At Reuters Global Energy Transition in 2021, Bloom Energy CMO and EVP, Sharelynn Moore, moderated a panel discussion about how Hydrogen is increasingly regarded as the key to enabling the transition and how we unlock it’s potential, drive costs down and realize a true global hydrogen economy.
Video Synopsis
Global Energy Transition Unlocking the Global Hydrogen Economy
Video length: 44:51
Talking Points:
- Green Hydrogen and Transference to Clean Hydrogen
- Hydrogen Colors and Meanings
- Using Hydrogen In Perspective
- Future Adoption of Green Hydrogen
- New Projects and Ideas Related to Clean Hydrogen
- Needed Breakthroughs For The Future
- Water In Relation To Green Hydrogen
Speakers
- Sharelynn Moore, Executive Vice President, Chief Business Development and Marketing Officer, Bloom Energy
- Owen Rolt, Head of Energy Transition, Reuters Events
- Daryl Wilson, Executive Director, Hydrogen Council
- Hitoshi Kaguchi, Executive Vice President, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries
- Marcelino Oreja, Chief Executive Officer, Enagás
Transcript
Owen Rolt:
Thank you, Chris. Another brilliant session. Up next, we’ll explore the unlocking of a global hydrogen economy, perhaps one of the most easily discussed and anticipated topics within this energy transition, a special thanks to both Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and to blue energy for their collaboration on this panel. And without further ado, I would like to pass over to Sharelynn Moore, CMO of Bloom Energy, to chat the conversation she over to you.
Sharelynn Moore:
Thank you, Owen and hello everyone. Thank you for joining. We are very much looking forward to getting in and diving into this very important, timely, and very much being talked about everywhere topic. I’d like to make a few opening comments and then I’m very excited to introduce the panelists. But first let me say by opening with that, really reducing carbon emissions is the number one fight against climate change and protecting our planet. But to reach a net zero carbon future consensus is clear. There is no way to get to net zero as a global world without hydrogen solar and wind represent and mere 1.4% of our total global energy mix. But by 2030, the world energy needs are expected to be 10% or larger than pre COVID levels. The increased demand alone is 714% of current wind and solar energy capacity. A complete transition to renewables will require trillions of dollars and take decades, but we cannot take that long.
We must accelerate deployments and advanced hydrogen production and utilization for the global hydrogen economy. Hydrogen’s not only emissions-free, but it’s reliable, available and provides for long duration energy storage, which make it such a critical and very important part of our energy mix. It’s also important to recognize we do need all of the above, which is not new. It is an and strategy, not an or strategy. One of the things I was reflecting on personally, as I was dialing in from North America, specifically the U.S. West Coast very early my time was a couple notes about the difference, differences between Europe which is as hosted out of UK and the U.S. And as we look at Europe and the opportunities for hydrogen compared to the U.S., it’s really interesting to see two historic approaches coming together, an approach in the U.S. That has traditionally historically been innovation led in moving progress forward, where in Europe, I compare that to a continent in Asia in many cases as well, to being much more, just go out and build it. Then you are starting to see initiative for R and D in incentives and programs in Europe.
And you are seeing in the current Biden administration in the U.S. Interest to go build stuff. So you are seeing now, I think, both sides of the big pond, if you will. And including, I believe Asia being much more like Europe than the U.S. In some ways starting to come together with a mix of innovation and let’s get out and go build it that needs to happen to bring hydrogen to life. So with that I am joined by some very, very impressive fellow panelists. So, I’d like to provide very, very brief quick introduction to each one of our panelists.
First, Daryl Wilson. He’s the executive director of the hydrogen council. Wave your hands Daryl. Daryl has a 38 year career in environmental innovation. He spent time with Devasco Toyotas and on environmental RGTL, and most recently Hydrogenics before taking on his role as Executive Director. Let’s just say a very, very important and critical and impressive series of innovations in his career. Welcome, Daryl. His longer bio is also available.
My other speaker is Dr. Hitoshi Kaguchi, Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer. Dr. Kaguchi is currently EVP in CSO at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries since April, 2021. He’s also led Mitsubishi Heavy Industries’, or MHI’s, global energy systems business, which includes highly efficient power generation technologies and innovative solutions that drive energy transition forward as President and CEO. Thank you for joining.
Our third speaker is Marcelino Oreja. He is the CEO of Enagas. Mr. Oreja has been Enagas’s CEO since September, 2012. And in this role he’s actively leading the internationalization process that started in 2011 for successfully exporting any gases, leadership and energy infrastructure, both to America and to Europe, and as with the others, his longer bio is available. So let me first ask each panelist beyond your biography to maybe say a few words about the role that you and or your organization are playing in hydrogen. So let me open with you Daryl.
Opening Remarks
Daryl Wilson:
Thanks very much, Sharelynn. It’s a pleasure to be with you today. The hydrogen council was formed in 2017 with the initial vision of 13 members recognizing that really the potential of hydrogen and the hydrogen story was not being told and was incumbent on them to start to communicate and educate and explain the important role that hydrogen has. Early in your introduction, Sharelynn, you mentioned that there is no getting to net zero without hydrogen, and I hope through our panel discussion today, that that will be evident to the participants in this session that hydrogen is just so critical to bring our energy system together in an integrated way and we sometimes talk about sector coupling. All the various different ways that we use energy can be brought together in a holistic energy system, like we’ve never seen before. Green electrons and carbon-free hydrogen can indeed make the world go round in a sustainable way. That’s a bold claim, but I think as we unpack our discussion today we’ll see why that is indeed the case.
Sharelynn Moore:
Thank you. Next Dr. Kaguchi.
Dr. Hitoshi Kaguchi:
Thank you. This is Kaguchi. I’m from MHI and MHI is the technology company to provide all the energy equipment and others. And about 30,000 people, engineers are working on the energy. And so energy transition is very, very important for my company. So we are diligently working for the energy transition and the hydrogen is an important part of our business, mainly hydrogen gas turbine and the hydrogen fuel cell or others. I want to discuss today about the technology and the society using that technology. Thank you.
Sharelynn Moore:
Thank you. And Marcelino.
Marcelino Oreja:
Well, thank you very much. Thank you for having us here as, as Enagas. So as you were saying, there are some differences between Europe and the U.S. So what’s important here is that the European Commission has launched up an important program to promote and to subsidize hydrogen projects, and we are confident that that will happen near soon, and that’s going to be very important to promote and to reduce the price of hydrogen in the future. And, in Enagas’s eyes, it is a transmission system operator. So we manage 12,000 pipes of gas pipes in Spain with subsidiaries in other countries around Europe and the U.S. Also, we are there also with the pipe company. In Spain, we are promoting 55 different renewable projects together with 50 different partners.
So I think what’s going to happen with nitrogen, we’re going to see different projects around this case, around Spain, all of them involving producers, technology companies, Mitsubishi of course, and users. That’s going to be very important to promote this type of project. So we’re going to need long term contract, take-or-pay contracts on hydrogen in order to be able to finance and produce those projects. And something also important is going to be the public and private collaboration.
So we’re going to need, for this to happen, a very close relationship between the administration TSOs in our case, so regulated companies, and other private producers. Otherwise it’s going to be very difficult to produce cheap hydrogen at the right time. We are starting to see real projects and companies asking for big quantities of hydrogen before 2025-2026. So we already are going to have in a few months, long term contracts. So now’s the time to produce the hydrogen. Something important to say is that there’s no green hydrogen in big quantities produced yet in Europe. So we are speaking about something, sometimes it looks like you can buy it at the supermarket, but I don’t think it’s not there yet. So there’s many things to happen before that. And of course, just to finish R and D is going to be very important too. So helping R and D venture capital investments to produce new ideas and helping small companies is going to be also important.
Sharelynn Moore:
Thank you. And if I didn’t introduce myself, which I might not have with my enthusiasm, I am Sharelynn Moore. I’m Executive Vice President and Chief Market and Product Officer for Bloom Energy and Bloom Energy is the world’s leading solid oxide fuel cell company that will be leveraging hydrogen within our fuel cells, but also providing upon that same solid oxide platform electrolyzers as well and are very excited about the role that the electrolyzer technology plays in creating green hydrogen. So along those lines Marcelino, you made a comment about the fact that we don’t have a lot of green clean green or clean, I think there’s a difference therehydrogen available. What are your thoughts about timelines? I know it’s not here yet but comment further on what it’s going to take to get to more green hydrogen and what’s that timeline look like?
Green Hydrogen and Transference to Clean Hydrogen
Marcelino Oreja:
Well, I mean, we’re all sure that the hydrogen is going to happen. We’ll see whether it’s green or blue hydrogen, both are going to be used in the future and, at that, looking at the U.S. I’m sure we’ll see the U.S. Exporting through hydrogen, perhaps quicker than we would be able to produce big quantities of green hydrogen in Europe. So, we’re sure it’s going to happen. It’s difficult to predict when it’s going to happen. Because again, what’s difficult is to understand the price when we get the price down enough. And what would the subsidies in the case of Europe would come to help that price to be there? So today, gray hydrogen is 1.5 Euros per kilo. Green is above five Euros per kilo. We do it in your stores but just to understand that the green hydrogen is four times more than the gray one.
So we need real projects to happen. In our case, as Enagas, we are building infrastructure in Europe, in Canada, by the Orca Island that will provide 300 tons of hydrogen next year, 2022. This is going to be the first big project in the south part of Europe. And we say big because it’s the bigger one in place. It’s seems very small with everything we are announcing around the world, but that’s going to be the first one and from there we’re going to see how much we can drop the price down. So this is going to happen. We’re going to see projects coming in, in 2022-2023, and I think we’re going to see big projects producing big quantities of hydrogen in 2025 and on.
Sharelynn Moore:
Very good. Any perspective on the movement from to cleaner and ultimately green hydrogen? Comments from you Daryl or Dr. Kaguchi. Well!
Dr. Hitoshi Kaguchi:
Yeah. Sorry. <Laugh> this is Kaguchi. The situation of the Japan is rightly different from the Europe. The current price of the hydrogen in Japan is maybe ten dollars per kilogram, and that even the target of the future of hydrogen is three dollars per kilogram in 2030. And in 2050, two dollars per kilogram. It’s far more expensive than other area because it’s very difficult to generate hydrogen inside of Japan. So we have to import the hydrogen from somewhere, a more green energy sufficient area. So that’s a quite different situation. So, but anyway, we need a hydrogen transportation and it’s a reason why expensive and the timeframe maybe technically technology will be ready by 2030, but maybe social system or economical the artistic situation is not, will not be achieved by 2030. That is my view. Thank you.
Sharelynn Moore:
Yes. Thank you. Daryl.
Daryl Wilson:
In terms of timing, cost has been a major impediment, and I think our other panelists have touched on that. In 2017 and 2018, the Hydrogen Council gathered the cost insights of our members. So, confidential cost data and projections were collected across many member companies through a clean room process with McKinsey, and we were able to start to show the trajectory for cost reduction over time. I think this has been a very important contribution that we’ve made to this discussion around enabling hydrogen to reach some of the cost targets that have already been mentioned.
Essentially we’ve seen this movie once before with wind and solar and costs have come down gradually at first and then accelerating until recently in a very red, very rapid manner. So these cost curves do not progress by themselves. It’s not a matter of numbers on spreadsheets. The critical thing that needs to happen is investments in scale up, and so our other panelists have spoken about projects that they are undertaking to indeed realize the scale up of hydrogen deployment. And as that happens we get good effects in the supply chain, economies of scale, innovation and technology improvements. And we start to reach into areas where hydrogen indeed becomes directly competitive with other energy alternatives.
It’s also important to understand that some of those energy alternatives are impacted by policies around penalties and taxes on carbon. And so the equation will be getting successively rebalanced over the coming decades and more and more hydrogen will be introduced.
Today globally, the hydrogen as a business is worth more than 200 billion U.S. Dollars annually, and much of that is going into the process industry of producing ammonia fertilizer and as part of the fossil fuel system for liquid fuels, but that gray hydrogen we anticipate will be successively converted. The council released a life cycle analysis on greenhouse gases associated with hydrogen reduction in January of this year. You can find that on our internet site and there we showed that gray hydrogen would phase out over the next number of years and be successively replaced by both blue and gray hydrogen. Green hydrogen, sorry. And ultimately green hydrogen will be the lowcost alternative, but that is absolutely going to take some time as our other panelists have said.
Hydrogen Colors and Meanings
Sharelynn Moore:
Yes. Thank you very much, and based on an anonymous comment on a Q&A site, it sounds like maybe clarifying how we interchange the colors of hydrogen may be important. So clearly green hydrogen is hydrogen created from renewable sources. There is, you know, other colors of hydrogen as well. Daryl, would you like to expand on that just for a few moments?
Daryl Wilson:
You know, Sharelynn, this whole system of communicating with colors is, it’s a good thing to educate folks in, in the early phases, but somebody reminded me just yesterday that, you know, bright colors are for the kindergarten classroom, and in some ways we need to grow out of this discussion. So while it’s informative, I think we’re going to become more precise in our language. So we’ll be talking about, you know, hydrogen from renewable sources and much like the system has emerged in Europe, where if you go to buy a car today, you can actually find on a sticker on the window of the car, the carbon footprint of that vehicle as it will be in use. So how many grams of CO2 will be emitted per kilometer of travel?
And I think that kind of system, we’re much more quantitative and specific about the environmental attributes of the hydrogen that we’re producing and using, and trading and exporting. I think we’re going to get a lot more sophisticated and clear about the environmental footprint associated with it so that we can make, consumers and producers can make effective decisions and government policies can be properly applied. So, the council, along with many other international organizations today, we are working on methodologies and approaches so that such a system can grow up and I think come into better use. But for now we still use the colors. We’ll use the colors in this discussion, I’m sure today and it’s a helpful start in a whole new discussion.
Sharelynn Moore:
Well, Daryl, I do second your comment that I think having a more or specific concrete discussion that doesn’t try to label colors and lead to misunderstanding is probably an order because I see people interchanging colors for different means all the time with exception of green. So here, here. I will second that motion, and maybe we won’t use colors outside of green for the sake of this conversation. Wonderful. Well, I think let’s expand on this just a little bit more around where we see the use case and or the sectors that need to move to hydrogen the quickest. We certainly recognize that some of some industries are the most difficult to abate steel cement petrochemical industries, but let’s talk about some of those use cases. Dr. Kaguchi, is there a perspective that you have from MHI on the industries that you think are most critical to tackle and what use cases?
Using Hydrogen In Perspective
Dr. Hitoshi Kaguchi:
Okay. My understanding if the green hydrogen is very common in that case, the electricity is very, very cheap because the price of the hydrogen, green hydrogen, is nearly equal of the electricity price. I mean if we want to make one kilogram hydrogen, we need about five kilowat hour electricity, that’s an equation. So no more secret. So if we can make a cheap hydrogen, it means a very, very cheap electricity existing in the world. So it’s not, it’s not good to use the hydrogen for the electricity generation. It’s not reasonable because there’s already cheap electricity is existing. So maybe in the future, like 2050, we need hydrogen for the industry like steel making or long range transportation, or sipping, or aircraft aviation. That’s kind of the area we have to concentrate to the future, but maybe in a transitional area we need hydrogen for the longer time energy storage for electricity generation, but it’s true. But in the future electricity area is not so important. That is my opinion.
Sharelynn Moore:
Yes. I agree. At least roughly 80% of the cost of hydrogen, of generating clean hydrogen, will come from electricity.
Dr. Hitoshi Kaguchi:
Yes.
Sharelynn Moore:
And that is the fundamental part of that equation. Absolutely.
Dr. Hitoshi Kaguchi:
Yeah.
Future Adoption of Green Hydrogen
Sharelynn Moore:
Marcelino, do you have a perspective on the use cases and where you see needing to adopt green hydrogen sooner rather than later?
Marcelino Oreja:
I think that, I mean, not all the energy can be electrified, so, I mean, electricity is going to be only 50% of the energy, total energy consumption. So the only way we can take the carbonized part of the economy and part of those end users is introducing hydrogen or renewable gases for their consumption. So the activities we’ve just mentioned that consume today green and gray hydrogen, are going to move quickly, I’m sure, to other, cleaner hydrogen, if we want or don’t want to use colors. It’s true that the colors have a problem because it looks like the green is the good and the others are the bad, and I don’t think this is the way, so it’s true that we should use cleaner hydrogen than the one we are using today.
And there are new other users, and just like you were saying in transport, in heavy transport, in railways, in driving, where electrification is not possible. So it is going to come there sooner than later, and if we want to really reduce tier two emissions in those sectors, the only way is to use renewable gases, whether they are mixed with the natural gas or used purely as hydrogen.
Sharelynn Moore:
Very good. And Daryl any disagreement from, you know, recognition that it is long duration transportation and these hard to bait industries like steel and others are probably the early movers. Do you agree with that, with that view?
Daryl Wilson:
Yes. At the council we’ve been studying these applications and charting which ones will have the strongest business cases earlier, and you can find that material from the council and certainly the hard to decarbonize sectors and heavy transport are favored, but I wanna bring another dimension here. One of the reasons that our energy system is not sustainable today is that it is a disintegrated system. We use liquid fuels to get around. We use gas to heat in the winter. We use electrons to keep the lights on and these three solitudes and their isolation from each other is indeed a big part of the problem. What we have in hydrogen is the opportunity to bring these energy systems together in a more integrated way than we’ve ever done before. And frankly, one of the big challenges we have in the energy discussion is we’re bringing the old thinking of, you know, we have horses for courses, and every time we have a new energy vector, we have to decide, where should it go?
And again, this is fracturing the system into pieces and the reason it’s not sustainable. What hydrogen does is to start putting the system back together. You know, there’s a wonderful example in the human body. We have a molecular life giving system in the flow of our blood, which brings oxygen to our brain and our muscles. And at three kilometers an hour, the blood is coursing through our body. Meanwhile, we have an electrical system on our body as well, which runs at 36,000 kilometers an hour and it’s critical. It runs our brain and our spinal cord and indeed keeps our heart going. So you see in the human body, the deep integration of a molecular system and an electrical system in our energy world, 85% of our energy today is molecular. 15% is electrical. And we need the electrical and molecular system working together in harmony and hydrogen gives us that opportunity.
So, I think it’s very important to think about our energy system as a whole system. And that means that hydrogen will flow into multiple applications. It’s not a matter to say, "Oh, we have a new energy tool. Let’s make it go over there and do that job." That’s old thinking. The energy system of the future will be a harmonious integrated system working like the human body does, the molecular side and the electron side. And we have this problem. We’ve got, you know, whole utilities that just focus on electrical, whole utilities that focus just on gas. And now the electrical system is saying, "wow, we wish we could have some long term storage capability," which is all today in the gas system. Hydrogen brings the prospect of offering the electrical system indeed long term seasonal energy storage, but in a deeply integrated way, not as an isolated, separate separated system. So, one of the themes that I think that we’re missing in these discussions is to understand, we need to put our electrical and PCS energy system back together with deep integration and then realize the synergy of the two systems working harmoniously together. That will give us sustainability.
Sharelynn Moore:
Oh my goodness. That’s fascinating. Marcelino, do you have a comment to add?
Marcelino Oreja:
Yeah. You know, I mean, I fully agree with you and actually what’s happening today, the big project we are looking at, we are working together as we have never done gas companies, oil companies, and natural companies, together with the end consumers. So if you look at the product I spoke about in Pallares, Mallorca, we are together with Acciona, one of the biggest Spanish, Mexico electric companies and with Simon company and with the end user, and we have the distributors. All the other big projects we’re working on, in or around Spain, we all have analytical company working with us. We are the transport company. So we are the ones experienced in transporting that nitrogen. You have the end consumer. You have the energy technical company. So the first time in seeing all of us working together in these big projects, with the administration, which is very important to have this public private public collaboration is happening. And we’re going to see huge projects. The difference between renewables, for me, is that the projects are so big that it’s not like small PV panels here and there. We are thinking of huge projects of billions of euros or dollars to be available to reduce the cost of hydrogen and to deliver the millions of tons or the thousands of tons the clients are asking for. So it looks more like big projects than small projects all around spreading slowly.
Sharelynn Moore:
I think you’re right. And when you talk about, you know, this integrated system of hydrogen brings everything together, it is on the business model side as well, which you just alluded to. And it is public private partnership. It is what is traditionally the gas industries with the electrical industries and it is, and consumers with big power. And it does all tie together. And there’s so many efficiencies by thinking about hydrogen as part of an integrated system than something net new, different, and by itself. And that’s not what that value and future will hold for us, is it? Dr. Kaguchi, any comments from you on how you are thinking about this and seeing it as an integrated puzzle, or the glue?
Dr. Hitoshi Kaguchi:
Yeah. That comment is very, very reasonable or very impressive because this is integrated. And I idealize again, the hydrogen society is the totally change from the carbon society.
So current is making energy from the carbon oil or gas or coal, and now we make a new generation of the hydrogen, but not burning a carbon. Instead, we are going to ban fire hydrogen on the, in the future. That is a maybe society in 2050. That is a very impressive comment from the, yeah, that answer. And also, one comment is because the big, big experiment demonstration in the society is coming. And I think it’s very, very difficult to do by private company because the project is too big to do without any, I’ll say economical justification.
Sharelynn Moore:
Right.
Dr. Hitoshi Kaguchi:
And if we wait the economical justification hydrogen society will not come. So we need some social system internationally by carbon pricing, carbon tax, carbon offset, or something like that. That is my opinion.
Sharelynn Moore:
Yes, agreed. So let’s transition, you know, time will go by so fast and let’s get to the heart of the matter. I think we’ve covered the territory of the need to move to cleaner hydrogen sources. We recognize its critical value and how we have to think differently about hydrogen. We recognize that the barriers to adoption is cost. And how do you address cost? We need to deploy at scale. And so let’s talk about what we’ve each seen as some of the most interesting projects to scale up hydrogen and or innovate in how we drive the cost down, because that’s the crux of bringing the future closer to the present. So would anyone like to start with some real world examples where you think there’s some game changing projects or ideas underway? Let’s start with you Daryl.
New Projects and Ideas Related to Clean Energy
Daryl Wilson:
So we’re seeing huge momentum here. I mentioned earlier that the current industrial business for hydrogens at around 200 billion. There’s more than double that amount of new hydrogen projects that have been announced just recently. The council is tracking multi megawatt, large scale projects around the world. And this means the industry will more than triple in short order. And, and in fact, the rate of new project announcements is accelerating. I think some of the areas that are particularly interesting are those areas where we’re seeing so-called hydrogen valleys or port area deployments, where the opportunity of hydrogen bringing the energy system together as a, I was mentioning early and earlier, and multiple more modalities of, of hydrogen applications all in the same place.
So it might be a large industrial off take alongside transport off takes alongside integration in the energy system for energy storage. There’s a project of that nature in t-side in the UK and Rotterdam in the Netherlands. And in fact recently facilitated by some of the international agencies a port’s initiative with more than 60 ports signing up. So these so-called clusters I think are important demonstrations of the integrative capability of hydrogen and those are the ones that really excite me.
Sharelynn Moore:
Very good. Marcelino?
Marcelino Oreja:
Yeah. Well, I mean, I think R and D is very important and I was saying before also venture capital funding is going to be very important. So promoting and helping small companies is going to be crucial in the next years. We are, as ourselves, investing in R and D. We are investing in a important product together with us all, the whole Spanish company, called Santo high, trying to develop, I mean, we’re investing in a technology using photo electrolysis to produce hydrogen directly from the sun. So, this could be a game changer. We will have no results before 2024-2025. It would be commercial after that, but that’s an example of something that could happen and change the way we see, and we produce hydrogen today, as we are doing this, there are others doing other developments around the world. So, we’re going to see many ways to produce hydrogen. Also, depending on the use of that hydrogen, we would be hydrogen very pure for some users or less pure for others. So that’s going to also going to need different types of technologies producing different types of hydrogens, hydrogen at all the world.
Sharelynn Moore:
Thank you. At bloom and then I’ll go to you doctor. At bloom we’ve been heavily invested in how can we make the world’s most energy efficient electrolyzer and believe solid oxide is ideally suited to be that most energy efficient and therefore most effective at lowering the cost of producing hydrogen, recognizing that we have to find innovations and investment innovation to help attack that problem. Dr. how do you see the breakthroughs that are needed or the ideas or projects to progress?
Needed Breakthroughs For The Future
Dr. Hitoshi Kaguchi:
Okay. My thought is that I’m very optimistic about technology innovation. I think we can do technically, but as I said, price of the hydrogen is the equal to the price of the electricity. So maybe what we need now is the more renewable energy development. And if the electricity is becoming cheap, people want to use the hydrogen as a media to transport energy. So that’s a basically, so to support this, we need some social system and also international collaboration. That is my opinion. Thank you.
Marcelino Oreja:
There are going to be other ways to produce hydrogen without electricity, and the one I was saying, photo electrolysis produces hydrogen directly from the sun and using photo electrolysis without electricity we produce. So we’re going to see other ways to produce hydrogen and we’re going to produce also hydrogen from [inaudible], and that’s going to help us also to produce cheap hydrogen. And that’s also new hydrogen. So we’re going to see many different ways to produce hydrogen in the future.
Sharelynn Moore:
I agree. Waste heat is another way to produce hydrogen and it’s leveraging at excess or heat, whether it’s from part of the output of hydrogen powered furnaces and the waste heat then is used to drive further efficiencies or excess thermal from nuclear could be another source of how we produce hydrogen. And again, it’s when it’s part of creating hydrogen is part of a broader inter integrated mix of an energy system. You can find, I think a lot of unique ways to add hydrogen production into the broader energy mix, which is interesting. I’ve been monitoring as some of the questions that I brought up and some of us have naturally touched on answers to some, but one of the questions that was brought up in a few minutes was a lot of talk about the value of green hydrogen. But what about water and how do you see water being a part of that mix, and maybe I’ll start with you Daryl.
Water In Relation To Green Hydrogen
Daryl Wilson:
So in our lifecycle study published in January, we looked at that across all of the various production pathways, as Marcelino has said, there are many ways to get to hydrogen. And we looked at the whole broad spectrum and we were able to show that actually the hydrogen production is not a water intensive activity even with electrolysis where we’re taking water and indeed splitting into hydrogen and oxygen and deriving the hydrogen from the water. Even there in comparison to other industrial processes, which we do regard as water intensive, hydrogen production is not a water intensive activity. As well, it’s possible to take all the different qualities of water from sea water to brackish water and to process it at relatively low cost and derive hydrogen. So, we do not believe that this is a constraint in the most severely impacted areas where water is in extreme scarcity. Yes, maybe there may be a concern but in the main indeed water supply and water quality are not concerns when it comes to hydrogen production. And you can find that the factual backup for that within the lifecycle analysis report published in January.
Marcelino Oreja:
Can you give us just a quick example to understand why a water is not a problem. The water needed to produce hydrogen through electrolysis for a car to be moved 400 kilometers is about the same that we will use for a shower.
Sharelynn Moore:
<Laugh>
Marcelino Oreja:
Okay. So it’s, that’s not the problem. So this is a good example. Okay. So 400 kilometers, one shower.
Sharelynn Moore:
<Laugh> I like that.
Daryl Wilson:
And of course the water all goes back in the natural ecosystem and returns to us. So, this is when the true sustainable nature of hydrogen becomes evident because we’re not putting emissions and pollutants and CO2 into the atmosphere. That car has only emitted water vapor, which is back into the whole hydraulic system of the planet. So completely harmonious.
Sharelynn Moore:
Well said. I think we put that issue to rest. Closing comments. I find our future is very great. There is a lot of innovation going on, and these were some very inspiring comments. Closing comments let’s do a quick rapid round. Dr. Kaguchi, quick close.
Dr. Hitoshi Kaguchi:
Yeah. Thank you. Originally I’m nuclear engineer, so thank you for the comment making hydrogen from nuclear. We call it pink hydrogen. Thank you. Thank you very much.
Sharelynn Moore:
You’re welcome. Marcelino.
Marcelino Oreja:
Well, I think we have amazing opportunity to change the way we energy and to make cleaner industries. And for the energy industry is going to be very challenging times, plenty of opportunities to invest and to create jobs and to make are economy grow again.
Sharelynn Moore:
Thank you. And Daryl.
Daryl Wilson:
You know, we’ve been heading in the hydrogen direction for a long time. If you look at burning wood and oil and coal and natural gas, what’s been happening for many, many decades is less and less carbon and more and more hydrogen in our energy sources. And now we’re kind of arriving at the final destination: pure hydrogen indeed. There’s a lot to learn about this discussion, but it’s critically important and urgent that we do learn, and we do work together. I think the wonderful thing about hydrogen is that together working across all these different sectors and the examples that have been shared by Mitsubishi and Enagas depicts that the importance that we come together and innovate together and capitalize on the opportunity of finally putting our energy system back together with hydrogen.
Sharelynn Moore:
Excellent. Well, great closing comment. I couldn’t have said anything better with myself. Owen, I will turn it over to you. Thank you to my panelist this morning.
Marcelino Oreja:
Thank you very much.
Owen Rolt:
Thank you to all of our panelists and thank you to Sharelynn as well. Another brilliant session. A quick reminder that both Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Bloom Energy do have content hubs in the exhibitor tabs. So do check them out at the top of your screen. Very shortly, I’ll be joined by Seifi Ghasemi, CEO of Air Products to continue this hydrogen conversation and examine the neon project in a little more detail. After that you’ll hear from Norwegian minister for petroleum and energy in conversation with Gladys Fuge Bureau Chief at Reuter’s news.