Potential Hydrogen Uses in a Growing H2 Economy

New uses of H2

Shown above: Toyota’s heavy duty hydrogen truck (top left), Toyota’s Mirai (top right), First Mode’s mining truck (bottom left) and LNG tanker to move natural gas (bottom right).

My last post covered existing uses of H2, which are more than 99% of H2. This post covers upcoming uses. It pulls heavily from my time at Shell and from the DOE when I was one of the lead authors in the Hydrogen Commercial Liftoff Report. This article goes into some detail on each, and in the future there will be deep-dive analysis on each. Overall, if hydrogen is to move beyond subsidized clean hydrogen for existing use cases, one or more of these below will need to take off. The major upcoming uses cases are:

1.         Long distance heavy duty

2.        Off-road vehicles

3.        Light duty vehicles

4.        Intercontinental Power Arbitrage (replacing oil and gas exports)

5.        Maritime Fuels

6.        Firming Renewables for Baseload Power

7.        Baseload power (dependent on geologic H2) 

Each of these will have its own future article with significantly more analysis. I’m leaving off flight for now because each of these could be major end-uses by 2035 whereas H2 for flight is looking for like an end use for 2040 and beyond. I’m also lumping derivatives (sustainable aviation fuel, synthetic fuels) into the maritime fuels segment.

Transportation Uses

Most hydrogen transportation uses a hydrogen fuel cell – these take hydrogen and convert them into electricity. Think of a fuel cell vehicle as a battery vehicle with self-charging capabilities. Compared to batteries, the bigger the vehicle gets, the more advantage fuel cells have.

Heavy-duty trucks

The DOE H2 Commercial Liftoff report identified heavy duty trucking as the most likely pathway to commercial acceleration of clean hydrogen owing to the higher break-even point and greater reduction of air pollution than any other replacement.

It is very likely that heavy duty vehicles become hydrogen in most use cases for two simple reasons:

1.       A short range heavy duty trucks holds a minimum of 500kwh of battery. To charge a single one in a single hour would pull down the same amount of power as 400 homes connected to the power grid. In short, the power grid is not ready for many of these. Worse, to pull down 500kwh of power and use it only a few times a day will cost the mile-equivalent of $10/gallon diesel

2.       500kwh of batteries costs in the order of $200,000. 500kwh of hydrogen storage is 25kg, and that much hydrogen tank costs about $10,000-$20,000 the price is rapidly dropping

Vehicles with short drives and long residency times to fill with goods could prefer battery, but most very large trucks don’t fit this.

This is by far the most exciting end use because it will drastically reduce traffic pollution in very polluted areas, preventing millions of pollution-related premature deaths worldwide.

Off-road vehicles and Trains

These are construction, mining, trains, port and material handling. Two characteristics make them more likely to go hydrogen one the economy is more scaled:

1.       High utilization. Batteries take a long time to charge, and expensive equipment that sits around  charging and not working costs a lot. Hydrogen is quick to refuel. Any use case with high utilization will be H2, full stop

2.       Heavy equipment – batteries are heavy. A long range Tesla model 3 weighs as much as a Toyota 4-runner. The BEV hummer is 9000 lbs whereas the equivalent consumer-grade hummer is 5000 lbs. The heavier the equipment, the more battery energy that is used to move battery instead of vehicle a payload. Batteries scale up poorly. Hydrogen is very light and much easier to move at large scale, and scales up well, so larger vehicles will likely go to hydrogen. One real-world case study is buses: the curb weight of battery buses is beyond legal limits whereas hydrogen buses are within these limits.

Overall expect many of these use cases to switch to hydrogen to decarbonize as hydrogen infrastructure develops further.

Light duty vehicles

Right now there are three light duty hydrogen vehicles and dozens more under development. Hydrogen passenger vehicles are currently held back by the lack of infrastructure for fueling, but if the hydrogen economy takes off they will have a very large part in decarbonizing personal vehicles, particularly for people that don’t own garages or parking spots to charge overnight. The short really becomes: how does someone who doesn’t own a home charge their BEV? Hydrogen will end up being the preferred fuel type for many.

Power

 One of the further-out use cases for hydrogen and the largest by far will be various uses in power production for the grid and distribution of energy between countries. These are by no means guaranteed and will require significant infrastructure that doesn’t yet exist.

Trading power between continents

LNG ships, oil tankers, and pipelines are how most energy is moved between continents and countries

Oil and gas are the primary movers for energy between continents. It’s moved via pipelines or, in the case of natural gas, often liquefied. In all cases, these are fossil resources, currently no renewable forms of these are traded internationally.

If these are to be decarbonized, hydrogen will be used directly or as a precursor material for a hydrogen derivative like methanol or ammonia.

The main ways to move H2 will be:

1.        Pipeline – examples include from southern Spain to the rest of the EU

2.        Liquid H2 tanker– LNG equivalent, still in development with 2030 timeline to understand whether this will work

3.        Turn H2 into ammonia and pipe or ship it – we have ammonia shipping, but this has issues

4.        Turn H2 into other fuels – methanol, jet fuel etc, and pipe or ship it

Depending on the flavor of H2 all of these methods could work economically.

Power for the grid

Firming baseload power

Baseload power means being accessible whenever it’s needed. Current power plants are dispatchable which means when we need more power, we turn them on. Renewable power is not dispatchable, so as we expand renewables we need more power that can ramp up at request to fill in the gaps. Grid scale batteries for all of this would be far too expensive, and right now we firm up gaps in power production with natural gas peaker plants.

To cost-effectively decarbonize filling in the gaps from power production with renewables, hydrogen peaker plants, either turbine or fuel cell, will be the lowest cost zero-emission peaking facility provided there is open access H2 pipeline network with storage. The hydrogen hubs will be critical here.

Providing baseload power

A few months ago, Koloma hydrogen raised $246 million to find geologic hydrogen. This is a long-shot bet, but if it turns out we have a bunch of hydrogen we can drill, we suddenly have access to zero emission fuel. It would be so cost-effective that the hydrogen could be used for baseload power.

It’s too soon to say whether this will come to fruition, but if it does, this would be a magic bullet for clean, low-cost power.

Conclusion

One or all of these needs to take off in order for the hydrogen economy to come into fruition, and all are currently so small that they wouldn’t show up on a pie chart of H2 use even if they were all added together.