 We'll be helped by Hannoverg. It's about a hydrogen beyond the hype. Hannoverg is a journalist and he wrote about the technologies that we have and that will help us to tackle the problem of climate change over the next years. And without further ado, Hannoverg. Thank you, Hannoverg. Yeah, hello. Yeah, as I said today, I want to talk about hydrogen and how it may be used as a solution to our emissions problems. So there is currently a lot of interest in hydrogen as a climate solution. And you could also say there's a lot of hype. Now, if you follow this space a bit longer than maybe this sounds familiar, because like the idea of something like a hydrogen economy that that goes back to the 70s, like where I wasn't even born. But, and then again, it kind of became quite popular in the early 2000s, particularly in the US. There was a push to to build cars that drive with hydrogen. But ultimately, not much came out of those previous instances of hydrogen hype, to say, but it looks currently that this time this may be a bit different, that this may be a bit more real than these previous instances where hydrogen was discussed as a solution. So right now, particularly in the EU, and also in Germany, there's from the political side, a very strong push in that direction. The EU published a hydrogen road map a while ago, and also Germany has its own strategy for hydrogen deployment. And I guess this is a number that just shows that this is that this is serious, like the EU has plans to invest 140 billion euro into hydrogen projects within the next couple of years. So that's that's quite quite a large sum that that's going into this space. And hydrogen is interesting because it can help us bring down emissions in sectors that are the so called hard to decarbonize sectors, which basically means it's there's no easy solution to, to make these sectors climate neutral or reduce the emissions substantially. But before we talk about the future and how hydrogen may help us being a climate solution, we should talk a bit about how hydrogen is used today. And because there already is a quite large industry that is using hydrogen. And actually, that's quite a dirty industry. So right now, hydrogen is usually made from fossil fuels. The the most relevant method to do that is a process called steam methane reforming. Methane is the main ingredient of natural gas, or you could also say fossil gas. And there's also some hydrogen that is made from coal with a process that's called coal gasification. And this production of hydrogen today is responsible for around 2% of the CO2 emissions worldwide. So it's I mean, it's not not huge, but it's quite substantial. So so right now, hydrogen is more of a climate problem than a climate solution. And the the majority of hydrogen is used in two sectors. One is ammonia production and ammonia is a an important ingredient for fertilizers. So that is basically used to grow our food. And the other one is is removal of sulfur within oil refineries, which is of course, hopefully something that in the future, we will get rid of because we want to get rid of fossil fuels. And therefore, there shouldn't be any oil refiners anymore. But that's like the situation today. And these are everything else is not very relevant. These two sectors consume basically almost all of the hydrogen that is produced today. But how could this change in the future? Like how could hydrogen become a climate solution? The what we want to get is so called green hydrogen, where there's a technology called electrolysis, which is basically we use electricity and that electricity, of course, ideally should come from solar or wind or other clean sources of electricity. And we can use that to to take water. And then we split the water into oxygen and hydrogen. So the picture you can see here that is in an electrolyser in in Prenslau, that is north of Berlin at a company called Anna truck that's already been installed about a decade ago. But overall, hydrogen from electrolysis that only exists in very small scales today. So it's less than a percent of the global hydrogen production comes from this this direct electrolysis. Yeah, so okay, but in the future, hopefully this will be more. And as we heard, there is quite some investment into this. So what what can we do with this hydrogen? And what should we do with this hydrogen? So one thing that is very important to keep in mind here is that when we do something like we use electricity to split up water, so we're converting the electric energy into into a chemical energy in the hydrogen. But every conversion of energy introduces losses, we lose some of the energy as heat that goes into the atmosphere. So if we can, we want to avoid this. So so the things to keep in mind here is that whenever we can use electricity directly without this conversion into hydrogen, and maybe then even back into electricity when we use something like a fuel cell, then it's likely better to use the electricity directly. So one thing I really want to emphasize here is that this is not about cars, like here you can see this fuel cell car. But this is this is basically like a lot of people seem to be very excited about fuel cell cars. But basically, most experts agree that this is not going to happen. And the reason is simply that that you have this efficiency loss when you when you have a car with a fuel cell, then you first convert electricity into hydrogen, and then you convert it back into electricity. And the losses are much bigger than when you use a battery. So and I kind of noticed that whenever I write something an article about hydrogen, then in the end, I didn't write anything about cars. But in the comment section, there will always be a discussion about hydrogen for cars. So so I really want to emphasize that this is not what this is about. And this is not almost certainly not where this is going in the future. But there are areas where it's not easily possible to use electricity or rates even even just impossible. And their hydrogen can play a role. And one very important sector is the production of steel. So steel today. So when you produce steel, what you have is iron ore and that is on a chemical level, mostly iron oxide. So you you have something which is a reduction process, which means you have you have iron with with oxygen, and you need to get this oxygen out. And how you do this today is that you use coal. And the steel industry is currently responsible for around 8% of the worldwide CO2 emissions. So that's that's quite big. And these emissions aren't just energy emissions, but these are emissions from this chemical reduction process. And several companies are currently working on something that is called direct reduced iron that can be used with hydrogen. So this is the technology that already exists today. But today it's usually usually using natural gas. So it's not really a solution if you do it with natural gas, but you can switch that natural gas for hydrogen, and then use hydrogen instead of coal to produce steel. The most advanced project is a company in Sweden, SSAB, that they have announced that they want to completely switch to that process within the next couple of decades. But there are a number of companies who are working on this. So yeah. Another sector where hydrogen can be an interesting option is is the whole sector of chemicals and particularly plastics. So I mean plastics today, they are usually made from oil, sometimes also from natural gas, but it's all fossil fuels. And one thing that could be done is that you can use hydrogen and then you need also CO2 and you can turn this into methanol. And then you can use methanol as a basis for all kinds of chemical processes and can produce something like plastics, but also other chemicals. And that could be a replacement for the petrochemical industry. Now a challenge here is that you need CO2 for this. And you need to be careful what these projects are trying to do this, what exactly they do. Because you could of course say, okay, we have too much CO2. We can go to the next coal power plant and then we get the CO2 from their emissions and then we make methanol from this. But then you're at the end, whatever you're producing will likely end up in an incinerator and then you have the CO2 emissions again. And also you really don't want to do something that creates an incentive to keep a coal power plant running. And the alternative is to you could filter the CO2 out of the air, which is a technology called direct air capture, but that needs a lot of energy, that basically needs a lot of electricity. So that this road to use hydrogen for chemicals, it can be done, but it needs a lot of energy. So that makes it quite expensive. Yeah. Another interesting sector for hydrogen is the production of ammonia. As I said earlier, ammonia is already made from hydrogen. Today, it's ammonia is made from fossil hydrogen. And then you also need nitrogen, but nitrogen is the main ingredient of the air around us. So we have plenty of that. So it's a very obvious step to say, okay, this ammonia production today, we should switch that from fossil hydrogen to green hydrogen. But also, it is discussed whether ammonia could be used as a fuel, for example. And one sector that's particularly looking at that is the shipping industry, like particularly large container ships. There is currently no really good solution for them to make them run on renewable energy, but ammonia is discussed as one option. And it has the advantage of other things like methanol. Methanol you could also use in a ship. But then you have this problem, where do you get the CO2 from? And that if you want to get the CO2 from the air, it needs a lot of energy. And with ammonia, you don't really have that problem because you don't need a carbon atom in it that I put you the chemical formulas here because ammonia is basically hydrogen and nitrogen. So that's an interesting option. And there are plenty of other things where hydrogen could play a role. One is aviation, you may have heard that last year there was an announcement by Airbus that they want to develop hydrogen powered planes, up to medium distance, but it's probably needed because there's really no, and of course you can reduce aviation, but there probably still will be some need for aviation. So yeah, hydrogen may be an option in shipping, but it may also be like for the smaller ships, they will probably be electric. And as I said earlier, for the larger particularly container ships, it may be that they will use ammonia. And it's not clear whether there will be an in-between space to use hydrogen directly. But it seems right now that it seems that this may also go into the electric and battery direction. So it's not clear whether this is going to happen. Then you can do all this, what is summarized under this name, e-fuels, which means basically you're doing something like diesel or kerosene and make it out of hydrogen. But that you have a similar problem to what I earlier mentioned with the methanol that you need CO2 and that all of this is very inefficient and so it's very expensive. So very likely you will only use this in sectors where you don't have an alternative, which is primarily long-distance aviation. Then also you can use hydrogen for heating, both in industrial applications and also to heat your houses and flats. But it's questionable whether this is a good idea because almost obviously you can use electricity directly there and that is more efficient. Then there's also the whole discussion about electricity storage like you could use excess renewable energy when you have too much electricity and use that to produce hydrogen. Then particularly in winter when we have situations where maybe there's not a lot of wind and not a lot of sun and then you need extra electricity and then you could use the hydrogen to produce electricity. The problem with that is that this is also very expensive, particularly because it assumes that you have electrolysis that produce the hydrogen but you're not running it all the time, you're only running it when you have excess electricity. So this will likely be needed because we need some electricity storage options, particularly long-term storage, but it's also something where you probably want to look at alternatives whenever you can and use these before you use this expensive option. One thing that is quite important is to realize that the scale of this is enormous. So right now we have almost no green hydrogen and we need to grow this to massive sizes and just some numbers to get an idea about that. These numbers are mostly from this German hydrogen strategy. So right now there's 55 terawatt hours of hydrogen used per year in Germany. That is mostly for ammonia and for refineries but if we want to convert steel into to use hydrogen then it's projected then in 2050 we will need something like 80 terawatt hours and the whole renewable electricity production in Germany last year, in 2019, the last year where we have the numbers already was 251. And now if you assume we add the, I don't know, we use it for ammonia production for shipping and then we use it for the chemical industry and then we also have some losses. Today they are around 20 percent. If we have better technology, maybe better electrolyzers will bring this down to 10 percent losses but all in all there will be huge amounts of electricity needed to produce all that hydrogen and likely more electricity than what we use in electricity today. So we need a lot more renewable electricity. I mean this is a very key message and also I think it's sometimes a bit funny when you have politicians particularly from the more conservative spectrum when they say yeah hydrogen is this great climate solution but then they are pushing back on extending wind energy and it doesn't really match like if we want to go that hydrogen route and I think we have to we will just need a lot more renewable electricity. But also for a country like Germany where it's just it's relatively dense and space is limited then this probably means that there will be a need to import hydrogen. And this brings up an interesting question because hydrogen is actually quite difficult to transport. If you want to transport it via ship you have to first compress it because it's not very dense and that needs extra energy. So an interesting question becomes if you really want to import hydrogen or if you want to import something that is made from hydrogen. And one thing again is you could say maybe we produce ammonia somewhere else where there's a lot of renewable electricity and then import the ammonia and we already need ammonia for the fertilizer production so this may be a better option. And one thing here that I find kind of captures this very well is that if you have a molecule of ammonia that contains more hydrogen than actually a molecule of hydrogen. So if you have it in its natural state without when it's not compressed or something then ammonia is just a more dense carrier of hydrogen than hydrogen itself. Yeah one thing of course also that plays a role here is costs because right now if you produce hydrogen in a green in a clean way then this is more expensive than fossil fuel-based hydrogen which is the reason why it's not made very often today. And when we want cheaper green hydrogen we need basically two things we need cheap renewable energy and that is I mean you probably know that that solar power and wind energy already is is massively cheaper than it used to be a few years ago and there's still potential that it gets even cheaper so I'm not not very worried about that but the other side is we need cheap electrolyzers like these basically these machines that turn water into hydrogen and the the key here is that technology gets cheaper at scale right so if solar power got cheap because we just built lots of it and then yeah common processes can be optimized and I think really wind and solar is is the thing to look at here because that is kind of the success story that that one may build upon because they they became cheap basically because some countries started to install solar energy and wind energy at a time where they were not competitive in prices so yes that means this money yes or maybe indirectly I mean in Germany we have this renewable energy law where you pay it with your electricity prices but someone has to pay that but I think this is really the key one of the things that needs to happen next when we want to go in that hydrogen direction that you just need to build up these electrolyzers you need to to install them and if you install them in large quantities then the prices will go down yeah and last I want to talk a bit about who is currently interested in this space particularly from the industry and how this discussion is going sometimes so one of the reasons why why this discussion is so big right now is that actually natural gas industry is heavily lobbying in this space and they are trying to influence the discussion so there are several organizations that are mostly made of companies from the natural gas industry that are trying to to to form this discussion and I mean for one today hydrogen production is usually based on natural gas so naturally they will say okay we can sell you the hydrogen today it's fossil hydrogen but and that is something to be on the lookout for like today if someone says yeah we we do this project with hydrogen I don't know we use it to power a train or whatever then very often it is that they are not using green hydrogen but they are using fossil hydrogen also like there are a few hydrogen gas stations in Germany for example and they are also like what you can buy there is fossil hydrogen um and I mean obviously that that is not something that makes sense as a climate solution and then there's also there are two ideas how the industry thinks that they could make a cleaner hydrogen but still based on on natural gas one of these options which they call blue hydrogen is that you you you still make the the hydrogen like you did before with this steam methane reforming but you add ccs which stands for carbon capture and storage which means you're trying to to take the co2 emissions and then store them in underground somewhere and another process is called methane pyrolysis where you're chemically splitting up the methane into hydrogen and pure carbon so both of these processes likely won't mean that you will have zero emissions one reason for that is that even drilling for natural gas um even drilling for natural gas and transporting it you will have leaks in pipelines and the the natural gas itself is the greenhouse gas um the other problem with that is in ccs you usually don't capture all the emissions but uh and the more you capture the more expensive it becomes so you may have a situation where you either have something that is very expensive or something that is very expensive or something that is not much better than the fossil option you had before um yeah uh another thing you can observe right now a lot is that the natural gas industry is pushing for hydrogen in residential heating so they will tell you yeah we can right now a lot of houses and flats they they use gas boilers for heating and they want to switch that to hydrogen in the future maybe with an intermediate step of having some mixing in of hydrogen um from from an efficiency point of view this does not make a lot of sense and the reason for that is that just you can use a heat pump with electricity and that is just extremely efficient so it's very likely that the heat pump will will cover most of the heating needs in residential heating in the future um but so why are they so focused on this residential heating and I think that the reason is that is this that there's uh there's a huge natural gas grid and that consists of very different things like you have these huge pipes this on on the left side here is the oigal pipeline which is currently built in Brandenburg but you also have these all these smaller pipes that go into people's homes so the natural gas grid is just a huge piece of infrastructure and if the world gets serious about climate change and we really massively reduce emissions then most of this natural gas grid just becomes worthless so you kind of get the idea that if you own such a grid then you you're maybe not comfortable with that maybe you you're wondering what can I do with this in the future so I think that is where this this push for residential heating with hydrogen comes from and the industry basically hopes that they can repurpose the natural gas grid for hydrogen and I mean don't get me wrong this is it's generally a good idea like I mean it needs some changes in the technology because hydrogen is kind of different from the methane that's usually used in natural gas but it makes sense to use existing infrastructure when you need it but if you look at a scenario which I think is a likely scenario where you're primarily using hydrogen in industry then you will not have a large grid you will not have a national grid and you will definitely not have a grid that goes into residential areas and into people's home you will much more likely have a smaller grid where you have a hydrogen production facility maybe close to some renewable energy production and then maybe it's transported to a steel plant and maybe to a chemical plant but there's no need for for this large grid that we have today so in all likelihood even if we use hydrogen wisely then a lot of the natural gas grid will will just become obsolete yeah um yeah so yeah to summarize it looks like there's a hydrogen boom coming and I think this is really good news because we will need it in some areas but the hydrogen should be used wisely and likely only in sectors where we don't have a better alternative and also a quick announcement tonight I will do a Q&A session in the like in cooperation with hackers against climate change where we can discuss this or also other questions around how can we move the whole industry to climate neutral technologies uh uh leading to a big blue button is in the dbq um yeah so that was the talk and I think now we have some time for questions yeah thank you very much it was really interesting and I think it showed us in a nutshell that um everything is once more much more complicated and complex than uh some people would like it to be um yes we do already have some questions in the pad if you go to the schedule you find the um the questions pad in on the detail page of this talk uh you can still enter questions there um let's start with one pretty interesting one is already the claim of natural gas not some kind of greenwashing um yeah I mean I agree with that I'm also struggling what terminology to use there I mean the natural gas it always sounds like natural nice and but it's the term that is used right I mean I sometimes use fossil gas but it's a bit difficult when you have an established terminology that that already pushes in that direction but I think also in more general there it is a problem that that gas has quite a positive reputation because it was for a long time it was pushed as this it's better than coal it's better than oil uh where today we can say maybe okay maybe that's true but that's not good enough so yeah but I agree natural gas is a problematic term there's a question I think you you already scratched the topic but probably you have one or two more sentences on the efficacy of hydrogen powered houses like a little hydrogen power plant for small houses even um so I currently don't have a number on top of my head it's just um if you're like you're I mean you already have a electricity grid so you already have electricity in your home um when it's about heating you can use a heat pump which is you're basically using the energy from from either outside or underground so you have a more than 100 percent efficiency with a heat pump um I cannot put an exact number on this but but there's a massive difference and um there's one long one I think I would just read it out um a lot of political actors try to push hydrogen for cars as competition to be evs uh with the um uh word of technologie betroffenheit or no technologie offenheit yeah sorry some of them even suggest using it to keep the combustion engine alive are those people just misinformed or is there a deeper agenda behind this uh okay that's um yeah I so I mean one thing is that hydrogen cars are not combustion engines like they're using fuel cells they are basically also electric cars they are just converting hydrogen into electricity you in theory you could build a car with a combustion hydrogen engine but nobody's doing that like that doesn't exist it that's pure fantasy uh the I think yeah I mean I guess I mean this is a I think this is a discussion that's a lot happening in Germany uh because there's this impression that we have a large car industry and that it has a lot of knowledge in in combustion engines and there's also the other discussion about e-fuels all of that is just it's not plausible from an efficiency and and just the amount of electricity you would need to to pull that off and I mean one one thing to keep in mind here is that uh uh we will need a lot of electricity in the future if we want to go to this time of nuclear technology and we just cannot afford to add additional inefficiency in there uh but I also think this this this technologie often had discussion this this will go away in a few years like this I I know it like like this seems right now for me this is also something where politicians from the conservative and the so-called liberal party try to set some counterpoint where they they have their climate policy that's different from the other but yeah do you think the the whole discussion would benefit from um more uh information more um uh yeah of clearing for for all the people that um that we get to more use to all those technologies um early on in our lives hmm yeah I mean it's what I'm trying right I mean I write about these things I give the talk yeah of course like more informed I hope more informed discussion is good I mean I feel like very often this particular this car discussion is is having a very limited perspective where people start to get enraged about lithium mining but then they never talk about oil mining and yeah um yeah yeah well we got some more questions in the pub and people are already typing so um what would be something that you would if you had a wish what would that be for this sector I think we should start to build these electrolyzers like that is the next step that needs to happen and in at large scales like there was a few days ago a company from Denmark announced that they want to build one gigawatt of electrolyzer capacity in the Netherlands and this is the kind of project I would like to see right now I'm not sure if I understand the question correctly but probably we can work this out together here um when to use battery versus hydrogen on off-grid movables or why use hydrogen for long distance flights um okay so it's kind of medium distance flights the problem is a battery is just too heavy for long for a flight that goes more than maybe 100 kilometers so so there are some efforts to to start battery powered flights but they will likely be small and short distance so you have more density with hydrogen than a battery but it's the less density than than normal fuel so we just have a problem in weight for this particular means of movement yeah so you just cannot transport the battery on a long distance flight because it's too heavy then which could possibly change when battery technology evolves yeah but there are limits like it even if you add even if you think about 10 fold increase in efficiency that still wouldn't get you across the Atlantic so okay yeah but but even the hydrogen plane wouldn't get you across the Atlantic so so this is really a challenging sector I wrote a very long article about it last year yeah so I think this this point in there are limits is the thing that should probably reach people in politics and wherever there are but are currently moving the the discussion in particular particular directions yeah so yeah I mean thank you very much for your work there yeah if you look at the aviation thing you may almost must come to the conclusion that there's no technology where you can just replace the current planes and then go on like before because you can use e-fuels but the the scale is just enormous like there's a projection that we would use more electricity than all the electricity that's produced today just to power planes and I just don't think that this is plausible so we need to talk about that in this very difficult sectors we also need to talk about reduction there's one last question coming in I would just wait for whoever's writing to to finish the sentence maybe the reminder for the self-organized session in the evening have a look there hop in and talk to Hano I think this is a really really great topic to to keep on our focus um yeah yeah probably typing on typing on stopping with sentence Hano how did you how did you choose this topic for you why did you get there um so one thing is that that just noticed that whenever I write about hydrogen right now it there's a lot of interest so it seems it's currently just a topic people want to talk about so yeah and nobody else hit the topic in in that detail yeah the question is if steam so a water vapor and emissions in large heights are they also climate efficient yeah so so if you use hydrogen in aviation that's a problem I mean we're talking about technology that doesn't exist yet maybe it's possible to somehow capture that and like to just transport the water with the plane but a big problem there's also that there's a lot of uncertainty like there's a report from some research EU research project where they say these the emissions from aviation are between three and seven percent like so we have a four percent like we have more than a hundred percent uncertainty and that is because we really don't know how big these water vapor emissions are they are very hard to model so one thing there is yeah they exist they are a problem but we don't know how big the problem is okay so in short we've a lot of two okay thank you very much hano we are unfortunately out of time yes the reminder for the self organized session in the evening to go a bit more in depth on this topic and to all your articles you're writing about it yeah go to my web page and they are linked from there all most of them are German so yeah but I can we have to tell and can put the here's the link yeah okay so thank you again and have a wonderful dvok yeah thanks