How will Hydrogen make Industries more Sustainable?

Industries

In the first blog, I presented the basics around Hydrogen as a possible important element in the Energy Transition. According to the IEA CO2, emissions will reach 55 gigatons (Gt) by 2050 if no measures will be taken. To not exceed global warming by 2°C in 2050, we need to take reductions measures leading to only 15 Gt emissions that year. In this blog, I aim to show how hydrogen in industries can contribute to the ~30 Gt reduction of CO2 needed.

Mind that in the Transportation Sector (Hydrogen Council, page 29) another large gain can be achieved in terms of CO2 reduction by introducing Hydrogen, but I will not go deeper in this now.

Industries in The Netherlands
Industries are a group of manufacturing businesses in a particular field. The Dutch energy-intensive industry consists of the Paper Industry, Refineries, Petrochemicals, Iron and Steel Industry and the Construction Materials Industry among others.

The energy consumed in the energy-intensive industry in The Netherlands has a very large share. In 2012 it was measured as one-third of the total energy usage in the Netherlands. Natural gas amounts for 25% and oil for even 50% as the energy input source. The rest is a mix of coal, renewables, electricity and heat (Dutch Energy Sector, Page 7).

Furthermore, fossil fuels like crude oil and petroleum are used as feedstock for the industries to create plastics and many other products. Fossil fuels thus power the Dutch industries and many others around the world.

The energy input and feedstock creates CO2 emissions. Something we want to reduce the comings years. Hydrogen can play a significant role in abating the emission from industries all over the world.

Hydrogen Production

As we saw in the first blog, we can produce hydrogen from multiple sources. It is important to stress again; hydrogen is not an energy source but an energy carrier. It needs an energy source like gas, coal, sunlight or wind to be produced. If hydrogen is produced from gas or coal, we generate CO2, which we want to avoid unless we can store it (CCS).

Producing Green hydrogen

Using electricity from wind or solar energy for electrolysis, we create so-called Green Hydrogen since no CO2 is produced. AkzoNobel and Gasunie are thinking to set up a plant to produce hydrogen using this technique. According to their figure below, hydrogen is useful as feedstock for the chemical industry, as an energy storage medium and for the transportation sector.

(image courtesy: AkzoNobel)

Mixing natural gas and hydrogen

On Ameland, one of the Dutch islands in the North, an experiment of mixing natural gas and hydrogen took place. Households had a 20% share of hydrogen in their gas while cooking and heating their homes. However, the Netherlands might stop using gas in the future for its households and thus rendering this solution less useful.

However, using hydrogen in gas-fired power plants is another story. These plants are important during peak demand i.e. they can be switched on and off quite fast. They are strategic assets to smooth demand. The Netherlands does not have any form of storage like hydro or large scale electric batteries, they either need to import power or produce extra themselves when there is a shortage of supply.

Hydrogen & Ammonia as a buffer

Using hydrogen instead of gas in gas-fired power plants would thus be an interesting solution. Currently, Nuon, Gasunie and Statoil are diving into this possibility. Their aim is to have a 100% hydrogen-fired power plant in the Eemshaven, which is in the North of the Netherlands, and could become the Hydrogen Hub as depicted below;

(Image courtesy: Noordelijke Innovation Board)

However, they will take a bit of a complex route via Ammonia (NH3) to make hydrogen useful. Let me explain step by step;

1. During a very windy or sunny day when the supply of sustainable electrical energy is higher than the demand, hydrogen (H2) and oxygen (O2) are produced via electrolysis.
2. The hydrogen (H2) will be mixed with nitrogen (N2) from the air to produce ammonia (NH3). Remember that the air we breath consist of 78.09% of nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen and some other elements like Argon and CO2. The balanced reaction for this reaction is N2 + 3 H2 → 2 NH3. All substances are in the gaseous phase.
3. Important to note here: hydrogen is not stored, but ammonia is. This gas is easier to store and doesn’t have the material issues hydrogen has as we encountered in the previous blog.
4. Ammonia will be cracked to produce (again) hydrogen when the supply of wind and/or the sun is low. Thus now we get again the reverse chemical reaction equation: 2 NH3 → N2 + 3 H2.
5. Subsequently, Hydrogen will be burned in the plant to generate electricity

This whole model is called a “super battery” by energy producer Nuon.

Personally, I still have unanswered questions how fast/flexible this is, and whether it is really beneficial to have an extra step in the process i.e. what makes it cheaper to use ammonia next to the material and storage issues?

Hydrogen & Industry Energy Input

The Hydrogen Council points out that the following 5 industries consume most of the energy, especially in terms of the large amounts of heat used in boilers, steam generators, and furnaces;

1. Aluminium
2. Chemicals, Petrochemicals and Refining
3. Cement
4. Iron and steel
5. Pulp and paper

We can distinguish between low (<100°C), medium (100°C–400°C) and high-grade heat (>400°C). The figure below shows that a lot of (high-grade) heat is needed compared to electricity. The total worldwide energy demand of these five major industries amount to 130 EJ while the world energy demand was around 550 EJ in 2010. This is very serious.

(Image courtesy: Hydrogen Council)

How can hydrogen reduce CO2 emissions in industries?

Green hydrogen can be produced using a sustainable electric energy source. If hydrogen reacts with oxygen it creates an exothermic reaction, releasing energy in the form of electricity and heat, which can power a system. It avoids generating CO2 like in the fossil fuels. The other following actions can be taken in industrial plants;

• Retrofitting of materials/equipment to run on hydrogen. This is applicable in the (petro)chemical industry to ethylene crackers, for aluminium recycling adjusting gas-fired blast furnaces to hydrogen.
• Combining hydrogen and other combustible fuels e.g. in the cement industry where hydrogen and waste-derived fuels are mixed.
• Capturing hydrogen-rich gases in the same plant to generate power or enhance production for blast furnaces in steel industries
• Using hydrogen as a high-purity flame in the pulp and paper industry to flash-dry paper.
• Complementing heat pumps with hydrogen for low/medium-grade heat, production.

These are solutions presented by the Hydrogen Council. I can imagine there will be more creative solutions to put hydrogen to smart use in industries. The council declares that that retrofitting is not very expensive and expects that the main barrier for using hydrogen will arise from the high costs of producing hydrogen itself.

Expected Results

Based on the roadmap of The Hydrogen Council they expect by 2050 to abate 1 Gigaton (Gt) CO2 per year, which is 3,3% of the 30 Gt CO2 reduction needed.

Hydrogen as Industry Feedstock

We discussed the production of Green Hydrogen and subsequently how the energy carrier can be used as a heat source.

Hydrogen can play the following roles;

• Replacing fossil-based feedstocks for the production of hydrocarbon-based chemicals such as methanol and ammonia. It can reduce the upstream emissions in refineries of the (petro)chemical industry.
• Assuming that many power plants produce their own feedstock on site, the hydrogen could be created by using non-CO2 intensive sources.
• Furthermore, hydrogen has the ability to replace carbon, which is derived from coal or natural gas, as a reducing agent in the iron industry as well as in the steel industry.
• Instead of putting CO2 underground i.e. Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), CO2 can also be put to good use i.e. Carbon Capture and Utilisation (CCU). In combination with hydrogen, the greenhouse gas can be converted into high-value chemicals, which reflects aspects of a circular economy. CCU offers the potential of converting CO2 to chemicals and could encourage the uptake of carbon capture technologies. The costs for capturing CO2 are still high, around 100 dollars per ton, and as mentioned before, producing hydrogen is costly as well, making it a tough business case.

Expected Results

• Reduction of CO2 emissions over 0,7 Gt by 2050 on annual basis, around 2,3% of the needed CO2 reduction.

Synthesis

Can hydrogen thus play an important role in energy-intensive industries to reduce CO2 emissions? The answer is yes. It could potentially achieve a reduction of around 5% making it an interesting case to pursue these industries.

However, there are many hurdles along the way. In the meantime we need to take the following into account;

• Cost of hydrogen production needs to be decreased
• Sufficient hydrogen needs to be produced sustainably and be sufficiently available
• Hydrogen needs to be produced sustainably
• CCS and CCU needs to be more developed and their business case heavily depend on the CO2 price

Upcoming next.

Since I have been looking into the context of the developed world, I want to understand whether Hydrogen could be an interesting case as well for other countries and in particular developing nations. And whether there are different challenges too. Read more on this in the third instalment of the introductory hydrogen series.