makes a lot of sense because this is where all the early-adopter vehicles
use cases live, so there is quite an elegance there.
So Germany, Japan, America, China, Saudi, UK are all piling money into Green H2 and H2 research right now, as are many other governments at smaller scales. Here is an idea of the investment that is happening from the private sector alone:
www.rechargenews.com
Anyway, to answer your question finally, once Green H2 is used at large scale to store green energy and decarbonise heavy industries, it will be cheap as chips. Then you will see it being used more seriously in smaller applications because it is suddenly cheap and convenient, and for a lot of use cases, actually better than BEVs. I think particularly for us outdoor types, in 15 years you’ll be using H2 fuel cells in things like campers, drones, ebikes, maybe even camping stoves. Even with today’s tech, a H2 drone can go further, longer, faster than a BEV but you getting H2 is obviously a highly niche, expensive activity.
Initially Green Hydrogen will (is) being used to a) store and transport energy, mostly on a seasonal scale — it doesn’t lose charge or degrade like a battery, b) for large things where battery weight is problematic e.g. ships, trains, large industrial stuff, and c) industrial heat as a replacement for carbon fuels.
People see there is a hole in our efforts to decarbonise the entire economy with things like process heat and shipping being particularly problematic for batteries to handle. Hydrogen will help fill that gap significantly, being used in different ways.
Right now we make H2 cheaply but in a very carbon dirty way — the Haber Bosch process. This H2 is only ~$1/kg, but dirty as heck. It is referred to as brown hydrogen.
As we decarbonise, we will use dedicated farms and excess generation to simply make H2 with electrolysers. You can make electrolysers that are quite efficient at many scales. This will be a very very green ‘fuel’/energy carrier.
The problems today are:
1) the cost of making Green H2 at the moment, which is about $7/kg, and really the biggest part of that is just there is no large scale infrastructure or manufacturing of the stuff you need. All the stuff you can buy at the moment is comparatively niche. We need a few large industrials pumping out electrolysers on a large scale. A very large company I work with recons simply ramping up to the existing demand for a country like Australia would reduce the cost down to in the order of $2/kg. Pair that with a revolution in electrolyser/fuel cell research and it isn’t hard to see how it can become cost competitive with brown. Then add in (hopefully) carbon taxes and it becomes obvious.
2) Infrastructure — You need the same thing we have today for petrol but for H2. This is why it is sometimes criticised as being a back door for big oil because for them it’s just slight different engineering standards. Essentially as they will roll into H2 infrastructure as hydrocarbons become less viable/acceptable/cost effective (carbon taxes). This is probably what will eventually happen, you’ll get H2 from Shell or whatever, but before that Hydrogen infrastructure will be focussed in hubs like ports, industrial estates and the like. This makes a lot of sense because this is where all the early-adopter vehicles
use cases live, so there is quite an elegance there.
So Germany, Japan, America, China, Saudi, UK are all piling money into Green H2 and H2 research right now, as are many other governments at smaller scales. Here is an idea of the investment that is happening from the private sector alone:
Global green-hydrogen pipeline exceeds 250GW — here's the 27 largest gigawatt-scale projects | Recharge
Rapidly rising number of gigawatt-scale renewable H2 developments promise economies of scale that could drive down the cost of the zero-carbon fuel
www.rechargenews.com
Anyway, to answer your question finally, once Green H2 is used at large scale to store green energy and decarbonise heavy industries, it will be cheap as chips. Then you will see it being used more seriously in smaller applications because it is suddenly cheap and convenient, and for a lot of use cases, actually better than BEVs. I think particularly for us outdoor types, in 15 years you’ll be using H2 fuel cells in things like campers, drones, ebikes, maybe even camping stoves. Even with today’s tech, a H2 drone can go further, longer, faster than a BEV but you getting H2 is obviously a highly niche, expensive activity.
