Green Hydrogen: Industry's next development boom

While society has made important advances in the scaling up of renewable energy production and bringing down its costs, important challenges remain on the road to Net Zero. Notably, the intermittent nature of sunshine and wind, plus the limitations of current electrical battery technologies. Hydrogen, in particular, has emerged as a leading candidate to help address the storage, transmission and distribution problems of green electricity, and building out the necessary infrastructure is likely to keep industry—and its process control and instrumentation sector—quite busy for decades to come.

“The hydrogen economy is accelerating,” said Loic Charbonneau, global pursuit director, Emerson, in making the case for hydrogen’s increasing role in a sustainable energy future during a recent press conference. “Hydrogen has a special attribute in that it can decarbonize applications where renewable electrons can't go,” he said.

Hydrogen is extremely flexible, and can be transported short or long distances, in small and large volumes, and depending on state, can be stored for a very long time if needed. Indeed, hydrogen can be stored and distributed in its pure form as a high-pressure liquid, piggybacked onto liquid organic hydrogen carrier (LOHC) molecules, or as ammonia for long-term stability. It can even be mixed in with natural gas and distributed over existing gas transmission networks as a transitional step toward reducing carbon emissions.

“Hydrogen’s storability provides a strategic flexibility for countries and regions seeking to stabilize gas or electrical grids,” Charbonneau added. Further, hydrogen provides a vector for renewable energy development in areas with insufficient electric grid infrastructure such as North Africa. “It’s a new type of chemical battery that perfectly complements electrical ones,” he said.

In total, renewable hydrogen could cut global carbon dioxide emissions by 25% at scale, Charbonneau said. In addition to end-use cases ranging from home heating to industrial processing, he cited hydrogen’s potential in maritime applications, noting that when stored as ammonia it’s very stable at low pressures and temperatures, and can substitute for bunker oil as a fuel of choice for ships. “Large ports will become multi-energy hubs, facilitating the shipment of oil and gas as well as hydrogen in its various forms, carbon dioxide and biofuels,” he said. “All of which means added flexibility. We already see ports establishing themselves accordingly.”

“A full 40% of global carbon emissions come from industry,” Charbonneau added, “and deep decarbonization will require a multi-pronged strategy.” The steel and cement industries, in particular, are leading contributors to industry’s carbon emissions, with steel alone accounting for about 7-8% of global emissions—about half of all road-transport emissions. Cement emissions have tripled since 1995, and are on a 5.1% trajectory of continued growth through 2029. “Replacing fossil fuels in these industries will require a larger reorganization of processes around green chemistry,” he said.

Charbonneau also cited the broad range of hydrogen production methodologies and flexibility of storage, transmission and distribution modes in the hydrogen value chain (Figure 1). “What’s critical now is a change in mindset from pilot-scale implementations to large-scale facilities. Because of the wide variety of production and end-use examples, not all need to be adopted at full potential for the value chain to grow and evolve.”