I’m a bit of a green hydrogen skeptic, except for niche uses but there is some backing for it. For example, an enormous planned green hydrogen facility in Australia that will produce electricity equivalent to 1/3 of Australia’s existing power grid. All used to make green hydrogen.
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Labor’s green hydrogen ambitions suffer blow after Fortescue announces 700 job cuts and major company restructure
https://www.skynews.com.au/business/energy/labors-green-hydrogen-ambitions-suffer-blow-after-fortescue-announces-700-job-cuts-and-major-company-restructure/news-story/cac76d9ef45c8da328846050ffcccc96
Green hydrogen is looking increasingly like a niche, longer-term export prospect for Australia as the reality of the supply costs involved, customers’ willingness to pay, and the vast investment needed in infrastructure to handle the fuel becomes clear…
Matthew Rennie, a former EY partner who is now an independent adviser, said his firm’s analysis indicated that prices for power and electrolysers – which use renewable power to split water into hydrogen and oxygen – would need to be much cheaper to produce green hydrogen in Australia even at under $3 a kilogram.
He said power prices would need to be less than $40 a megawatt-hour and electrolyser costs would need to more than halve to produce hydrogen at that level – still 50% more expensive than the government’s $2 target for the gas to be competitive.
DB2
Not surprised. It is really hard to see how the numbers work.
Yeah. I think the only electricity source in Australia that could supply electricity cheap enough would be their old brown coal plants. Which would be ironic.
DB2
Clean Fuel Startups Were Supposed to Be the Next Big Thing. Now They Are Collapsing
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/clean-fuel-startups-were-supposed-to-be-the-next-big-thing-now-they-are-collapsing/ar-AA1oZDQQ?ocid=BingNewsSerp
A company backed by United Airlines that raised hundreds of millions of dollars to turn trash into jet fuel appears to have shut down. Another, backed by Airbus, JetBlue and GE Aerospace, that was working on using hydrogen to power planes went bust. Chevron, BP and Shell, meanwhile, are scaling back projects to make biofuels from cooking fats, oils, greases and plant material…
Plug Power, a startup that recently opened one of the country’s first plants making green hydrogen…Shares of Plug Power have tumbled more than 90% since the passage of the US climate law two years ago…
Shipping company Maersk recently said it would order up to 60 new ships that could run on liquified natural gas and bunker fuel, in part because of uncertainty about the development of green fuels…
Forrest, the billionaire founder of Australian iron-ore giant Fortescue, said his company’s 2030 hydrogen production target now looks unrealistic. Fortescue is planning to produce its own clean power to make hydrogen in Australia and is considering doing the same in Arizona.
DB2
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They started collapsing years ago. How do I know? I was invested in some of them. Tyson Foods, one of the failures, tried to convert chicken fat into fuel and even free fat from their main business was not enough to make the venture profitable.
The Captain
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The article mentions there was a large surge of government money two years ago from the “climate law”, presumably the IRA. This may have lead to more collapses.
DB2
Virtue signaling cannot replace market forces. The Climate Crises is creating lots of waste.
The Captain
When I was at the pump seal company, carbon emissions were not top of mind. The narrative was locally sourced oil, vs imports from OPEC. There were an armload of “shale” oil and coal to oil projects. OPEC cleverly kept the price of oil below where any of these other sources would be economic. We can thank the farm lobby for keeping ethanol going.
Steve
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They were likely using the wrong type of fat. They should have been using the FREE FAT OF MANAGEMENT. Now the world is short on chicken soup.
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A lot of the failures are caused by the utilities not hooking up new projects to the grid. No revenues.
The article’s focus was on things such as sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) and green hydrogen rather than electrical power generation.
DB2
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That is also infrastructure not being mature enough yet.
If we wanted to actually shift people from consumption of hydrocarbons to “green” stuff we had to use real price signals, meaning e.g. taxes on gasoline with the proceeds rebated to citizens, and the Bush Gore election went against anything like that.
Instead, predictably idiotically magically, money has been allotted to subsidize perceived misapprehended ballyhooed virtue. Is anyone here surprised that that led to almost nothing but payoffs to snakes making profits and misspent moneys to dreamsters and bureacrats checking off items on political good appearances lists?
d fb
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There is a lot of economic friction in this processes of going green. The US government needs to subsidize much of the transition particularly the infrastructure.
The cart before the horse the US GDP needs to expand faster as we retool. I am confident the retooling is going well and the GDP growth will pick up. That makes all of this affordable.
We will turn around 5 years from now and forget this was a struggle with a lot of economic friction.
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