PremiumIndia’s biggest two businessmen, Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani, announced plans last year to invest about $70 billion each by the end of this decade in developing everything that is required to make green hydrogen cheap: largescale renewable energy plants, largescale photovoltaic cell manufacturing, electrolysers, combined cycle power plants burning green hydrogen, storage and transportation facilities and other bits of the hydrogen ecosystem. The government announced it would waive the transmission cost of renewable power that is used, at a place removed from the point of power generation, to produce hydrogen. It would also waive import duties on electrolysers.
Now, the government has announced that it would support green hydrogen in India with something like ₹20,000 crore. This is to be welcomed, rather than condemned as super-feeding the fattest of the fat cats.
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This is because green hydrogen is big artillery in the war against climate change. And has the potential to slash India’s imports of oil and strengthen energy security. To appreciate that, we need to get acquainted with the honorific ‘green’ for a gas that, we have been taught at school, is colourless, as well as with the property of hydrogen that makes it a hero on the green battlefield.
According to a US government website, 1 kg of hydrogen contains as much energy as 2.8 kg of gasoline (petrol), but, of course, the hydrogen would have to be compressed at high pressure to manage the volume. When hydrogen is burnt to produce energy, it combines with oxygen to produce heat and water, unlike when we burn coal, natural gas or any other hydrocarbon, whose combustion produces global-warming carbon dioxide. Hydrogen can replace natural gas to drive a turbine to generate power, again with zero pollution. In a fuel cell, a catalyst can strip atoms of hydrogen of their electrons, pushing the electrons out as an electric current that can run a motor. This would result in battery-fee electric cars. Batteries take time to recharge, and more to the point, have supply chains that are dominated by China, and a handful of countries that have a stranglehold on the minerals from which battery-critical cobalt, nickel and lithium are refined.
Further, hydrogen is key, when it comes to decarbonising steel and cement manufacture, replacing coal. Aluminium guzzles power, both to get alumina out of bauxite and to refine aluminium out of alumina. Using hydrogen to produce that power would redeem, to a large extent, this shiny metal with a long, dark history.
Shipping and aviation are two other industries that hydrogen or its close associate, ammonia, promises to liberate from the grip of carbon. A technological solution to aviation’s carbon footprint would be good for the world, even if it might leave distraught all those savouring the abstinence and self-denial involved in the boycott of flying, the solution upheld by green fundamentalists in the spirit of penance-inducing hairshirt and fasting of yore.
The colour-coding of hydrogen depends on the carbon trail generated by its process of production. Hydrogen produced by the steam methane reformation process — making steam and natural gas interact at high temperature and pressure, to break down natural gas, which is mostly methane, a molecule of one atom of carbon and four atoms of hydrogen, to release hydrogen and produce carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide — is called grey hydrogen. If the carbon generated in the production of grey hydrogen is captured for storage or use, the hydrogen produced is called blue hydrogen. If hydrogen is produced by electrolysis of water (splitting water into its constituent parts of hydrogen and oxygen, using electricity) and the power used in this process is entirely renewable, the resulting hydrogen is called green hydrogen.
Grey hydrogen is a mainstay at petroleum refineries, which use hydrogen to remove sulphur from diesel. If they follow this up with effective carbon capture for storage or, better still, use, that would boost the availability of hydrogen. Hydrogen will burn as sweetly carbonless, whatever the colour appellation added to it.
But green hydrogen can give a big boost to wind and solar power. The main drawback of such renewable power is that they do not produce power continuously. When sunshine isn’t accessible or the wind stops blowing, power generation comes to a halt. To overcome this intermittency problem, the proffered solutions are pumped storage — pump water up to an elevation, from where it can be run down, when power generation has stopped, to turn a turbine — and largescale battery storage. Green hydrogen presents a better alternative. Use the renewable power to work the electrolyser and produce hydrogen. This can be stored and transported, thus making renewable power available at a place and time removed from its generation. This ability to give renewable power temporal and spatial flexibility of utilisation makes hydrogen a valuable export commodity.
Green hydrogen is a nascent industry globally. U.S. President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act envisages dollops of subsidy for America’s hydrogen industry. India can hope to be globally competitive in this green technology/fuel. Scale economies and efficiency of executing large projects hold the key to success, as well as R&D. The Green Hydrogen allocation by the government can be faulted for its modest outlay of a few hundred crore rupees on R&D. That apart, this is a welcome and sensible initiative.
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