So is the future hydrogen?

Business Daily

BBC

Business

4.4 • 816 Ratings

🗓️ 4 February 2020

⏱️ 18 minutes

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Summary

The gas could provide the critical missing piece in decarbonising the global economy. But can the hydrogen itself be sourced cheaply and carbon-free?

One exciting new application could be to replace the coal used in steel-making. Manuela Saragosa speaks to Martin Pei, chief technical officer at Swedish steel company SSAB, which is collaborating on a pilot scheme for the new technology. He says hydrogen produced from renewable energy can generate the intense heat needed in many heavy industries like his, that is currently only achieved by burning fossil fuels.

Could hydrogen also be used to replace the natural gas currently used for winter heating in many homes in northern latitudes? That is the contention of Marco Alvera, chief executive of Italian gas pipeline operator Snam.

The key question is whether the cost of producing hydrogen from solar and wind energy can be brought down to a competitive level. Pierre Etienne Franc of French industrial gas company Air Liquide says they're working on it.

Producer: Laurence Knight

(Picture: High pressure hydrogen fuel filler nozzle for refueling hydrogen powered commercial vehicles; Credit: Stephen Barnes/Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. I'm Manuel Saragossa. Coming up, hydrogen.
0:08.1	Enthusiasts say it's the magic molecule that could help stop climate change, because when it burns, it emits only water vapor and no carbon dioxide.
0:16.5	You can safely burn hydrogen in existing infrastructure with no additional cost, with no harm,
0:22.2	with no safety issues. There's a lot of sectors that are very hard to decarbonise.
0:26.4	The hard to abate sectors actually desperately need hydrogen.
0:29.5	But if hydrogen is the answer to climate change, why aren't we all already using it?
0:34.2	When we move to scale, we are getting closer to something which is competitive.
0:40.2	By 20, clean hydrogen will be affordable and competitive.
0:45.6	That's all here in Business Daily from the BBC.
1:02.5	That's my boiler firing up. I'm at home just looking into my boiler cupboard here.
1:07.9	It's a pretty normal sound in any British home at this time of year because it's midwinter,
1:12.6	it's cold outside. So we burn natural gas piped in from the North Sea and from Russia to heat up water that runs through pipes throughout the house and so helps keep it
1:17.6	nice and cozy and warm inside. But natural gas or methane is a fossil fuel, which means that my
1:23.8	boiler here is emitting carbon dioxide into the air. And if we want to move away
1:28.9	from fossil fuels, either I'll have to scrap my boiler here altogether, or I'll have to find
1:34.2	something else to burn. And one possibility might be to burn hydrogen. The thing about hydrogen is that
1:43.0	when it burns, it emits water vapour. It's a squeaky, clean fuel.
1:47.0	So why aren't we all already using it? A question for our producer Lawrence Knight, who worked on Business Daily's Elements series.
1:54.3	I guess the question is, where does the hydrogen come from, right? I mean, it's not just floating around in the air. You can't dig it out of the ground like natural gas.
2:01.5	Hydrogen needs to be extracted from some other chemical.
2:04.6	Now, at the moment, the main way in which hydrogen is produced is from natural gas.
2:09.1	Natural gas is a molecule made up of one carbon with four hydrogens.
	...

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