Annual Lecture 2024 - Michael Liebreich. Global Energy Transition Trends and Hydrogen
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- čas přidán 12. 06. 2024
- Energy Futures Lab 2024 Annual Lecture. Our keynote speaker, Michael Liebreich, delivered an enlightening talk on the latest global energy transition trends and the future of hydrogen. His wealth of experience and insights captivated our audience.
Michael is a prominent figure in the energy sector, serves as co-managing partner of EcoPragma Capital LLP and CEO of Liebreich Associates. His impressive resume includes:
- Honorary Fellow of the Energy Institute
- Visiting Professor at Imperial College London
- Founder of BloombergNEF
- Advisor to the United Nations on hashtag#Sustainable Energy for All
- Host of the Cleaning Up Podcast and CZcams channel
Following the lecture, hosted by Professor Nigel Brandon was an insightful panel discussion featuring:
Kate Grannell, RISK Records Project Lead , Professor Tim Green, Professor of Electrical Power Engineering at Imperial College, Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, expert in future energy systems and renewable energy integration, Greg Jackson, Founder and Chief Executive of Octopus Energy, leading innovator in green energy technology, serial tech entrepreneur, and angel investor
The event was a resounding success, and we are grateful to everyone who attended. Here are some highlights from the evening 📸:
Through our hosted lectures and events, Energy Futures Lab at Imperial College London offers a platform for open debate on diverse perspectives related to energy topics. Our goal is to encourage critical thinking and debate. While we aim to invite widely recognised and knowledgeable speakers, their opinions are their own and should not be construed as an endorsement by our institute or the university.
Energy Futures Lab remains committed to providing a respectful and inclusive forum for all viewpoints in the pursuit of advancing energy research and innovation.
#EnergyTransition #NetZero #SustainableEnergy #Hydrogen #EnergyFuturesLab #AnnualLecture - Věda a technologie
Excellent talk. Michael and Paul Martin do such a great job of laying this out for us non-technical people.
An excellent presentation and discussion. Very knowledgeable and informative.
Think i need to link to this video every time someone starts talking about hydrogen cars on every EV review video I've ever watched.
Would pay to hear Greg and Michael talk. Excellent stuff.
To add to their points on buses, Shenzhen cracked on and built 16,000 buses in two years Inc all the infrastructure necessary. 1 million miles a day are covered by them.
London has taken a decade to get to 1000 . Bravo 👏.
Isn't it amazing! Meanwhile, I have clients here in the UK that are being offered grid connection dates in the 2030's🙄
Pelican/Yutong partnership is selling EV buses all across UK with great uptake.
They have already discussed together during one of Michael’s podcast episodes.
speaking of 'bravo', the private equity vulture that temporarily owns one of the two major bus companies here in Hong Kong, excellent public transport capital of the world, is Templewater Bravo. Hence Bravo Bus. Nearby Shenzen, 16,000 electric buses. Hong Kong: 3 electric buses and 1 hydrogen bus. British snail pace travels far.
This is a "must watch" video for everybody involved in cleantech and the energy transition. Michael, thanks for again explaining things in such clear and no BS way!
Totally agree, superb listening.
Excellent great to see the reality matched against the Hydrogen narrative
Brilliant, thankyou
This is plain physics and common sense, what can people argue except protecting their investments/intesrests.
Thank you very much for sharing.
Very interesting, well sum up.
If you'd like to hear more from Michael Liebreich, his thoughts on hydrogen and other aspects of the clean energy transition, as well as from leaders across the climate space, please follow Cleaning Up, a podcast hosted by Michael and Baroness Bryony Worthington.
Thank you for sharing!
Excellent lecture - a must watch!
An excellent presentation, although most of the basics heard elsewhere previously..
What appalls most over energy transition is the willingness of politicians to fund the absurd rather than the obvious, influenced by those who have a financial interest in maintaining the status quo, hydrogen and micro-nuclear being two glaring examples.
The elephants in the room are conservation and interconnects,.
I'd doubtless be vilified for still using gas in my 10 year old house, the fact that I'd reduced consumption by 80% through insulation would be ignored as progress because I'm still 'burning' stuff - Viz 20% is not good enough, it must be Zero, we really need an adult conversation.
Distributed storage is the next big leap in thinking - Greg already highlighted vehicle to grid, add inter-connects to Europe and the potential is enormous....
It does need to be zero (or very close) eventually, so yes 80% reductions do not actually solve the emissions problem, but they do help enormously in giving us more time. So so long as you stick a heat pump (or even a direct electric boiler) in when your current boiler dies in another 5 years that'll be fine. Every _new_ gas boiler install (and every new non-passivehous) is a problem at this point.
@@xxwookey Your post perfectly examples the problem, global warming 'religious fundamentalism'. My comparative sub 1% contribution to MY global warming impact passes in your one ear and straight out the other unobstructed. I'm an Engineer not an idiot, as your "(or even a direct electric boiler)" perfectly demonstrates you provably are.
@@robertlamont9455 I'm an engineer too. Are you asserting that a direct electric boiler has higher emissions than a gas boiler? It can do, if the grid intensity is high enough (somewhere in the 180-300gCO2/kWh range depending on leakage rates), and I don't know where you are. If it still will do where you are in 5 years time then we agree that that won't help.
And are you saying that your gas boiler emissions are only 1% of you total personal emissions? That would certainly be a good reason for concentrating on other things first. Again I have no idea where you live or how big your house is, but for UK numbers 80% below average emissions for a gas boiler in in average house is 400Kg. So maybe 150Kg/person, giving a 15 tonne/yr total footprint if it's 1%. Seems plausible. That would be 3 times more than average but not unusual. So was your point that cutting down on whatever it is that is generating the rest of the 15 tonnes would be more effective? Then we agree there too.
But it's not fundamentalism to understand that ultimately all emissions have to be tackled to stop making the climate problem worse and most of them come from 'burning stuff'. Total emissions need to be lower than natural process absorption levels for the total forcing to level out.
Gas boilers->heat pumps, combined with grid decarbonisation, is one of the easiest parts of this process, but there are plenty of others.
@@xxwookey Sorry but you're a troll not an Engineer, nobody so demonstrably thick would qualify.... Going for a few beers in the V8, petrol by the way...Have fun troll..
Great Talk and discussion. Can't keep Michael down on H2!
Fantastic Lecture, thank you.
Brilliant lecture and panel discussion! Michael is a legend.
Thanks. Please tell my kids!
Liebreich should go on Robert Bryce's Power Hungry podcast.
Great stuff!
My question is why not a single one of the PANNEL DISCUSSION members asked why PREVENTION OF WASTING OF ENERGY is not targeted first?
I think it's because we live this stuff and we take it as read. Although, frankly, given the choice between a heat pump installation with a COP of 3.5 and a huge investment in building fabric followed if you still have the money by a heat pump installation with a COP of 4, you're better off doing the heat pump and forgetting the fabric investment.
@@MLiebreich Thank you for your reply Michael. What you described is wasting of money and time, but the energy gets wasted the same way as before or even more. In your speech, you described well the incentives cascades, which is one of the reasons why we introduced last year e new meaning of the famous Alber Einstein formula E=mc2 taking it from the world of Physics to the world of economics
ECONOMY = money x corruption squared
Insulation doesn't give you hot showers.
I'm an absolute fanboy of Michael since following his podcast. His ability to draw threads together means he has a future in fabrics, should the energy thing not work out! A great choice of panellists, especially Kate's 'vox pop' insights - and that is not meant in any deprecatory way. I absolutely believe that we need to take on the vested interests not just with data, but with stories and narratives, because there is a reason 'social proof' is not far behind the hero section of every website. So many talking points, and my only regret is that YT transcripts are not user-friendly, because I want to pick this session apart!
Good to see fantastic lecture. Can i have presentation/slide available ? please share.
The power of the gas lobby is enormous. They can pay to repeat the wrong message until all politicians' heads are turned, to subsidise the wrong stuff.
Politicians must get better informed, and more politicians should be more than just masters of rhetoric. Journalism is also to be blamed.
Forever minerals 🙌🏻
My own calculations for energy density of oil tanker vs tube trailer came up with 7x requirement, not 15x. Where did i go wrong?
Diesel is about 36 MJ/L, 5000 psi hydrogen is ~1.8 MJ/L, which is 20x. Gasoline is 32 MJ/L, 18x.
BUT then you need to consider those 5000 psi tubes are super heavy so for the truck to move the same weight there would be a lower volume of hydrogen.
I see why. I used 700bar (10000psi).
(Both accounts are me!)
@@GreenEnergyGuyd Maybe 10,000 psi is the right number to use! I'm not sure. I believe hydrogen buses run at 5,000 and the Toyotas run at 10,000.
(And the Titan sub that crushed the rich guys was at 5,800 psi so maybe any way you cut it trucking hydrogen around is not a great plan.)
@Greenammonianews i think the cheaper option is 5000psi, but I was using a study that quoted 10000psi as a benchmark. As Micheal pointed out though, where do you draw the line at cost vs pressure for the sake of energy density still being poor.
Even at 7x, I figured it was awful.
So 15x just puts the nail in the coffin of road transportation of h2.
Thanks! Based on this valuable information I could make an informed decision and invest my money in Tesla (instead of my state subsidized program before) and therefore help directly creating the cleaner and more efficient future we all want.
Hope the FUDsters don‘t come for you.
Tesla laid out this plan in its master plan 3 march 2023. They even mentioned the circular economy nature of materials extraction and recycling allowing for a potential future where don't need to extract more battery minerals as there will be enough in circulation to meet demand....a distant dream perhaps....but the vision is already there.
How would your utility bill (hydrogen vs gas) only double, when there is soooo much efficiency loss?
The gas industry calculation in the 2018 report was based on blue hydrogen via SMR, with only 80% carbon capture.
If you did the calculation with blue hydrogen based on ATR with 99% capture - as would be required to be compatible with net zero - or based on green hydrogen, the first would be much higher, as you suspected.
Hydrogen to manufacture ammonia for fertilizer. Eventually in time the main source for agriculture.
Great talk and panel discussion, which I largely agree with. There is one major exception.
The heat pump story told here should be expanded a bit. The required capacity in kW for the heat pump itself, the grid and the backup power plant is dominated by a few very cold days. 1% of the days are responsible for over half the capacity investment. In other words, 99% of the time that part of the investment is laying idle doing nothing useful.
With large hydrogen storage and large efficient power plant, the main cost is actually grid buildout with that 1% utilisation.
Peak gas demand for heating in Germany is about 300 GW. Heat pumps are more efficient, but for grid and backup power plant, the critical days are very cold and without deep renovation the coefficient of performance drops off quite a bit..
The 300 GW of gas heat will still be 150 GW of additional electricity demand, twice current total demand. For these cold days the grid would have to be tripled in capacity.
The grid investment could be reduced with very local power generation, but that is hard to do with hydrogen.
If we use natural gas or propane / DME in local engines and heat pumps at COP 2, we will not save on fuel compared to simply keeping the existing gas boiler for backup on cold days.
Adding a small heat pump to the existing boiler can easily cover 90% of the heat demand and do so without any need for grid upgrades.
Simply replacing gas heating with heat pumps would be hugely expensive and unworkable. 150 GW of additional peak demand in Germany as an example could be avoided by deep renovation, but there we are looking at 50000 to 100000 Euro per home.
By far the easiest and quickest way is to go hybrid for heating.
Thermal storage is an additional option to avoid having to ridiculously oversize the grid at huge expense.
Simply putting a high temperature heat pump, which of course all else equal will have a much lowe COP when supplying water to the heating system at 60 Celsius instead of 30, is a recipe for disaster as a national strategy.
People sometimes mention Norway as kind of a counter example. And it is true that Norway's grid is capable of supplying more electricity per capita than say England's. However, the grid is amortised over a lot of kWh. The average home uses massively more electricity, the utilisation of the Norwegian grid is not all that bad. Partially that is because it is effectively using hybrid heat pumps. The building code requires this as an option for most buildings and wood based heating is widely used on very cold days. There are also some design choices for the grid infrastructure that are based on the need for a lot of capacity, one example being fewer buried power lines, which results in greater vulnerability to storm damage. Norway has significantly more outages than most other Western European countries. Retrofitting the existing grid is a very different task, especially if this buildout is just for the 1% coldest days with that expensive additional infrastructure not being used the rest of the time.
Don't modest home batteries with weather aware charging solve all this in one increasingly cheap go? Solar + Battery + Heatpump + V2G EV and you can probably go off grid even in the depths of winter? I just removed gas, because my forced air furnace finally broke beyond repair, and a new condensing furnace was a decent chunk of the cost of an Air to Air heatpump (and I get AC with that) - I;m in a temperate part of Canada (Vancouver) - I'll see how this summer and winter go.
@@brushlessmotoring Modest home batteries are useful for dealing with the early evening peak. Very cold days and electric heating are a particularly difficult nut to crack, especially so when water filled radiators are the system of choice.
These are common in the United Kingdom and Germany. High temperature heat pumps were mentioned in the panel discussion as a convenient solution. What did not get mentioned in sufficient depth is how this affects efficiency. I will take a particularly efficient air to water heat pump to illustrate this, the Ovum AC312. With an air temperature of 2 degrees Celsius and a water temperature of 35 degrees Celsius the COP is a very respectable 4.54. With an air temperature of -10C and a water temperature of 70C this drops off to 1.74. These water filled radiators are often designed to cover peak heat loads with pretty high water temperature. The basic trade-off there is capital cost of the radiators vs efficiency and with gas efficiency isn't impacted nearly as badly by choosing a small heat transfer area. The heat transferred is basically proportional to the area and the temperature difference. So, with 20C room temperature you need to triple the radiator surface area to make do with 35C water when it is designed for 65C at peak heat load (35-20=15, 65-20=45). At minus 10C and 35C water temperature the Ovum's COP still drops, but not nearly as severely. It still achieves a COP of 3.25. With air to air systems this is not nearly as bad, but as said these are extremely rare in the United Kingdom and Germany and it is no coincidence that these markets are hard to crack. Central air to air as a retrofit means throwing out the existing radiators and piping and putting in air vents instead.
There's another alternative to tripling radiator area, cut the heat load by two thirds through insulation. Let's assume a peak design heat load of 18 kWth (th thermal). If the easy route is chosen (the high temperature heat pump), you need 18 divided by 1.74 = a little over 10 kWel of capacity. The Ovum is pretty expensive in Germany, you readily see quotes of 30000 Euro for 3.5 kWel of capacity. Assume for the moment there is some froth in that and that the cost can be reduced to 10000 Euros with a bit of learning curve magic (a reasonable assumption). Still, we'd spend 30000 Euro on 10 kWel, as essentially we'd need three of these. The grid cost for these 10 kWel are much higher than for 10 kWel of electric car charging. With those a hundred homes can intelligently stagger charging times and achieve only 300 Watt of grid requirements. This is so because they do not need to simultaneously all charge at the same time, which is very different for heat pumps. Grid cost there comes to something like 3000 Euros per kWel. In other words, in this example another 30000 Euros have to be added for grid upgrades. Backup power plants are cheap by comparison, if we assume peakers at 1000 Euros per kWel, that would be another 10000 Euros. These are huge costs, when this dropin solution high temperature heat pump is used to avoid having to touch the existing water filled radiators. 70000 Euros in total, where of the order of 5000 or so would easily do when the existing gas furnace can stay and handle the coldest days.
Another option is heavy insulation to cut the heat load by two thirds. Now 35 C radiator temperature will do, which gives a COP of 3.25. With heat load reduced to 6 kWth, a heat pump of a little under 2 kWel will do. Here capacity related costs (heat pump itself, grid, backup power plants) drop by over 80%, because in addition to the cut by two thirds in the required heat load through insulation, the design COP nearly doubles giving nearly a reduction of a factor six overall.
The issue with this: cutting heat load that heavily through deep renovation / massive insulation is very expensive as retrofit in existing homes. This can easily exceed 100000 Euros.
These issues of particular relevance to the German and UK markets are being glossed over a bit unfortunately in the talk.
In Germany they have led to a huge revolt against the Green party. They tried making pure heat pumps mandatory and here people know how expensive this is. All they need for that is getting a quote themselves, or talking to someone who has. Being forced to spend 100000 Euros you don't have generates enormous fear.
The whole thing has been an unmitigated disaster and been a if not the most important factor in killing the green left vote in Germany.
And there are lessons to be drawn here for the United Kingdom in particular.
In North America I would say that this is not nearly as critical, as radiator based systems are quite rare there. Not to say that heat pump induced peak demand isn't an issue at all there, it definitely is, but the UK and Germany are much harder nuts to crack. I personally do not see a fast transition in the heat market here without hybrid heat pumps.
You say Germany needs 300GW of heating on its coldest day. So if we are optimistic and say average boiler efficiency is 90% that means actual heat delivered so actual heat requirement is 270GW. If on the cold days average HP COP is 3 then electrical demand is 90GW. Still a very significant demand but a lot less than 150GW. And using batteries and demand response to smooth out the peaks we should be able to reduce this further. It is as you say a nut we need to crack but it does not seem insurmountable. And we are talking about maybe 15 days a year, would not having some Gas power stations on standby for these few days be a better/cheaper solution than every home having a complicated hybrid HP?
@@adamcole4808 The source of the number is the study Spitzenlasten im Wärmesektor (Peak loads in the space heating sector), which gives 272 GW for natural gas heated buildings in Germany. Natural gas is currently used to heat about half the building stock.
The applicable COP depends on a number of things, but essentially the more is invested (in the pump itself, radiators and insulation) the better it gets. If nothing is done to the building and a high temperature heat pump is used as a drop in replacement and this pump is also under sized and complemented by direct electric heaters for peak loads, COP can easily drop to something like 1.5, when it is very cold, not least as direct electric heaters only have a COP of 1.
A small heat pump can fairly easily and cheaply be added to the existing gas boiler based system and handle 90% of the heat demand in kWh of gas saved per year.
Where power plants and the grid are concerned, there are also trade-offs. When the peak demand is addressed with large power plants, the main advantages are conversion efficiency and the ease of accessing hydrogen underground storage. The main disadvantage is that a lot of grid infrastructure would need to be built with 1% utilisation, that is extremely expensive grid upgrades would be built and lie idle doing nothing nearly all the time.
The other extreme would be a backup engine in your own home. This is noisy, inefficient and dirty, but would not require grid upgrades.
I personally think that something in between is most suitable, that is engines of 50 kW to 5 MW to deal with rare peak loads.
An optimal mix of heating technologies for net zero in the space heating sector in both Germany and the UK by 2040 I think would be something like 15% district heat, 15% pure heat pumps in very well insulated buildings and small heat pumps in addition to the existing heating system for the rest of the building stock.
This is doable while keeping investments in heat pumps, the grid, insulation and back up power to quite low levels. The remaining fuel requirements would be down to levels that can easily produced without net greenhouse gas emissions or exorbitant costs.
Excellent point on DME and thermal battery hybrid system as viable system setup.
For the coldest days of winter, is it too much to ask if some 'evil hydrocarbon' is burned ?
Fuel is storage. Coal, gas and oil are great storage. Uranium is also great storage and is probably the only form of multi decadal storage.
True. But burning it is burning it. There's no escaping the consequences of that. If there's an alternative, like using renewables to create and store a green fuel with far less carbon impact, then this is the better path.
"Fossil" Combustion fuels will still be the ultimate backup. But with the aim to never use them if possible.
Substitute coal with biomass and oil with bio-diesel/DEE. Radioisotopes for RHU is hard to come by, though great alternative, doesn't look practical for now.
But doing everything with batteries wont work either right? Simon Michaux's report and the recent work by Ed Conway for example show we have orders of magnitude to few resources like copper to completely replace our existing system. We have no choice but to degrow.
No one except Michaux is suggesting doing everything with batteries. In my lecture I talk about doing long-duration storage with hydrogen or a derivative, which is one of the use cases high up on the ##HydrogenLadder.
Michaux assumes every wind and solar plant has to be paired with four weeks of battery storage and ends up with a grid-connected storage figure between 90 and 450 times higher than any serious energy modeler, and then assumes it all has to be me by batteries of 2022 design. It's silly stuff, frankly.
There are many ways of dealing with variability of supply and demand, of which batteries are only one.
See Superhero 2, system solutions.
czcams.com/video/ZkwN-hLV42I/video.htmlsi=Yiw0nA4thNCDfdYV
Conway points out the scale of materials we use but does not say challenges can't be met. Here's my conversation with him:
www.cleaningup.live/material-world-ep149-ed-conway/
Green fuel is another choice. Green ammonia is price-competitive on an energy-unit level with diesel. Trucks, ships, mining, etc. can move to green ammonia as fuel.
Green ammonia is not competitive with diesel, dream on. It's also toxic and dangerous. Might it find a role as a fuel? Perhaps. Does it help for promoters to pretend it's competitive today? No.
@@Greenammonianews
DME or DEE would be a better alternative to NH3, as there's plenty of bio-input scope in these.
@@aryaman05 possibly... there is bio-input. I will look into it and edit this if I learn anything more.
I expect DME or DEE will cost more at the end of the day. I don't know what's the cheapest bio-mass so I am just grabbing a figure on softwood pulp - that will cost ~500/t. The cost of nitrogen is maybe ~10/t.
Also, site selection becomes a challenge. The outback of Australia has cheap land and great solar but it is a long way from bio-mass.
In the economics of pulp and paper, they balance out the cost of inputs, cost of transporting inputs, cost of power, cost of shipping finished goods, etc. Cost to transport bio-mass is a huge driver. With ammonia you just grab nitrogen out of the air.
"Resistance is futile" 😂
38:36 One 30t tube trailer carries 300 kg of Nitrogen.
Nitrogen?
@@ChrisBaileyMusic
Of course H2. The density of 600 bar H2 is about 0,046 kg per liter.
Even the density of liquid H2 is 0.072.
You need 22 kg of steel to lock in 1 kg H2
@@wilfriedschuler3796 you say of course...but he clearly wrote nitrogen. I'm just checking.
@@GreenEnergyGuyd
of course he said nitrogen. Ask him it is a mistake. It does not make sense
to carry compressed nitrogen around.It is easy to liquify.
If you use just hydrogen for plastics, you get water. 😂
There is some sucking and blowing in this presentation. Paraphrasing here but "the problem with using green hydrogen is it requires a build-out of green power generation". That is the opportunity. We can build green power generation in places with great green economics without worrying about grid demand (e.g. Newfoundland Canada). This significantly improves the ROI on that green power, better utilization, cheaper land, etc. You cannot export grid power from Australia to Japan but you can export green fuel.
I agree, hydrogen is ridiculous but that is a straw man argument. No serious person with any actual experience with ammonia and hydrogen would ever suggest using hydrogen. Hydrogen requires ridiculous pressure or ridiculous temperatures. Ammonia is a different story. Ammonia is an energy-dense liquid. This means it is cheap to ship a lot of energy. (Notice he showed an 'efficiency' breakdown not a cost breakdown of shipping ammonia. The input is 100%-green free-wind, the costs matter, not the power loss.)
We can build and build and build green energy production, that is not the bottleneck. We can build turbines, a port, hydrogen, and an ammonia plant in 5 years. Expanding an electric grid in a tiny fraction will take 10 years. Building green ammonia is the FASTEST route to reducing GHG.
I have asked 5 different green ammonia developers "If I gave you a contract for green ammonia could you build me supply?" Every single one said - "Absolutely, with a contract, there are zero barriers, how much do you want?"
His conclusion - use heat pumps, and EVs, lacks any math. What is the GHG impact of this? We use 100m barrels of oil daily, and roughly 20m barrels of that oil is consumed as diesel. WE NEED FUEL. Shipping, trucking, trains, mining equipment. Home heating is worth doing but it will not avert climate change.
Natural gas is largely a byproduct of oil production. It is fantastically cheap. Using this as your point of comparison is a great way to make your argument sound solid. If you compare the price per unit of energy of green ammonia to the price of diesel you get an entirely different picture, they are within spitting distance of each other.
Remember, the oil industry is constantly re-investing. Exploring, fracking, drilling, etc. The question is - what is the energy produced per unit of investment? The match on green ammonia looks good.
I think you have missed the point.
When you use something with 20% end-to-end efficiency as an energy transport medium, you are going to have a resulting power price 5x higher than at the source. And that's excluding capital cost and maintenance; add those in and you're talking 7-10x.
Now Haber Bosch plants need to operate 24/7 because they are high-pressure, high-temperature affairs. So you can't run them on solar power alone, you need to hybridize supply, add batteries, etc. So you are talking about all-in power cost of *at least* $30, probably $40/MWh, even if you have great wind and solar.
So your ammonia-fired power at the destination is $210-$400/MWh. Try getting a PPA at that price, let alone running an economy. Which is exactly why these projects are not getting done.
Summary: that sound may be the sound of sucking and blowing, but it's not coming from me!
@@MLiebreich on a levelized cost basis green power is cheap. I would start with the premise that we should exploit any opportunity to use green power to do anything we can as long as the final consumer cost makes sense. Invest all we can as fast as we can, build build build. The numbers I am seeing make sense for ammonia when compared to diesel.
Using the Energy Power Research Institute numbers, they say green ammonia can be produced at around $750/tonne today. If you look at the cost for the equivalent of ammonia to a liter of diesel that is $1.41 or a gallon at $5.53. This research appears to assume grid-connected green sources, my understanding is green power is a fair bit cheaper if it is not connected to the grid. I have seen figures around $500 from Bloomberg NEF (isn't that your outfit?) Regardless, 100% green fuel for the price per unit of energy of diesel is a winning proposition.
www.epri.com/research/products/000000003002028977
Don't believe the numbers from EPRI? How about S&P Platts? They say contracts in the market right now range from $600-$800 /tonne
I hear your point about carrot farming. With the new US IRA tax credits the ERPI estimates green ammonia will drop down to ~$250 - that is potentially trillions in giveaways! If I had a fleet and could source green fuel for less than half the diesel price, I would buy all I could. I'm a little surprised we haven't seen an announcement from Amazon yet about turning their trucking fleet green.
The great thing about green ammonia is it can be made in places with cheap land and excellent wind or solar. This project will be 4GW! The land is cheap and the wind capacity factor is about 50% (off-shore numbers at an on-shore location.) The entire green capacity for Canada is 22 GW, there is literally no place where you could shove an extra 4GW into a grid but if you are making fuel it is no problem.
ammoniaenergy.org/webinars/project-nujioqonik-harnessing-wind-power-for-ammonia-on-canadas-atlantic-coast/
Quick comment on peaker power. Peaker power costs are mostly fuel, ~85%. In Ontario, we bill peak power at 10x cheap overnight. So if you made ammonia cheap, had massive losses, only retained 10% of the energy, and then used this as fuel for peak power you are not far off today's prices. (Yes I understand the constraints of HB process, several green hydrogen sites today buffer hydrogen, there are also HB designs that can throttle..)
I am all for heat pumps but we need to address petroleum head-on. 46% of North America's GHG emissions are petroleum. Transport is a far larger GHG emitter than industry or operating buildings. Ammonia for ships, trains, and trucks, will be critical.
We have a fantastic alternative fuel at our fingertips. Go ahead, dunk on hydrogen, it never made sense, and will never make sense. But ammonia, with its energy density, is a fundamentally different story.
Could not manage to watch after about 30 mins.... the presenter was basically mocking the whole concept and anyone supporting Hydrogen - in those 30 mins atleast he has not presented any solid technical reason of why it is unsustainable other than costs.
If you move back about 120 years one could talk exactly the same things about Internal Combustion engines and Petrol / Diesel too.
I expected a more erudite presentation from someone of his fame
Thanks for the heads up. Saved me an hour I will never get back.
You need to understand the difference between mocking and explaining basic thermodynamics and micro-economics. There is a reason why 150 years into the hydrogen economy just 0.1% of hydrogen is produced by electrolysis and 0% of it is consumed in either heating or transport. I understand the consequences are uncomfortable, but I can't change them and neither can you.