Using electricity to do things currently done with fossil fuels means generating more of it. Here’s how hydrogen can help
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskThat is a daunting prospect for developing countries which do not have the capacity to meet today’s demand. It is less worrying for countries like America, Germany and Japan where new capacity is affordable and grids are getting more sophisticated. But it is still a huge challenge. And there are still difficult decisions to be made about what is electrified directly and what is electrified indirectly with green hydrogen.
Such hydrogen will not, though, be a one-for-one replacement for natural gas in all applications. In high-temperature turbines it makes sense. In domestic boilers it generally does not. Going from a natural-gas-fired boiler to a hydrogen-fired one may sound nice and likely to be minimally disruptive. But using electricity to make hydrogen to burn in a boiler is much less efficient than using it to run a heat pump.Electric heat pumps are, in effect, air conditioners that run in reverse.
For high-grade heat, above 500°C, hydrogen probably has the edge. And it will have other niches, too. One of the reasons that the chemicals and steel industries are locked into fossil fuels is that they make use of their chemistry—the way the carbon and hydrogen inside them react with things—as well as the energy stored up in them. Making iron from iron ore and then steel from iron requires chemistry as well as heat, and the steel industry has grown up relying on fossil fuels for both.
. Hydrogen can do much the same job. Lourenco Goncalves, the firm’s boss, says that replacing 30% of the natural gas with hydrogen would be easy if the plant had a reliable hydrogen source, and 70% could be achieved with limited modifications, slashing emissions by over 1m tonnes a year. Going hydrogen-only would be harder, but such plants are quite possible.made in Toledo still goes into coal-fired blast furnaces. But it could be put into electric-arc furnaces which melt iron with electricity.
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