The Hydrogen Revolution
Hydrogen commands a great deal of policy attention, and with no doubt, will play a fundamental role in the global energy transition. So what is hydrogen?
We know that Hydrogen is an element in the periodic table, but what is it about hydrogen that makes it being talked about in the energy realm?
Hydrogen is an energy carrier that can be used to store, move, and deliver energy produced from other sources. But what does an ‘energy carrier’ mean? An energy carrier is a substance (fuel) or sometimes a phenomenon (energy system) that contains energy that can be later converted to other forms such as mechanical work or heat or to operate chemical or physical processes.
Hydrogen, like electricity, is an energy carrier that must be produced from another substance. Hydrogen can be produced—separated—from a variety of sources including water, fossil fuels, or biomass and used as a source of energy or fuel.
Hydrogen has the highest energy content of any common fuel by weight (about three times more than gasoline), but it has the lowest energy content by volume (about four times less than gasoline). These two facts are VERY important. To illustrate what that means, for applications where mass is a huge concern (i.e., we do not want a large mass) hydrogen would be a perfect fuel! For example, rockets which need to have huge propelling energy with less mass to not weigh the rocket down! On the other hand, hydrogen has low energy content by volume meaning that for applications where volume is the concern hydrogen is not ideal. For example, ships have limited volume and that is why ammonia is used as an energy carrier across the seas instead.
For further details see: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/hydrogen/
Hydrogen will play a fundamental role in balancing renewable electricity supply and demand by absorbing short-term variations and offering long-term storage to help balance renewable variability across seasons.
The colour palette
Hydrogen has several colours, based on the production method (HOWEVER, there is a general consensus that such labelling is ambiguous and misleading as categorization more rigorous quantitative emission-related method is lacking):
Green hydrogen: Hydrogen produced by electrolysis of water, using electricity from renewable sources like wind and solar.
Blue hydrogen: Hydrogen produced from fossil fuels (i.e., grey, black, or brown hydrogen) where CO2 is capture and either stored or repurposed.
Grey hydrogen: Hydrogen extracted from natural gas using a method called ‘steam-methane reforming’ (SMR, in short).
Pink hydrogen: Hydrogen produced from electrolysis using nuclear power.
Yellow hydrogen: Hydrogen produced by electrolysis using grid electricity from various sources (i.e., renewables and fossil fuels).
Turquoise hydrogen: Hydrogen produced by thermal splitting of methane (methane pyrolysis) instead of CO2, solid carbon is produced.
White hydrogen: Hydrogen produced as a by-product of industrial processes. Also refers to hydrogen occurring in its (rare) natural form.
Saudi Arabia’s hydrogen ambitions
The Kingdom, as part of its Vision 2030 program and its Circular Carbon Economy ambitions, is strategically situated between major demand markets in Europe and Asia where it can leverage the nascent hydrogen economy as a potential tool to successfully diversify its economy and become a player of strategic importance in this space.
In September 2020 Aramco and the Institute of Energy Economics, Japan, in partnership with SABIC, successfully demonstrated the production and shipment of blue ammonia from Saudi Arabia to Japan with support from the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. Forty tons of high-grade blue ammonia were dispatched to Japan for use in zero-carbon power generation.
ACWA Power & Air Products are leading the introduction of hydrogen in the Saudi economy and market with the upcoming NEOM Green Hydrogen Project which is the world’s largest utility scale, commercially-based hydrogen facility powered entirely by renewable energy.