For eons, this has been a quiet, unremarkable place — thousands of square miles of flat land covered in shrubs and red dirt. The sun is withering, and the wind blows hard.
It is exactly those features that qualify this remote parcel of the Australian Outback for an imminent transformation. A consortium of energy companies led by BP plans to cover an expanse of land eight times as large as New York City with as many as 1,743 wind turbines, each nearly as tall as the Empire State Building, along with 10 million or so solar panels and more than 1,000 miles of access roads to connect them all.
But none of the 26 gigawatts of energy the site expects to produce, equivalent to one-third of what Australia’s grid currently requires, will go toward public use. Instead, it will be used to manufacture a novel kind of industrial fuel: green hydrogen.
This patch of desert, more than 100 miles from the nearest town, sits next to the biggest problem that green hydrogen could help solve: vast iron ore mines that are full of machines powered by immense amounts of dirty fossil fuels. Three of the world’s four biggest ore miners operate dozens of mines here.
Proponents hope green hydrogen will clean up not only mining but also other industries by replacing fossil fuel use in steelmaking, shipping, cement and elsewhere.
Green hydrogen is made by using renewable electricity to split water’s molecules. (Currently, most hydrogen is made by using natural gas, a fossil fuel.) The hydrogen is then burned to power vehicles or do other work. Because burning hydrogen emits only water vapor, green hydrogen avoids carbon dioxide emissions from beginning to end.
In the Pilbara region of Western Australia and in dozens of spots around the globe endowed with abundant wind and sun, investors see an opportunity to generate renewable electricity so cheaply that using it to make green hydrogen becomes economical. Even if only some of the projects come to fruition, vast stretches of land would be duly transformed.
The project is one example of a global gamble, worth hundreds of billions of dollars, being made by investors, including some of the most polluting industries in the world.
Last year, government subsidies sped up action in the European Union, India, Australia, the United States and elsewhere. The Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration’s landmark climate legislation, aims to drive the domestic cost of green hydrogen down to one-quarter of what it is now in less than a decade through tax incentives and $9.5 billion in grants.
“We are about to jump from the starting blocks,” said Anja-Isabel Dotzenrath, who once led Germany’s biggest renewable energy company and now runs BP’s gas and low-carbon operations. “I think hydrogen will grow even faster than wind and solar have.”
Not everyone sees it that way. Challenges loom on every level, from molecular to geopolitical.
Some energy experts say green hydrogen’s business rationale is mostly hype. Doubters accuse its champions of self-interest or even self-delusion. Others see hydrogen as diverting crucial investment away from surer emissions-reduction technologies, presenting a threat to climate action.
Still, if the rosiest projections hold, green hydrogen in heavy industry could reduce global carbon emissions by 5%, if not two or three times that. In those scenarios, which are far from certain, hydrogen plays a crucial role in limiting global warming.
Fatih Birol, the Turkish economist who leads the International Energy Agency, said he seldom meets people who don’t find green hydrogen alluring, with its elegant elementality. His organization forecasts that green hydrogen will fulfill 10% of global energy needs by 2050…Read More…
Source: PTI
