Hello, everyone. My name is Maggie Hannah and I'm a geologist by training and have worked in both mining and oil and gas exploration for over three decades. In the last 10 years, I've been working as a technology scout, a systems thinker, and a futurist on pathways to take the global energy system to net-zero CO_2 emissions by 2050 with a special focus on hydrogen. I have the titles of Fellow at the Energy Futures Lab and associate at CESAR, which is the Canadian Energy Systems Analysis Research Group, out of the University of Calgary. The 21st century energy transition is upon us, like it or not, and it's proving to be messy. Whatever you call it, this energy transition or transformation, evolution, or revolution, or inevitability, it will be accomplished only with the contributions from a huge variety of energy sources and facilitators. Hydrogen has a very important piece of the puzzle. What is hydrogen anyway? Well, hydrogen is actually the smallest element we have. The red arrow on the slide points to the location on the periodic table, position number 1. It is built from one proton and one electron, and we generally write the formula for hydrogen as H2 because it always occurs as two atoms bonded together into a molecule of hydrogen. The energy in a hydrogen molecule is actually stored in the bond between the two hydrogen atoms, marked by the purple arrow. When we break that bond, we release the energy for our use. Now here you can see a nebula. This is what hydrogen looks like in the universe through a telescope, and it's approximately 73 percent of the mass of the visible universe is in the form of hydrogen. Helium makes up about 25 percent of the mass and everything else we know and love represents only two percent. However, there's relatively little free hydrogen roaming around on Earth, and most of what we have is tied up in ocean waters. So we have to use energy to make hydrogen, and making it an energy carrier and not an energy source. Here we have some hydrocarbon chemical structures. The first three molecules represent coal, which is the most carbon intense, and then oil, which is second, and natural gas, which is third, and you can see there are lots of carbon atoms in there. When we burn these for energy, we poop the resulting CO_2 off into the atmosphere. But where does that energy actually come from in hydrocarbons? Well, mostly, again, from the hydrogen bond itself. When we break the hydrogen bond by burning hydrocarbons, we release energy for our use. Why switch to hydrogen? Well, because there's no carbon in it. We still get to use the hydrogen bonds with no CO_2 emissions, only water is produced when we burn pure hydrogen. Now, how do we make hydrogen and what CO_2 emissions are produced over the entire process or the life cycle of that production of hydrogen? Different ways of making hydrogen are color-coded. Today, 95 percent of all hydrogen produced is gray and brown, shown on the far right. Gray hydrogen is made from methane and water heated in a steam methane reformer, and it releases about 9-13 kilograms of CO_2 per kilogram of hydrogen. Brown hydrogen is even worse. It's made by coal gasification, which poops off 15-25 kilograms of CO_2 per kilogram of hydrogen. Now, notice the orange line at 4.4 kilograms. Anything below this line meets the European definition of low-carbon hydrogen. Three methods on the left are consistently below that standard pink hydrogen made from nuclear electricity and electrolysis. Again, that's the process of splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity. That carbon intensity is 1-2 kilograms. Green hydrogen from wind is about the same as nuclear, about 1-2. A little more, but we rounded down to 1-2. Solar is higher a little bit, but at 3-4. Blue hydrogen is made using natural gas and water and 90 percent carbon capture and storage, and it comes in at about 2-3 kilograms of CO_2 per kilogram of hydrogen. If we include the fugitive methane emissions, which we must, then the emissions count as 2-4 kilograms of CO_2 per kilogram of hydrogen. Turquoise is made by pyrolysis of methane. This means heating it in the absence of oxygen, making carbon black. It's a solid black material as an end product, instead of gaseous CO_2. White is waste industrial byproducts that can be retrieved from the [inaudible] plant near Red Deer, Alberta, for example. Yellow hydrogen is made by electrolysis from mixed grid electricity, which can have a wide range of carbon intensities depending on the electricity sources in mixing that grid. In the future, the world will beginning away from the hydrogen color scheme as the emphasis shifts from needing to identify how the hydrogen was made to identifying what matters most, and that's the life cycle carbon intensity. Today, most hydrogen is used for oil refining to make ammonia for fertilizers and as a feedstock for petrochemical products like plastics. But what else can we do with it? Well, as the right side of the slide indicates, there are certain things that are better done with hydrogen and not with electricity. Some of these things include storage of energy in the form of hydrogen for use as seasonal energy backup. Now, using hydrogen for powering fuel cells to provide heat and power or backup power for commercial and public buildings is also used. I'm not actually a big fan of hydrogen stoves because of the potential for excess of NOx formation, which is an indoor air pollutant. Although natural gas stoves are worse. Electric stoves are the way to go. We have already started blending hydrogen into the natural gas pipelines, which can likely tolerate about 15-20 percent hydrogen or hithane, meaning hydrogen in the methane, hithane. We use transport, heavy, long distance transportation of all sorts. Hydrogen is good for trucks, and buses, and trains, and planes, and ships, and agricultural machinery. It has a use in industry, including oil refining and making steel, and chemicals, and cement and high temperature processes like glass and ceramics as well. Let's look at one example. Personal vehicles. My rule of thumb is if you own a vehicle and want to change to a zero-emission vehicle, then if it currently runs on gasoline, you're probably better off going battery electric. If your vehicle runs on diesel, then you're almost certainly better off switching to hydrogen fuel cell electric. The choice is closely related to the loads you carry, the distances that you travel, the time you have to refuel. For the past six years, I've had an electric car. I love it. Battery electric vehicle purchases are doubling every one to one and a half years. An exponential rate of growth actually. Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are also increasing exponentially, but they are earlier on the exponential curve. So the exponential curve for zero-emission vehicles today is dominated by battery vehicles. This cartoon really nails what exponential means. Take a moment to digest it. That red arrow is my estimation of where we are in the zero-emission vehicle growth cycle, poised to take off up the steeper part of the curve. Why? Because Chevy, and Tesla, and Toyota are not the only electric vehicle makers anymore. Not only are there more companies making electric cars, but the number of offerings from each carmaker is expanding really fast. There is ever more consumer choice and prices are coming down. As an aside, my car is a 2013 EV and I'm in total love. It might make a million kilometers. I'll have it for the rest of my life maybe. As we learned earlier in these lessons, energy storage is critical to maintaining the balance in our electric grids. Making sure that for every electron we take out, another one is added in real time. Maintaining the balance is more challenging when we rely on intermittent energy sources like wind and solar. Hydrogen is a great energy storage medium. This is a graph from Nel Hydrogen out of Norway. They make hydrogen electrolysers and fueling stations. It plots the amount of electricity that can be stored on the vertical axis against how long the electricity can be stored on the horizontal axis. The best place to be on this graph is in the upper right corner, where large amounts of energy can be stored for a really long time. This is where hydrogen resides in purple. Hydrogen can store a large amount of energy for a really long time, like seasons to years. This is really important because long duration energy storage is one of the most challenging issues we face in transitioning our electrical systems. Let's address a concern that engineers and efficiency wonks., experts have often voiced. They challenged the value of hydrogen as an energy storage medium because it loses quite a lot of energy in that process. They're right, it really does. Take the example of storing green electricity as green hydrogen. When we convert electricity to hydrogen from water using electrolysis and use a fuel cell to burn it, to turn it back into power again, we lose almost half of the original energy. That doesn't sound like a very good deal, does it? But it really is. We can do so many things with hydrogen that we just can't do well with electricity. These things include things like space heating, and heavy or long distance transportation, and storing large amounts of energy for really long time, which makes it worth the energy loss. Here's my analogy. Electricity is like milk and hydrogen is like cheese. It takes a lot of milk to make a little bit of cheese. Milk doesn't store for very long, a few days, maybe 10 in the fridge, and neither does electricity store for very long. But cheese stores for seasons to years, and so does hydrogen. They do different but very necessary things from each other. You wouldn't want to put milk on your pizza. You wouldn't have to rely on only renewable electricity being available to heat your home all winter either. What about safety? Well, people often say to me, what about the Hindenburg disaster? Look how many people died. Well, the Hindenburg was a hydrogen filled, lighter than airship that crossed the Atlantic Ocean 34 times, at a time when no other aircraft was capable of flying so far. On the 35th voyage, it was forced to go around this major thunderstorm, which meant an extra day in the air before landing. When it finally came in to land, a combination of the highly flammable aluminum base paint on the skin of the dirigible and the built-up static electricity from the crossing, and perhaps from being near that storm for all we know, it caused a spark from the grounding cable that traveled up to the dirigible and lit the skin on fire, which then ignited the hydrogen. However, 62 of the 97 people aboard survived. They survived because hydrogen is so light that it went straight up away from where the people were in the cabin below the dirigible. The firestorm was over in 40 seconds. As a side note, the Hindenburg has a sister ship called the Graf Zeppelin. It preceded the Hindenburg, and it flew for more than 1.6 million kilometers for nearly a decade on hydrogen before being grounded after the Hindenburg disaster. Let's look now at hydrogen safety in cars. These images are from a study done by the US National Highway Transportation and Safety Administration. The hydrogen fuel cell car is on your left, and the gasoline fuel cell car is on your right. Now, this study compared a hydrogen storage tank leak fire with a gasoline tank leak fire. Which one do you think is safer? Well, the hydrogen tank. The hydrogen flame went straight up and did not damage the car at all, whereas the gasoline fire eventually consumed the whole vehicle. Hydrogen is so light that if you release it outside and blink one time, it's already up six stories in one second. Solution by dilution is very fast in an open space for hydrogen. Hydrogen will still explode in an enclosed space, just like natural gas will. So let's not do that. We've taken a look at most of the positives for hydrogen on the left, and now let's look a little deeper at a couple of the challenges listed on the right of the slide. Number 2 and 3, for example, hydrogen is a weird gas. It's difficult and therefore costly to compress, to put it in a pipeline or in a tank. This also makes storing hydrogen in large volumes costly. One of the solutions is to store hydrogen underground in huge salt caverns, as we saw in the last lesson on energy storage. Let's look at number 5. Hydrogen is currently more expensive as a fuel for combustion than natural gas. Heating with natural gas is cheap. I mean, really cheap. Let's say $3.50 a gigajoule. But if we add carbon taxes to natural gas, for every 10 bucks per ton CO_2 carbon tax, adds about 50 cents a gigajoule to natural gas price that we the consumers pay. By reaching 170 bucks a ton for carbon tax as is intended by the Canadian government, the natural gas will be about $11.50 per gigajoule, which is about the price of blue hydrogen currently at 1.60 a kilogram. In Canada, if we want to use electric heat pumps for both home heating and cooling, then we had better include some way of burning hydrogen for heat. Then when the outside temperature gets below about minus 10 Celsius, below that temperature, heat pumps become significantly less effective. Number 8, liquid hydrogen called LH2 is being considered as a way to ship hydrogen across the ocean and it takes a lot of power to make it. I'm not a fan of liquefying hydrogen for shipping. Having said that, Australia just delivered its first load of LH2 to Japan. Liquefying hydrogen is energy-intense because you have to take it down to 21 degrees above absolute zero. That's where all molecular movement stops. As a comparison, outer space is at four degrees above absolute zero. The liquefaction costs are about $3.50 per kilogram of hydrogen. If you're using really cheap hydropower to do it, that is expensive. Number 12, the hydrogen market has this chicken and egg problem regarding supply and demand. If I were an investor and wanted to build hydrogen fueling station, I would be hesitant because there are so few hydrogen vehicles around to buy it from me. That's the chicken. If I wanted to buy a hydrogen vehicle, again, I would think twice because there's no or very few hydrogen fueling stations around to fuel up. That's the egg. How do we solve this? We have to focus more on incentivizing the expansion of the demand side. Hydrogen hubs and corridors, where both supply and local demand are addressed, are critical to building out hydrogen capacity and infrastructure. Right now, Canada makes about 8,000 tons or eight kilotons of hydrogen per day for industrial use. By 2050, the Canadian Energy Systems Analysis Research team out of the University of Calgary has predicted that we will need a whopping 56-64 kilotons of hydrogen a day. That's 7-8 times what we're making now. How the heck can we possibly meet this demand? Well, let's look at this. We could hypothetically make either green hydrogen with a lot more electricity or we could make blue hydrogen from natural gas or both. Let's do a thought experiment, shall we, regarding the scale of what we're actually talking about here. If we use only wind turbines to make the electricity to electrolyze enough water to make 64 kilotons of hydrogen per day, we would need 64,000 large wind turbines, which may be possible if we have the available land. If we're using only nuclear though, we're going to need 30 plants the size of Bruce Power, which might be possible or if we're only using hydro dams to make this electricity, 195 Site C dams is going to be needed. Like, definitely not possible. Not on this slide, but relevant I think to this conversation is if we were going to make all that power with solar panels, we had 300-watt solar panels, we would need 2.13 billion of them, and that might be possible maybe. Let's look at the bottom orange square to see how much natural gas it would take to produce all of Canada's hydrogen in the 2050 demand using blue hydrogen. Sixty-four kilotons a day of hydrogen would be equivalent to 72 percent of Canada's natural gas production in 2018. That's doable, given that we also have tremendous capacity to increase our natural gas output in the three Western provinces and the East Coast as well. Plus, we would need 203 million tons or megatons of carbon capture and sequestration per year. That's a lot. Today, Canada only has just under five million tons of CO_2 sequestration capacity today, including enhanced oil recovery or EOR as it's called. It might be doable, but we just really don't know yet. Let that sink in. In reality, I think we will meet Canada's 2050 hydrogen needs with a combination of both green, and blue, and pink hydrogen production. Mostly of those three. As dictated by the regional resource endowments of the different regions of Canada, as dictated by economics and enlightened policy, and government support to get things going, and incentives across the country, now let's zoom out from Canada and take a look at what the world is actually doing. Well, the world is moving towards using hydrogen as a low-carbon fuel. There are over 40 countries with hydrogen roadmaps in the world today. Here's a sampling of the countries already committed. One example is the EU's commitment to the hydrogen backbone, which is a hydrogen pipeline system connecting 21 countries to a hydrogen supply system. They plan to convert and augment their existing natural gas pipelines over to hydrogen as well as building hydrogen capable pipelines as well, to total about 40,000 kilometers worth of hydrogen pipeline by 2040. Now that's a real commitment and it's doable. To support these strategies, innovations like a carbon token, this is a blockchain instrument that encapsulates the carbon footprint of every ton of hydrogen, will help countries to secure hydrogen supplies while staying both within their economic budgets and also their carbon budgets. There's been a lot of rhetoric around blue hydrogen versus green hydrogen and which one is better. Some people don't want blue hydrogen because it's associated with the oil and gas industry, which they blame for climate change. However, if our priority is really to address emissions, then blue hydrogen has a big part of both the near term and the middle term solutions. As I said before, this is not an either/or situation, it's a both/and situation. Now, the optimum time to start building out hydrogen infrastructure like industrial hubs, local distribution pipeline networks and ports is now. Right now, actually. How do I think this is really going to go? Here's my prediction. Gray hydrogen in the dashed line, which we used mostly in the world today, will progressively convert to blue hydrogen as we build out carbon capture and sequestration and utilization. Because blue hydrogen is about a third the production costs compared to green hydrogen, it will dominate the first couple of decades. Green hydrogen will build out more slowly, and that's because of the time required to build enough wind and solar, etc., capacity, but also depending on the timing of the supply and demand. Electrical grid expansion like green hydrogen production may experience, I think it will, stiff competition from the electrical grids for those green electrons. Because we have to build out the grids at the same time as use those electrons for hydrogen, and I think hydrogen will mostly likely lose that competition most of the time. Notice the inflection point, though, in the middle of the green line. That reflects new green hydrogen technology, bringing down production price. Maybe it's new catalysts, maybe it's a sub two cents kilowatt-hour power cost or both. Green starts to compete more effectively with blue. So I predict a 50-50 blue-green crossover point in the market by about 2044-2045. This might be a little optimistic, but from then on, there should be enough cheap green power generation for green hydrogen to dominate the market. However, blue will still be supplied to places in the world that need it. In the later stages of the energy transition, pink hydrogen made from nuclear will be added to the mix as soon as enough nuclear plants are built to handle the needs of the grid first. Hydrogen behaves differently than what we're used to. In fact, the actual use of hydrogen is no better or no worse than any other fuel. You just have to know the rules for working with hydrogen. But low carbon-hydrogen does hold an absolutely key place in our future decarbonized energy systems, likely 25-35 percent of global energy use by 2050. Now you have a sense of some of the ins and outs of hydrogen and how it can fit into our modern lives. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn or follow me on Twitter. Thank you for your kind attention.
