Материал: The_Future_of_Hydrogen-IEA-2020

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The Future of Hydrogen Chapter 1: Introduction

Note: Co-generation refers to the combined production of heat and power.

There are multiple mutually reinforcing reasons why this time around might well be different for hydrogen

Hydrogen has never enjoyed so much international and cross-sectoral interest, even in the face of impressive recent progress in other low-carbon energy technologies, such as batteries and renewables. As the cost of technologies has fallen and ambition for tackling climate change and air pollution has risen, understanding of hydrogen’s potential role as a flexible complement to

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electricity has improved. While the level of investment today remains very modest compared to the scale of the energy system, and deployment challenges are significant, the current level of attention has opened a genuine window of opportunity for policy and private-sector action. There are four main reasons for this positive prospect.

1) Greater attention to the deep emissions reductions that hydrogen can help deliver, especially in hard-to-abate sectors

The number of countries establishing ambitious goals for greenhouse gas emissions reduction continues to increase, and with it the number of sectors considering the use of low-carbon hydrogen has risen. The 195 signatories of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change agreed to raise their emissions reduction efforts towards net zero emissions from all sectors over the course of the century. In 2018 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that global net anthropogenic CO2 emissions would need to reach net zero around 2050 in a pathway consistent with limited global temperature increases to 1.5°C (IPCC, 2018). The European Union is considering net zero emissions as an objective for 2050 and others seem likely to do the same.

The increased focus on reducing emissions to near zero by mid-century has brought into sharp relief the challenge of tackling hard-to-abate emissions sources. These emissions are in sectors and applications for which electricity is not currently the form of energy at the point of end use, and for which direct electricity-based solutions come with high costs or technical drawbacks.3 Four-fifths of total final energy demand by end users today is for carbon-containing fuels, not electricity. In addition, much of the raw material for chemicals and other products contains carbon today and generate CO2 emissions during their processing.

Hard-to-abate emissions sources include aviation, shipping, iron and steel production, chemicals manufacture, high-temperature industrial heat, long-distance and long-haul road transport and, especially in dense urban environments or off-grid, heat for buildings. Rapid technological transformations in these sectors have made limited progress in the face of the costs of low-carbon options, their infrastructure needs, the challenges they pose to established supply chains, and ingrained habits. While significant financial and political commitments will be necessary to realise deep emissions cuts, there is an increasing sense of urgency on the part of governments and companies about the need to start developing appropriate solutions. As a low-carbon chemical energy carrier, hydrogen is a leading option for reducing these hard-to-abate emissions because it can be stored, combusted and combined in chemical reactions in ways that are similar to natural gas, oil and coal. Hydrogen can also technically be converted to “drop-in” low-carbon replacements for today’s fuels, which is particularly attractive for sectors with hard-to- abate emissions, especially if there are limits to the direct use of biomass and CCUS.

2) Hydrogen is seen as able to contribute to a wider range of policy objectives

While interest in hydrogen continues to be strongly linked with climate change ambition, there has been a noticeable broadening of the policy objectives to which hydrogen can contribute.

3 For energy applications that directly use electricity today, confidence is growing in many regions that low-carbon electricity can be cost-competitively supplied to the grid or to off-grid communities, thus decarbonising these end uses without changing fuels. However, achieving a decarbonised electricity supply still faces major economic and technical challenges, in particular in the integration of variable renewable power output.

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The benefits of hydrogen for energy security, local air pollution, economic development and energy access are now routinely cited.

Hydrogen can support energy security in several ways. When hydrogen is deployed alongside electricity infrastructure, electricity can be converted to hydrogen and back, or further converted to other fuels, making end users less dependent on specific energy resources and increasing the resilience of energy supplies. Hydrogen produced from fossil fuels with CCUS or from biomass can also increase the diversity of energy sources, especially in a low-carbon economy. If the right infrastructure is developed, it could be attractive in the future for countries to diversify their economies by exporting low-carbon energy in the form of hydrogen and hydrogen-based fuels, or importing hydrogen to benefit from competition that restrains prices. Countries with high-quality resources for hydrogen production are widely dispersed around the globe, and many current energy exporting countries are also endowed with renewable resources that could produce hydrogen. In an ambitious low-carbon context, such hydrogen trade would effectively enable trade and storage of wind and sunshine between different regions to overcome seasonal differences. Lastly, hydrogen could provide an additional way for countries to store reserves of energy strategically in a highly electrified lowcarbon world.

Using hydrogen instead of carbon-containing fuels in energy end uses could also reduce local air pollution, improving environmental and health outcomes. Urban air pollution concerns and its related health impacts are now major drivers of energy policy decisions, and governments are keenly interested in ways of reducing air pollution and improving air quality. When used in vehicles and heating appliances, hydrogen does not produce particulates or sulphur oxides or raise ground-level ozone (Stephens-Romero et al., 2009). When used in a fuel cell, hydrogen does not produce nitrogen oxides.

Development of hydrogen infrastructure and technologies is often considered in relation to broader economic development objectives, especially in the context of energy transitions. Hydrogen value chains touch upon many different types of technology and manufacturing sectors. Producing, transmitting and using hydrogen may require chemical technologies, such as carbon capture solvents or fuel cell membranes, and new precision-engineered products, such as storage tank or pipeline materials and burners. There is scope for countries to develop leadership, technical expertise and new jobs in these areas, particularly when they reinforce existing skills and capacities.

While owners of some existing skills and assets would see their value decrease in a low-carbon scenario, much of the value could be conserved by investing in low-carbon solutions that are compatible with current infrastructure. For example, some operators of natural gas grids are now exploring the opportunity to replace natural gas partially with alternatives that have a lower CO2 intensity, including hydrogen. Likewise, if hydrogen can be used cost-effectively to reduce industrial emissions without any relocation of manufacturing, that would help with the retention of local jobs. Similarly, if CCUS is used to reduce the CO2 intensity of fossil fuel hydrogen production, that would enable some fossil fuel resources to continue to be used. Transition pathways that make use of existing infrastructure, assets and skills could be easier and cheaper to navigate than the alternatives.

Opportunities for off-grid hydrogen generation and storage systems have emerged from improvements in integrated designs of electrolysers, hydrogen storage and fuel cells. Containerised systems are in development that can be paired with off-grid energy supplies to provide backup power for important facilities such as hospitals and electricity storage for longer periods than battery-based systems. While these systems are still costly, such off-grid solutions

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can be attractive where electricity demand is modest and the expansion of the electricity grid is not expected in the near term, for example in some parts of Africa. In India hundreds of fuel cells are used to ensure uninterruptible power for telecom towers. Today these systems run largely on imported fossil-based methanol.

3) Hydrogen can help ensure the current rapid growth of renewable electricity continues

Declining renewables costs are one of the forces driving hydrogen’s potential upwards. As solar and wind costs become cheaper, their expected share of the future primary energy mix rise. At high proportions of solar and wind power, the variability of their output poses a challenge. A number of countries and regions now have ambitious targets for the share of electricity coming from low-carbon sources, with South Australia aiming for 100% by 2025, Fukushima Prefecture by 2040, Sweden by 2040, California by 2045 and Denmark by 2050. Others have ambitious emissions reduction targets that point in the same direction. The EU objective of reducing emissions by 80–95% by 2050 compared to 1990 levels, for example, implies almost complete decarbonisation of power generation and high levels of variable renewables.

Because hydrogen can be stored or used in a variety of sectors, converting electricity to hydrogen can help with the matching of variable energy supply and demand, both temporally and geographically, alongside alternatives such as pumped-storage hydropower, batteries and grid upgrades. If renewable power generation becomes sufficiently cheap and widespread, it can be used not only to provide low-carbon electricity, but also to create low-carbon hydrogen that can displace fossil fuels in transport, heating and industrial raw materials, and indeed almost any application not susceptible to electrification. All this makes hydrogen one of a suite of technologies that work well together to support the growth of low-carbon energy at the level of the overall energy system.

The question of cost is of course very important in this context. The cost of electricity is the single most significant factor in the cost of electrolytic hydrogen production, and recent sharp declines in solar and wind power costs have therefore reduced the real and expected prices of renewable hydrogen. For example, utility-scale solar photovoltaic (PV) capital costs are 75% lower than in 2010, and electricity from onshore wind is around one quarter cheaper today than it was ten years ago. This has led more potential end users to look closely at whether renewable hydrogen is becoming a competitive way to meet their needs and reduce their environmental impact. Recent investments include a project to use electrolysers for the generation of low-carbon hydrogen to displace a share of fossil fuel-based hydrogen in oil refining and fertiliser production.

4) Hydrogen can benefit from positive experiences of developing clean energy technologies

Several clean energy technologies have become major new industries since the beginning of this century. While deployment of solar PV and wind turbines was initially backed by direct government support systems and policies, investment in them now stands at USD 124 billion per year, mostly from private capital (IEA, 2019). Electric vehicles are currently following a similar path from government-supported research and pilot projects to a self-sustaining industry. This experience provides today’s investors with increased confidence that governments could have the will and capacity to help develop hydrogen, a potentially clean energy technology that largely relies on government-funded projects today, in a similar way and on a similar scale.

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