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Hydrogen is the most abundant chemical in the universe, and the lightest element on the periodic table has become the liveliest topic in clean energy circles.
Chemists, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and some of the biggest names in the energy industry are developing ways to capture hydrogen for use as support for wind and solar power plants and as a fuel for long-haul transportation. The gas also promises to keep Texas at the center of the energy world.
Hydrogen is both ubiquitous and difficult to isolate, and there is the challenge.
Pure hydrogen is flammable, a fact made famous by the fire of the Zeppelin Hindenburg. When combined with oxygen, the gas creates H2O. Fuel cells generate electricity by combining hydrogen with oxygen to create water. But hydrogen also puts it in hydrocarbons, the compounds that burn oil and natural gas.
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Englishman Francis Thomas Bacon developed the first commercial hydrogen-oxygen fuel cell in 1932. NASA has used fuel cells, an expensive type of battery, to power spaceships since the 1960s. The only emission produced by a fuel cell is water, making it a darling of environmentalists.
The tricky part is getting hydrogen, which is usually bonded to other atoms. The most common industrial method of capturing the gas is to vaporize the hydrocarbons and then compress the gas with vapor on a nickel catalyst heated to more than 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit.
In other words, the distillation of hydrogen into a gas requires a significant amount of energy and natural gas, and the process releases greenhouse gases. Environmentalists call this hydrogen gray because there is nothing green in it.
Many, many companies are trying to find an affordable way to do this without releasing emissions.
“It is no longer a nascent market. It is expanding and scaling quite rapidly as we see many geographies and international companies investing heavily, “he said at a recent conference hosted by the Houston Center for the Future. The French company is one of the largest hydrogen producers in the world with a plant near Houston.
The Gulf Coast has the largest hydrogen production and distribution system in the world thanks to Texas’ large and inexpensive natural gas supply. Petrochemical plants use hydrogen to produce ammonia, a key ingredient in fertilizers, textiles, alloys and rubber.
Boissy-Rousseau said Texas is in a unique position to generate hydrogen in facilities that can capture and sequester greenhouse gas emissions. These structures produce what the industry calls blue hydrogen.
“Texas has an existing infrastructure, it has 900 miles of hydrogen pipelines, it has hydrogen reformers that can be easily adapted for carbon capture and sequestration,” he explained. “Texas is also number one in wind production, so we can imagine producing hydrogen with water electrolysis and using renewable energy.”
Electrolysis is a process in which an electric current is sent through water, separating it into hydrogen and oxygen. If the electricity comes from wind, solar, or other forms of renewable energy, you end up with what the industry calls green hydrogen, a zero-emission form of storable energy that doesn’t rely on hydrocarbons at all.
Air Liquide is experimenting with electrolysis of water at a hydrogen filling station in Braintree, Mass. Using hydroelectric power. The company is also building a hydrogen plant in Nevada to supply green hydrogen to the California trucking industry.
The International Energy Agency reports that green hydrogen production has increased from the equivalent of 1 megawatt of electricity generation in 2010 to 25 megawatts in 2019. Germany has set a target of producing 5,000 megawatts by 2030 and another 5,000 megawatts by 2035, enough energy to power 3 million homes.
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Researchers are also looking for other ways to produce green hydrogen. Jim Tour and his team of chemists and materials scientists at Rice University have adapted a carbon-based nanotechnology that radically reduces the energy required to create the gas.
He uses a laser to produce graphene sheets and then coats them with cheap nickel or cobalt-based catalysts. Once immersed in water and charged with a low voltage electric current, one side produces hydrogen while the other produces oxygen.
Large-scale affordable green hydrogen production, however, will take a decade to commercialize, which means that if we are to slow climate change now, we will have to rely on blue hydrogen. Texas companies should quickly begin retrofitting their facilities to acquire a significant portion of what could be a $ 300 billion market over the next five years.
Next week, I’ll delve into ways hydrogen can replace fossil fuels, support renewables, and create a zero-carbon electricity grid by 2035.
Tomlinson writes commentaries on business, economics and politics.
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