Green Hydrogen Offers Current, Future Solutions
Experts: Explore All Options to Meet Storage, Transport Challenges
Green hydrogen and battery innovations no doubt remain instrumental in the eventual electrification of the world. Some of these technologies are closer to reality than others, agreed participants on an Energy Week 2022 panel presented by TDK Ventures. Part 1 of the discussion explored how scalability and proof of concept issues will drive incentivization and research into these new approaches. Here, we chronicle the second half of the presentation, highlighted by the need to explore every option, apply those that work best in specific circumstances, and develop futuristic applications while refining those that already demonstrate promise.
Exploring Every Option
Aruna Ramkrishnan, co-founder and CTO of Copernic Catalysts, warned not to let the search for an ultimate solution detract from efforts to mobilize efforts to slow global warming and accelerate decarbonization.
Her company works to alleviate the environmental and energy impacts of producing chemicals on a large scale — millions of tons per year — that emit large volumes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It is also interested in finding smaller-scale and localized applications.
“We’re also looking into the future and thinking about models where chemicals are produced in decentralized ways,” Ramkrishnan said. “For example, there are many people working on fertilizer production from ammonia in decentralized manners, especially if they need fertilizers for farmers who live off the grid and energy is not easily available or who have to rely on other forms of energy than electrons. We need to come up with innovative ways to make zero-carbon fertilizers and to give people access to low-carbon energy. Each model of production has its place, whether it’s large-scale or distributed models. We need to develop technologies that meet the demands of different markets across the world.”
Clea Kolster, partner and head of science at Lowercarbon Capital, said localization can relieve some of the pressures to build bigger and to concentrate only on developing products that gain economies of scale by building out.
“The decentralization aspect and the advent of electrochemistry and synthetic biology as well as the availability of bioforges, where you have smaller systems set up at the point of use, enable this kind of scaling up and multiplication that we’ve seen with the solar PV (photovoltaic) and value manufacturing industries,” she said. “That’s opposed to the traditional, high-temperature thermal systems, where you only get economies of scale when scaling out. Hence, you have very high capex demands and decentralized approaches, where you can demonstrate the functionality of new technology on a very small scale, creating a flywheel of ‘financability.’
Materials and chemical science led by academia can provide a leg up said Yet Ming Chiang, the Kyocera Professor in the Department of Materials Science & Engineering at MIT and co-founder of several energy and construction-materials-focused businesses.
“Computational chemistry is the standard for materials”, he said. “It narrows the number of experiments you have to conduct through targeting and greater selectivity. There are many fields in which these tools can be applied more robustly. I worked in batteries for many years where computational design of everything from cathode and anode actives to electrolytes has been going on for many years.”
It’s a weapon he believes should be employed to help find ways to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere during the production of cement, steel, and other products. “With cement, the standard experience is to make a bucket and test it in a variety of ways over 28 days,” he said. “It’s a process that’s crying out for both computational and high-throughput methods to be applied.”
Applying What Works Best, Where it Works Best
Decentralization of manufacturing and localized application can be accomplished, despite the large-scale operations many of the leading technologies require noted Marty Neese, CEO of Verdagy.
“On the production side,” he explained, “if you’re trying to scale and address multiple markets at the same time and can get the right product and manufacturing methods, it becomes a replicable node, whether you build it yourself as a startup or gain it through partnerships.
“The ability to develop and maintain parallel processes is a key scalability dimension. Otherwise, scale-up becomes a serial operation that takes longer and costs more. It’s better to refine a basic concept and then secure local supply-chain partners, adapt to regional challenges, and amend workflow to match the challenges in the various jurisdictions in which companies want to operate at the same time.”
Chiang agreed that these types of operations might need to operate at a huge scale.
“Some technological solutions scale down better than others,” he said. “For instance, there are some storage technologies that do scale down well to the residential level. Others, you really can only deploy at very large scale. A lot of it has to do with energy density. There’s a reason we have a lithium-ion battery in our cell phones and not pumped hydro.”
One of his companies is investigating iron air batteries, “the lowest-cost rechargeable battery chemistry we know of,” he said. “The natural building block for an industrial iron-air battery is the size of a combined washer/dryer unit — much bigger than the lithium-ion cell, which has many thin layers. Storing green hydrogen geologically can have the same cost as the iron-air battery, down to the $20-kilowatt-hour range, which enables multiple days of storage that’s competitive in cost with natural gas. The issue is that to store hydrogen geologically, you need a salt cavern that doesn’t scale down very well.”
Those limitations point out that green hydrogen is an option for some industries, but is not yet feasible for others Kolster said.
“The current industries in which hydrogen is being used are ones that need to be replaced by green hydrogen; they are the ones we want to be decarbonizing,” she said. “But right now, if we do that with electrochemical systems and the average grid carbon intensity, you’re actually on par if not above total CO2 equivalent emissions level. So, we need to think about it holistically. What are the levers that need to be pulled so it evolves? There are many areas where we talk about the utility of green hydrogen where it isn’t necessarily the best-case scenario because hydrogen has its own global warming potential.”
“That holistic approach is the best model in scaling in parallel in numerous jurisdictions,” Neese continued. “Similarly, just like any other scale-up activity in the past, you have to break down the entire ecosystem. There may be different constraints in different markets and different ways to address them yourself or with partnerships. Partnerships and being able to pull through volumetric changes at the scale needed is an interesting challenge. Having a strong demand pull gives everyone in an ecosystem the opportunity to participate economically, so the risks are not on the demand side. The risks are how do we get this done as quickly as possible? Answering the question satisfactorily attracts capital that helps make it so.”
Developing the Future
That luxury of strong demand pull or advance market commitment facilitates technological advancement Kolster reflected.
“When you can create market ahead of time, it alleviates investors’ fear that the supply will have nowhere to go,” she said, citing examples inherited from other industries. “We are starting to see it applied to broader industrial decarbonization and would love to see more of it in creating advance market commitments for clean steel and cement, agnostic of the technology used, so we can incentivize a broader set of technologies.”
She said carbon taxes, electrification mandates, and the subsidies contained in the Inflation Reduction Act are strong starts, “but the cost of long-duration energy storage and water electrolysis to hydrogen is also dependent on electricity price and utilization factor. We need to bear in mind that renewable energy generation is one of the drivers of the cost for hydrogen production. Hydrogen is also particularly difficult to move around, requiring a whole different set of infrastructure. We should think about storage and transportation mechanisms, rather than just production on-site when considering the role hydrogen has to play in industrial decarbonization.”
Ramkrishnan agreed that transporting hydrogen presents difficulty, but that the industry will rise to the challenge. “As the smallest molecule,” he said, “it’s hard to transport because it diffuses and leaks easily from pipelines. It also interacts with metals and requires significant energy to convert from gas to liquid.
“The solution, if you want to transport hydrogen over long distances, is to convert it to an energy-dense form, preferably liquified that can be easily transported by ships. The most popular solutions are converting hydrogen to ammonia or methanol. The shipping industry has a mandate for decarbonization and is interested in both of these molecules as potential zero-carbon fuels. The challenge is to minimize the cost of conversion and to accomplish it energy efficiently.”
Chiang noted that in many cases, the manufacturing practices that sparked the Industrial Revolution are still in use. “These are truly commoditized materials, so the economics work with a healthy CO2 price. That’s a great way to start, but in the long term, it’s a tricky proposition. I would rather have something where I can see line-of-sight. Maybe it will take two decades to get there and there’s a significant learning curve, but real progress comes where you can really reinvent these processes at lower energy and cost competitiveness without that carbon price.”
TDK Ventures’ second annual Energy Week assembled some of the greatest minds and brightest lights in the fields of renewable energy, materials science, mobility, storage, and more. Over the course of 13 sessions — fireside chats, panel discussions, spotlight interviews, and in-depth reports — TDK Ventures and the expert businesspeople, researchers, academics, and investors presented their opinions and field notes on the world’s progress in solving some of its most pressing problems. You can find the recording for this particular session on YouTube. Energy Week 2022 fulfilled TDK Ventures’ mission to spotlight the best ideas and most promising technologies to inspire entrepreneurs, inventors, and investors to redouble their efforts to mitigate climate change, hasten electrification, and develop the solutions that will herald a greener, more equitable planet. If you want to chat green hydrogen and green chemicals, don’t hesitate to connect with me on LinkedIn!
