Green flag for green hydrogen sets India on the right path

It is welcome that the government plans to put in nearly ₹20,000 crore, a little under $2.5 billion, into green hydrogen, a promising segment of the sunrise sector of green energy, when India’s two wealthiest businessmen, Gautam Adani and Mukesh Ambani, plan to invest ₹70 billion each in the sector over the present decade. 

This would go a long way in decarbonising hard-to-decarbonise sectors such as shipping, aviation and production of steel, aluminium and cement. Hydrogen also incentivises greater investment in wind and solar energy, as production of hydrogen using wind/solar power solves these sectors’ intermittency problem.

Multiple uses

Hydrogen can burn, produce heat, and drive a turbine to produce electricity. GE claims its gas turbines can use fuels in which the percentage of hydrogen ranges from 5% to 100%. Its combustion will make it combine with oxygen and produce water vapour — no carbon dioxide is released in this process of energy generation. Waste heat can be captured to boil water, produce pressurised steam and run another auxiliary turbine.

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Hydrogen can burn in an automobile’s internal combustion engine as well. Again, it will produce only water vapour and avoid emitting greenhouse gases. Each kilogram of hydrogen contains as much energy as 2.8 kg of petrol. However, internal combustion engines are inefficient machines, where a lot of heat is wasted; in fact, coolants have to be used to remove the unused heat.

Hydrogen can serve as an energy carrier, as well. It can be used to produce electricity in a fuel cell, inside which it is stripped of its electrons and combined with oxygen to produce water. The released electrons can produce an electric current that drives a motor. Cars that make use of hydrogen fuel cells run on clean electricity without having to burden themselves with batteries, whose supply chains, dominated by China and a few countries that account for a disproportionate share of the mining of minerals such as cobalt and nickel, are increasingly a source of worry.

Abundant in nature

Hydrogen is one of the most abundant elements in the universe, and on Earth. But it is not available as hydrogen: it is available in combination with other elements: water, where it combines with oxygen; natural gas, which is one carbon atom bonding with four hydrogen atoms; or organic matter, in which hydrogen combines with carbon and oxygen, and other elements.

Hydrogen has to be produced. The most common way of producing hydrogen is called Steam Methane Reformation. At high temperatures and pressure, steam reacts with natural gas to produce hydrogen and carbon dioxide, as well as some carbon monoxide. Refineries produce a lot of hydrogen in this fashion, to use it for removing sulphur from diesel.

Some  industrial processes, such as the one that produces chlorine, also produce hydrogen as a byproduct. All these processes also produce greenhouse gases. Hydrogen in the production of which carbon dioxide is produced is called grey hydrogen. If the said carbon dioxide is captured for storage or use, the resultant hydrogen is called blue hydrogen. If no carbon dioxide is produced in the course of generating hydrogen, that hydrogen is called green hydrogen.

Cleanest way to manufacture hydrogen

Splitting water to produce hydrogen and oxygen is the cleanest way to produce hydrogen. The splitting is done using electricity. If the electricity comes from a green source, such as a solar or a wind power plant, there would be no carbon dioxide production at all, in the production of hydrogen.

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This is the beauty of green hydrogen. The chief problem with solar and wind power is that their output is intermittent. Suppose their power output is used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, and the hydrogen is stored, transported and used to produce power where it is required, that gets rid of the intermittency problem, ridding green power of its biggest drawback.

This is why the world at large is trying to produce large amounts of green hydrogen. Power cannot be stored. But hydrogen can be. 

Suppose you can generate huge quantities of power in the large deserts of the world — the Sahara in Africa, the Great Australian, Gobi in China and Mongolia, Thar in India and Pakistan, Atacama in Chile and Peru — and transmit it to the nearest point where water is plentiful, use that power to electrolyse water in into hydrogen, and then store and transport that hydrogen as you please. This would make solar power from the Arabian desert available in monsoon-drenched Kerala or in Copenhagen at night.

Billionaires lead the race

In India, Mukesh Ambani announced that he would produce green hydrogen at a cost of $1 per kg, that is, bring down the price of hydrogen by more than four-fifths. That is the goal of the other big Indian billionaire, Gautam Adani, as well.

These two businessmen with a track record of execution excellence had announced their ambition before the government announced its support scheme. What the government had done was to waive transmission charges for renewable power being used to produce green hydrogen.

The government’s announced support for R&D in the hydrogen package is a mere few hundred crore rupees. Many times that amount should go to biotechnology research into processes to break down industrial, municipal and other waste, particularly plastics, and recover hydrogen, while capturing for use any carbon gases released.

Edge for India?

Hydrogen, along with nuclear energy and carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere, shows humanity’s way out of climate disaster. India stands a good chance of developing a competitive advantage in green hydrogen globally, notwithstanding the subsidies on offer in the US Inflation Reduction Act for green hydrogen. 

The government’s support is well-deserved, even if the principal beneficiaries would be two of the world’s richest people, who happen to be India’s biggest billionaires.

(TK Arun is a senior journalist based in Delhi.)

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