Hydrogen is extremely cost effective but we will need widespread adoption of the right technology, said this week’s Net Hero Podcast guest.
Ali Al-Sikab, Scientist at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) told Sumit Bose: ‘People often misunderstand the role that hydrogen will play in the future.
‘Almost 90 per cent of the time, people will say that you can burn hydrogen and use it as a combustion fuel like you would petrol and diesel. And while that is correct, they don’t associate it with generating electricity.
‘And that’s the main part of science communication that we need to address. The UK is expecting hydrogen to account for, between 20 per cent to 35 per cent of all electricity used by 2050. That is a huge amount.
‘To put it into context, that is the equivalent of using hydrogen for all electricity production today.
‘And I think people should know that we have hydrogen available to us – the air we breathe, the water we drink and the clothes we wear. And it is going to play a big role in net zero.’
Ali said that transitioning from grey to green hydrogen is necessary for a clean energy future.
‘We already use hydrogen a lot in industrial and chemical processes. Decarbonising those fields and taking them away from grey, dirty hydrogen to electrolysed green hydrogen is going to be essential.
‘Hydrogen also has a place in decarbonising heavy-duty transport – planes, busses, trains, trucks and marine. You really can’t rely on batteries alone for that industry. The weight of the batteries, how long they take to refuel and how quickly the batteries degrade; it’s just not viable.
‘But at the moment, 96 per cent of all hydrogen is made from carbon-emitting thermal processes. So we burn things that have hydrogen in them, we capture the hydrogen and it emits carbon dioxide (CO2) as well. This is called grey hydrogen as this is what we want to transition away from.
‘The other 4 per cent is made from electrolysis, which is simply the conversion of water to hydrogen using electricity.
‘At the moment, the production of electrolysed green hydrogen is far too expensive and the goal is to lower these costs so it is cost competitive with grey hydrogen.’
NPL’s report looks into standardising electrolyser technology to encourage widespread adoption.
‘So we have an electrolyser which uses electrochemistry and it has a lot of metals in it which can be quite expensive. And we have looked into improving its durability and efficiency. What we want to do is standardise the measurement process to improve the intercomparison between different materials used in electrolyser technologies.
‘And when you standardise and then improve the intercomparison, you have a better understanding of what’s working and what isn’t. You can, therefore, de-risk investment and once you’ve done that, you can accelerate your transition to net zero.
‘We’ve also looked into the technology itself, so while it is running, we’ve looked into how different components are performing and how we can reduce the amount of precious metals used.
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