Oil companies are touting their long experience with using hydrogen for industrial processes, as interest has grown in switching to it as a lower-carbon energy source when produced with renewable power.
But even proponents noted at the World Petroleum Congress (WPC) this week that even lower-emissions green hydrogen also has its tarnishes.
"Hydrogen is not the silver bullet," said Csaba Zsoter, senior vice president of Hungary's MOL Group. The Budapest-based company is building a 10MW, €22mn ($23.4mn) green hydrogen plant in Hungary that will feed the nearby 165,000 b/d Danube refinery, lowering its carbon emissions, along with other hydrogen initiatives.
Hydrogen was a key focus at the conference, which took place the same week as UN's Climate Ambition Summit in New York City.
But Zsoter and others noted that lags in demand for end uses of lower-emissions hydrogen and last-mile infrastructure development, permitting issues and other hurdles must be overcome, even for companies long used to working with higher-emissions grey hydrogen.
Hydrogen prices at about $200/t for blue hydrogen — produced from natural gas — or $300/t for green hydrogen are not high enough to promote investment and governments must provide more incentives, Aramco chief executive Amin Nasser said on a separate panel.
To balance this, Japan has taken the baby-step approach of launching hydrogen pilot projects gradually, said Momoyo Yuki, head of research at Japan Petroleum Exploration. The country is also looking for hydrogen that could be simply released from drilling — referred to as white or gold hydrogen — which can lower costs and energy intensity significantly.
Hydrogen produced through electrolysis can also demand large quantities of water, which could be an issue in drier areas such as Alberta in Canada, said Bryan Helfenbaum, associate vice president of Clean Energy at Alberta Innovates.
"Water intensity as well as carbon intensity should be taken into account," he said. He also pushed industry groups to discuss the specific carbon intensities of different types of hydrogen, rather than relying on the "rainbow" concept that has been used to communicate about hydrogen to general members of the public.
But no matter the color or carbon intensity, Helfenbaum also noted that even one major safety incident with hydrogen could set the field back 5-10 years — the explosion of the hydrogen-filled Hindenburg airship is still mentioned almost 100 years later, he noted.
