Snorvey wrote:It's been said that its expensive to produce hydrogen (and we'll just focus on green hydrogen here). But it must be quite expensive to produce a gallon of gasoline from absolute scratch. Prospecting, drilling extraction, transportation, refining and so on.
I might suggest that you would get a more, shall we say,...focussed... reply over on the oil board rather than DAK. But broadly you can say 1 barrel of oil is 159 litres and contains 1.7 MWh of energy, the same as 50kg of hydrogen.
Current prices for green hydrogen are around $3-6/kg, so £125-£250 for 50kg. See eg this recent paper from HMG for the cost of different technologies (but multiply by 1.7!)
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.u ... df#page=31Whereas production costs for oil are maybe $5/bbl in the Middle East, $50/bbl offshore. Yes you have to transport it to a refinery and refine it, but that costs a couple of bucks.Oil is dirt cheap for what it is.
Eg some 2018 refining costs here :
https://www.compassinternational.net/wp ... _Capex.pdfTheir basic little 60,000bpd-capacity refinery in the US costs $762-$918 million. Amortise that over 20 years, allow for some maintenance downtime and it's about $2 per barrel plus say the same again in finance costs.
They estimate opex for a 50,000bpd refinery (ie 17.5 million barrels per year) at $8.9m so another $2/bbl.
So the
average barrel of oil products costs about half the
cheapest green hydrogen (before you start adding taxes and margin).
The real issue is that the infrastructure for hydrocarbons is already built and (largely) depreciated, whereas for hydrogen you're having to do massive capex before you sell a single kg. Which in turn means that for the next decade it will largely be confined to discrete sites such as chemical plants where it can be used on site without needing lots of transport infrastructure.
And to be honest, hydrogen isn't really competing against "oil" but natural gas - for the next several years the limited amounts of hydrogen available will be sucked up by the likes of chemical and fertiliser plants that don't have alternatives to replace the chemical reactivity of natural gas, whereas eg most forms of transport will have alternatives in the form of batteries. And if your application can use batteries, you see eg 85-90% efficiency from windmill to wheel, whereas going via hydrogen gives you 45-50% efficiency. Unless there's a huge lithium shortage then physics dictates that hydrogen just won't be able to compete with batteries for mainstream transport (outside certain niches).
And the infrastructure argument also applies - we have an electricity grid already. Yes it needs changes to accommodate the coming electrification of heat and transport, but it's an inherently incremental process rather than almost starting from scratch like hydrogen.
Snorvey wrote:Is hydrogen produced by a nuclear reactor classed as green btw?
There's a can of worms, not least because terms like "green hydrogen" have no official status. But eg the EU will consider hydrogen from nuclear as "low carbon hydrogen" for the purposes of their classification (and see
herefor what that means in UK terms)