"Renewable energy", perfectly illustrated

Proof of concept

Australia launches liquid hydrogen exports and Houston, we have a problem

The fuel of the Green’s future: It takes more energy to produce hydrogen than it yields, and the electricity to make it comes, in Austraila’s case, from dirty brown coal. Oh! It also blows up.

When the 380-foot-long Suiso Frontier set sail from Australia on Friday, bound for Japan with liquid hydrogen in its insulated hold, it marked the first time that liquified hydrogen has been transported by sea to an international market, according to project participants.

Experts say that it’s an important milestone for hydrogen—a fuel that several major economies have pinned their hopes on to help them decarbonize. It proves that the supply chain works, they argue, and will kick off international trade in the commodity.

“Australia’s first hydrogen liquefaction facility and ship loading terminal, the world’s first liquid hydrogen carrier ship, and a hydrogen unloading and storage facility in Kobe, Japan,” have been developed so far, says Jeremy Stone, a non-executive director of J-Power.

Jazz Shaw, Hot Air: As I’ve discussed here previously, I have no problem with investing in hydrogen as a viable alternative energy source. I’m an “all of the above” sort of person when it comes to producing the energy our civilization needs to stay afloat, and hydrogen holds a lot of promise and delivers multiple benefits. First of all, it’s a very “clean” energy, both in terms of burning it and (with some exceptions) producing it for use. It delivers a lot of power when it’s burned and is commonly used in rocket launches. Also, it’s remarkably abundant here on earth.

With all of that said, there are still some significant challenges facing us in terms of moving to the widespread use of hydrogen as fuel and the Australians have not addressed all of them. First of all, almost all of the hydrogen available on the planet is trapped in water molecules. You can separate the hydrogen from the oxygen in water easily enough by running an electric current through it, but you first have to generate that electricity somehow. The Australians are doing it by burning lignite (brown coal) which is obviously a high-carbon emission fuel. Further, it takes more energy to split the hydrogen out of the water than is produced by the hydrogen when it’s used as fuel.

If you use more fossil fuel energy to produce the hydrogen than the energy you wind up getting out of the finished fuel, that’s a net loss in terms of “saving the planet” and regulating carbon emissions. It’s just virtue signaling to your primary audience while producing no net positive effect and arguably making things worse. The Japanese would have wound up with more net energy if the Australians had just shipped them the coal to burn.

Also, the storage and transfer of hydrogen are tricky. The Australian ship looks impressive, but you need to cool and compress the gas to a tremendous degree to transport it in a liquid form. (Similar challenges had to be overcome in the effort to export liquid natural gas.) If your container ship experiences a significant containment failure, you’re going to have an earth-shattering “boom” on your hands that will make the average oil spill look like child’s play. And we still need to invest in a massive number of storage and distribution portals for hydrogen before it can be widely deployed.

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