A Pint of Science and a glass of Kool-Aid

The ‘Pint of Science’ Festival was hosted by Teesside University from 13 to 15 May 2024 at various venues around Middlesbrough. I decided to attend the 15 May event Net Zero to Hero at Off the Ground Coffee on Grange Road. Net Zero to Hero would be a discussion about the future role of hydrogen in the economy in Teesside. Something alarmed me about the speaker line-up for the event though. Three presentations, all putting the case for hydrogen, but nobody putting the case against.

Presentation 1 – Exploring Public Perception: Hydrogen and Teesside’s Economic Growth

Presentation 1 was by Dr Clair Cooper of the ‘Just Transition’ project at Teesside University. The theme, in more detail, was: “To help industry across the Tees Valley Region….which has been identified as a hub for hydrogen innovation, production, storage, use and transport. This talk will share insights….about how people feel about the Tees Valley….and future research in societal acceptance of hydrogen.”

This immediately begged a question. Who has identified the Tees Valley Region as a hub for hydrogen innovation? Ben Houchen? BP? Hydrogen boiler promoters such as Redcar MP Jacob Young, who didn’t declare that he had skin in the game when trying to foist hydrogen boilers on to his constituents? And how do people in the Tees Valley perceive hydrogen if their only source of information is a barrage of propaganda from fossil fuel lobbyists, with nothing to counter it? Shall we research societal acceptance of hydrogen? Or perhaps we could research societal acceptance of home insulation, heat pumps or onshore wind farms, as a counter to those who would put a massive effort into discrediting them?

World Beating

“Teesside to be leading the way in H2 production by 2035 as a “superplace.” Really? That sentence and the use of the pejorative made-up word “superplace” could easily have been written by Ben Houchen or his backers in the hydrocarbon industry, and might imply that you have already made your mind up about societal acceptance of hydrogen.

Presentation 2 – Hydrogen: A Clean and Flexible Energy Carrier

Presentation 2 was by Dr Mahdi Amanipour (Assistant Professor – Durham University). The theme, in more detail, was: “Hydrogen has the potential for use in transportation….and portable sectors….currently, most hydrogen is produced from fossil fuels. In the longer term, solar and wind energy can be used more directly to generate hydrogen as new technologies make alternative production methods cost competitive”

I’m not sure that hydrogen is clean. As Amanipour said, 99% of hydrogen is produced from fossil fuel sources. So now, let’s move on to the flexibility of hydrogen as an energy carrier. First, try storing your hydrogen as a gas, at a minimum of 350 bar. You’ll need very strong tanks and pipeline networks to do this. Alternatively, you can store your hydrogen as a liquid (LH2). But you’ll lose 45% of the energy content during the liquefaction process as you refrigerate it down to minus252.8°C, and any storage facilities will need to be well insulated. Why not convert your hydrogen to ammonia (NH3) instead? The temperature problem is solved, but NH3 is extremely toxic and corrosive. You’ll need to keep it away from water too. Leak-proof infrastructure is a must, and this is expensive. But hydrogen transportation and storage is safe, right? I’m not too sure about that.

Question and answer session

I had a question for the first two speakers. The elephant was in the room, and he hadn’t been mentioned. Lots of talk about how we can use hydrogen to move us away from the more polluting hydrocarbons such as oil and gas. Zero talk about the real problem. I asked the first two speakers about our need to drastically reduce our energy use now, to get CO2 levels on a sustainable downward trajectory. This means a re-ordering of how we live, travel and work. And if we don’t do it immediately we are in serious trouble. Tinkering with hydrogen isn’t going to solve the problem. The North Atlantic Ocean has already reached dangerously high record temperatures, and continues to smash records. Globally, April 2024 was the warmest on record, and the average temperature in the UK in May 2024 exceeded the previous record high by a wide margin.

Time for a coffee break?

Well, I thought so, but by an incredible coincidence, a couple of people who I’d never met before wanted to talk to me. I won’t name them, but one is a member of the engineering faculty at Teesside University and the other lectures in anthropology at Durham University. They both wanted to talk to me about curtailment. Curtailment is the waste of energy caused when sustainable energy sources such as wind farms are over-supplying the electricity grid at times of, for example, high wind speeds and low energy demand. Could hydrogen solve the problem of curtailment by allowing us to store it?

I’ve got a bad feeling about this

Say for example, underground storage? That could be a solution in maybe 20 years time, but it’s a bit of a long shot. It also sounds a bit like carbon capture, and we know that, despite 50 years of work from the hydrocarbon lobby, carbon capture will never work either. Perhaps we could go a long way to solve the problem of curtailment by upgrading our electricity grid, building more battery storage, using smart meters to coordinate the feed of domestically generated renewable energy back into the grid at energy peaks, or using ‘smart time of use’ tariffs to even out those energy peaks. But none of these involve hydrogen, so I guess not. Anyway, we talked so long that I didn’t get time for a coffee refill. Not good.

Presentation 3 – Connecting Offshore Wind Electricity with Hydrogen

Presentation 3 was by Dr Alessandro Giampieri (Postdoctoral Research Associate – Durham University). The theme, in more detail, was: The integration of offshore wind electricity with hydrogen production has the potential to help move towards a net zero society. This talk will explore ….the feasibility and profitability of producing, transporting and storing hydrogen or hydrogen carriers using offshore wind electricity.

Dr Giampieri focused on the possibility of using offshore wind farms to create green hydrogen from wind energy, then move it onshore via a pipeline. His presentation was based on a case study of the Hornsea Two Wind Farm provided by Dr Giampieri et al in a paper to the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy in January 2024. A very detailed paper, and worth a read if you want to get into the nitty gritty of hydrogen economics. But the eye-watering costs of storing and transporting hydrogen, which I’ve outlined above, won’t go away. And, of course, the Hornsea Two Wind Farm is only 89 km offshore. It gets a bit more expensive when your wind farms are a lot further out in the North Sea.

Cut the crap

Just like my two friends during the coffee break, Giampieri mentioned the problem of curtailment, caused by overproduction of wind energy. 2.3 terawatt hours of energy are wasted every year in the UK, and if we only made more green hydrogen on offshore rigs and piped it ashore, everything would be better. If only David Cameron hadn’t cut the green crap in 2015, and Rishi Sunak had doubled down on this nonsense in 2023, we could be producing a lot more of this energy onshore. We’d certainly save a lot of money on building lengthy pipelines from offshore wind farms 150km out in the North Sea, instead of onshore ones just up the road.

Final question and answer session

Having confirmed that it will take until 2050 for green hydrogen to become cheaper than blue/grey hydrogen or natural gas, I asked Dr Giampieri what we are supposed to do in the intervening 26 years. A whole generation in which the majority of hydrogen will be produced from fossil fuel sources and will exacerbate the damage of human-induced climate change instead of mitigating it. Back in the real world, a recent study has revealed that green hydrogen costs an eye-watering €13 per kg to produce. And yet we are supposed to believe that we’ll get the cost down to €1.50 per kg by 2050?