Jointly hosted by the Japan-based IERE (formerly the International Electric Research Exchange) and Australia’s Commonwealth Science and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), the Brisbane Hydrogen Workshop might be the covid-delayed event that has been most enhanced by the delay, such is the speed of development in the energy world at present. Taking place over two full days, plus a half day visit to the CSIRO’s Queensland Centre for Advanced Technologies and a pre-event welcome reception, the conference was packed with content. This ranged from hydrogen production, through shipping and storage and safety, to utilisation, and looking not only at technical but also at the techno-economic, social, and policy environments.

In this summary, I will touch on some of the content that I found particularly interesting as well as a selection of the views of participants on hydrogen that were expressed, and in doing so I hope to give a sense of the state of research on hydrogen in the Asia-Pacific.

One of the most arresting of the presentations was the plenary by Professor Ian Mackinnon of Queensland University of Technology, who laid out an innovative energy vision for Australia that would bring efficiency, industrial capability and flexibility to Australia’s systems while electrifying and decarbonising them. He highlighted the possibility of Australia becoming a hydrogen exporting ‘superpower’, massively expanding its installed power generation capacity, particularly in remote areas connected to coastal export centres by high power transmission infrastructure.

This would be accompanied by a shift to a direct current grid, bringing advantages such as easier grid management (not having the worries of balancing frequencies and phases, for example), being able to more efficiently add renewable power generation sources such as solar without the need for inverters, while also making fuel cells, supercapacitors and flywheels less costly to integrate, and allowing electric vehicles to more easily provide ‘virtual power plant’ services. Concurrently, superconducting infrastructure would be installed – if it proved economic – to greatly improve energy efficiencies, particularly around renewable energy generation zones.

Recent advances in hydride-based superconductor materials, raising the transition temperature (at which electrical resistance is zero and superconductivity is achieved) to temperatures in the region of 200-288 Kelvin are expected to continue. If the challenge of the extremely high pressures they require is addressed, superconductivity could indeed become economic, with superconducting cables already being installed in some cities around the world. An Australia thus transformed would be very much leading-edge.  

On shipping and storage, presentations from Masaya Hashimoto from Kawasaki Heavy Industries and Andrew Tan of Chiyoda offered two different approaches, each with their own merits. Kawasaki’s focuses on liquefied hydrogen, and includes solutions for liquefaction, land-based storage tanks, loading arms, the ships themselves and trucking of liquefied H2 (as well as fertiliser plants, hydrogen gas engines, turbines and boilers, electrolysis systems and fuel cell trains).

It was the carrier of the H2 generated by J-POWER’s successful brown coal gasification trial project in the Australian state of Victoria, taking the liquified product to Japan. Chiyoda, for its part, began hydrogen transportation in 2020 using a method in which hydrogen is reacted with toluene to create methylcyclohexane (MCH) as a liquid organic hydrogen carrier, enabling transport at ambient conditions. At the destination, the MCH is converted back to hydrogen and toluene (using Chiyoda’s patented technology, including a catalyst), with the toluene being reused, or the MCH itself can be stored long-term. Two of the major projects the company is involved in are the Singapore Hydrogen Project and a project involving the Port of Rotterdam. In general the company sees a global hydrogen supply chain being fully established by 2030, with pioneering projects before that.

Further advances in the process of development are to directly synthesise MCH in a process that combines toluene and water electrolysis (work being done in cooperation with Yokohama National University), and to dehydrogenate the MCH using microwave technology.  As a rough guide, Chiyoda estimates that prices for ‘landed’ hydrogen, will reach around US$5/kg by 2028, and with successful technological development will halve to US$2.5/kg by 2030. (Presumably, this would be grey or possibly blue H2). This would be an impressive achievement indeed, bringing costs into a range that, while still relatively high compared to ‘normal’ prices for natural gas, when taken as a stabilising component in an energy system that includes low-cost renewables can lead to competitive power prices at a system level.

As part of our memorandum of understanding, the IERE graciously invited a presentation from the IFRF, which I gave as part of the plenary sessions, a summary of Topic-Oriented Technical Meeting (TOTeM) 48 – Hydrogen for Decarbonisation held in Paris in October last year. Of particular interest to the audience was the ‘NNH-route’ for NOx formation when combusting hydrogen, and the presentation was also useful in discussing applications in industries such as glass and metals making, which were otherwise not covered in the conference.

Two presentations – from Dr Mina Nishi of the Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry (CRIEPI), and Professor Jiandong Kang from China Electric Power Research Institute (CEPRI) – looked at prices to produce green and other ‘colours’ of hydrogen. One interesting aspect of these calculations was that, for green hydrogen, a price for renewable electricity consistent with installing renewable power generation capacity was the standard assumption.

Depending on the rules applied to classifying hydrogen as ‘green’ (such as the ‘additionality’ issue), such a price may not always be the case, as touched on in Professor Kang’s presentation, and acknowledged as a possibility by Dr Nishi. In a future in which there is much renewable power generation capacity, and there are times of considerable excess electricity generation and prices drop towards zero or even go negative (as already happens in parts of the world), it may be that green hydrogen could be produced considerably more cheaply. (The capital costs of electrolysers, control systems, storage, and transportation will remain, of course.)

Professor Kang presented work from the International Hydrogen Council showing that the ‘minimum’ cost of green hydrogen would be around two-thirds that of the price including electricity by 2030, and about half the price of that including electricity by 2050. By 2030, the projection of the Council is that blue hydrogen will be ~25% higher than grey hydrogen, and green hydrogen more than twice the cost of grey, findings echoed by Dr Nishi. A carbon price is not included in these projections, however, which Dr Nishi demonstrated would be highly influential on H2 production costs. How exactly green hydrogen prices develop will presumably depend not only on the carbon price (and government incentives), but also on how regularly electricity excesses occur (which may only be a few hundred hours per year), as well as on how quickly electrolyser systems can start up and shut down.

This latter matter was a focus of the presentation of Professor Shigenori Mitsushima from Yokohama National University, with detailed investigations of electrolyser degradation depending on start-stop cycles, and current leakage.

The presentation that most intrigued me was by Dr Marina Pervukhina of CSIRO.

Her presentation, which dovetailed with the interesting investigative work on ‘natural’ deposits of H2 (known as ‘gold’ or ‘white’ hydrogen) by the geologist Dr Ema Frery, also of CSIRO, looked at the possibility of ‘geogenically’ manufacturing hydrogen. Marina presented recent research (particularly work done in France) that has shown that in an anoxic (water depleted of oxygen), alkaline environment in the presence of magnetite-containing rock, hydrogen gas is produced from the water. Laboratory experiments under a pressure of 100 bar and 80oC with crushed magnetite, over four months, produced about 38 mmol of H2 per kilogram of magnetite. 

The idea, encouraged by Dr Nikolai Kineav, Director of Hydrogen Energy Systems at CSIRO, is that carbon dioxide could be pumped into magnetite-containing geologic formations, reacting with MgO or CaO to help create an alkaline environment, which would then usher in the production of hydrogen (presuming the presence of oxygen-depleted groundwater) over some amount of time – several months, or perhaps years – and then the hydrogen harvested, almost as if it were a crop. It is an early-stage idea, but a fascinating one; to be economical it would need to be able to be done at scale (which appears to be available), be operationally rather simple, produce considerable amounts of hydrogen, be energy positive as a process, and probably also be done near transport infrastructure.

In its favour is that it would be as carbon-free as green hydrogen, not require electrolyser equipment, and that it has the potential, at least, to be very low cost. Being an iron ore mining giant, Australia has both the expertise and the geology for it to succeed.

CSIRO is also putting considerable effort into developing tubular solid oxide electrolysers made from low-cost ceramic materials that work by having steam passed through them along with an electrical current. In contrast to proton exchange membrane electrolysis and alkaline water electrolysis, which typically use more than 55 kWh of electricity to produce a kilogram of H2, CSIRO’s SOE technology currently uses 41 kWh, a considerable energy advantage, and the research team aims to get this below 40 kWh.

Their small, modular nature means they can be stacked to produce a desired production rate, taking a relatively small footprint. It is envisaged that these would be used close to the site of H2 use to avoid the need for transport of H2 itself. CSIRO is aiming to reduce the current cost of green hydrogen in Australia from an estimated AUD$5.62 (in 2020 Australian dollars) to $2.05 by 2030, partly through the use of its SOE technology.

There is work underway, too, on hydrogen/ammonia tubular separation membranes, with CSIRO’s technology now being licenced to Fortescue Metal Group’s operations in the UK for the purification of hydrogen for the use in transport. CSIRO’s membranes produce 100% pure hydrogen, which is highly important for fuel cell applications (though perhaps uneconomic for others). CSIRO has also done considerable work into producing hydrogen from biomass gasification, work that grew out of earlier research into coal gasification.

Power generators in Japan, Malaysia and Indonesia had all successfully experimented with co-firing hydrogen with natural gas in existing gas turbines, albeit at volumetric percentages considerably lower than new turbines can fire. (GE, Siemens and MHI turbines already offer turbines that can fire 10-50% H2 in DLE mode). The highest percentage at the workshop was by Chubu Electric Power of Japan, with Naoya Kumazawa and Dr Norio Oiwa presenting work in which a volumetric percentage of 9.3% was co-fired with methane, at a hydrogen flowrate of 5.5 tonnes/hour.

As would be expected, somewhat less CO2 (-2.6% on a weight basis) was produced compared to firing natural gas alone. NOx production was considerably higher (10% ppm), while the total power output was marginally higher (+0.1%) and the power efficiency was marginally lower (-0.1%). The higher NOx rate is probably because of the NNH route that European work (presented at TOTeM 48) has identified as the dominant route in hydrogen combustion.

The two Chubu representatives presented interesting, detailed work on the process changes introduced in order to co-fire H2. The Malaysian and Indonesian work both used lower percentages of hydrogen, and did so successfully.

The workshop’s panel session addressed the question of how “relevant” research and development should be defined and encouraged, and in some ways this could be tied to a poll conducted by the IERE team on attendee’s opinions on the prospects for the hydrogen economy and what research should focus on. Generally, attendees were cautiously optimistic, and felt that rather than a focus on domestic or local production and consumption of H2, production, trade and consumption should instead have a global focus. This is a more ambitious view, but one that is supported by the different competitive advantages of different regions. Some regions of the world have huge capacity for hydrogen generation, while others are more specialised in manufacturing, and the trade of energy has for more than a century been global.

But there were notes of caution expressed, too. Barry Maccoll of the Electric Power Research Institute (International) expressed his view that if the ultimate aim of using hydrogen is decarbonisation, then there are numerous means of decarbonisation, and technology developers will find the most efficient means, which quite often may not involve hydrogen. This is an important point, and one that the IFRF presentation touched upon – that electrification and carbon capture and storage will sometimes be rivals to H2, though at other times they will support each other.

Certainly, the efficacy and economic viability of carbon capture and storage will be one important factor in shaping the extent of the adoption of hydrogen. Nevertheless, as many energy sector analysts have concluded, because of its scale, all technologies will be needed in the energy transition, and I am sure this will be the overarching force.

Much of this work would not have been available to present if the workshop had gone ahead in 2020, as originally planned, and the absence of the driving policies of the REPowerEU and the USA’s Inflation Reduction Act, as well as other initiatives such as the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (excellently covered by Manabu Hirano of the Japan Electric Power Information Centre), would not have given quite the same sense of impetus.

For these reasons I believe it really was a more captivating workshop because of the long covid delay. To add to this, IERE’s decision to wait until an in-person meeting was possible, rather than to convene a virtual conference, was a fine choice. The chance to meet people in the flesh and let ad-hoc conversations find serendipities is irreplaceable, and the IERE team should be commended on making it happen.

On my side, one of those serendipities was meeting Dr David Harris (who along with Dr Nikolai Kinaev did a wonderful job of co-marshalling the event on the CSIRO side) – I was previously unaware that David had been an investigator at the IFRF Research Station in IJmuiden, Netherlands, back in the 1990s, and such a connection was a pleasure to discover, as was hearing the names of those involved in the IFRF in those times, such as Peter Roberts, John Smart, Nico Thijssen, Klaus Hein, Willem Van De Kamp, and Roman Weber. I am sure IERE and CSIRO will both host many more fine workshops and conferences in the future.