The future of hydrogen energy
In the context of limited natural resources and global warming, the world community is actively searching for alternative energy sources that would meet both economic and political challenges and modern climate standards. On the threshold of great changes, more and more countries are beginning to pay attention to hydrogen, which is used today in many areas of industry: in the production of fertilisers, plastics, medicines, microelectronics, as well as in the oil refining process. This chemical element tops the Mendeleev table and is considered to be the most abundant in the Universe - its concentration is about 92%. At the same time, hydrogen has unique heat-conducting properties, due to which it can become a worthy alternative to common energy resources in the future.
The historical path to hydrogen as an energy carrier
The idea of using hydrogen as an energy carrier first appeared at the beginning of the 19th century, but it was only realised in the 20s and 40s of the 20th century. At that time, it was scientifically and experimentally established that hydrogen can increase the engine power by more than 10%, while maintaining its energy efficiency properties.
During the Second World War, the study of hydrogen also received special attention. In blockaded Leningrad, cargo vehicles were converted to hydrogen fuel, which was extracted from spent stocks in air defence barrier balloons, for which Soviet mechanic Boris Shelishch was awarded the Order of the Red Star in December 1941. A year later this element was actively used in autonomous power systems of diesel submarines. In the post-war years hydrogen became an integral element of rocket engines and the main component of the hydrogen bomb, thanks to which it took a firm place in the defence-industrial complex.
The most active study of hydrogen began in the 1970s of the 20th century, coinciding with the world energy crisis. At the end of 1974, the International Association for Hydrogen Energy was established, and a number of countries, realising the prospects of this industry, began to include programmes to study the possibilities of using hydrogen in their energy doctrines.
In 1974, Japan launched the Sunshine Project, which operated successfully until a new one appeared in 2000. It was the largest hydrogen energy programme with a total funding of $15 billion, of which $3.6 billion was allocated for hydrogen research. The scientific and technical developments carried out under this programme formed the basis of modern hydrogen energy in Japan.
A decade later, progress was also achieved in one of the most problematic areas of hydrogen energy - hydrogen storage. Thus, scientists developed a new generation of composite gas cylinders, which differed from their predecessors in light weight and large capacity, after which the USSR (Buran-Energia programme) and the USA (Space Shuttle) for the first time created launch vehicles with liquid hydrogen engines. And in April 1988 the first successful test of Tu-155 aircraft using hydrogen fuel took place in the USSR.
Only in the 90s of the 20th century hydrogen began to be actively used in the commercial sphere. At that time, such giants as General Motors, Daimler-Benz, Toyota and BMW started working on the introduction of hydrogen fuel systems in cars. And a little later, the world's first hydrogen fuel cell power plant (11 MW) opened in Japan.
Thus, in the period from the 70s to the 90s, the scientific and practical basis of modern hydrogen energy was formed, and the world community came to realise the numerous advantages of hydrogen compared to other energy sources.
Advantages of hydrogen energy carriers
Hydrogen has a wide range of possibilities for its use, primarily due to the limitlessness of its reserves. It contains three times more energy than, for example, fossil energy sources, and its efficiency for energy generation is 30% higher than that of conventional fuels.
This chemical element is universal and could become one of the main sources of energy used in various production or commercial activities, particularly in long-distance transport, where fuels with high energy efficiency are required. Airbus has already presented the concept of hydrogen-powered aircraft, which are planned to be in service by 2035. States are also beginning to introduce hydrogen in the housing and utilities sector. For example, back in 2016, the UK Government announced the start of the conversion of the gas and heating network of the city of Leeds into a system based on hydrogen fuel cells. And Japan in May 2024 announced a gradual transition by 2050 from liquefied natural gas currently used for domestic purposes to synthetic methane produced from carbon dioxide and hydrogen obtained from seawater. This initiative was also supported in Oman and Australia, where Japan's Hitachi Zosen Corporation plans to build synthetic methane plants.
Challenges of hydrogen energy utilisation
According to the International Energy Agency's report "Global Hydrogen Industry Outlook 2023", global hydrogen production is 95 million tonnes, of which 45% is used in petroleum refining, 36% in ammonia production, 14% in methanol production and 5% in metallurgy. However, hydrogen consumption in the energy sector is only 0.04% - this low percentage is due to a number of reasons.
Firstly, the lightness of hydrogen creates problems with its packaging and, consequently, transportation. Its mass in standard containers is much smaller than that of other fuels, which leads to the need to store and transport hydrogen in larger containers and significantly increases the cost of transport. In order to solve this problem, scientists are working on ways to convert hydrogen into other aggregate states - liquid or gaseous. However, this may have a negative impact on the final volume of the transported volatile chemical element.
Secondly, hydrogen is almost never found in nature, which makes it necessary to produce it. It is extracted from different chemical elements, and the methods of its extraction are divided by colour gradation: red hydrogen is extracted from nuclear energy, grey - from methane, brown - from coal, blue - from natural gas. All of the above methods, although economically profitable - $2 per kilogram, are accompanied by waste emissions into the atmosphere, which partly devalues the very idea of hydrogen energy. At the same time, there is also green hydrogen extracted from renewable energy sources by electrolysis of water, but the cost of its production is much higher and amounts to about $10 per kilogram. Such a price in the current realities of the global energy market is uncompetitive in comparison, for example, with oil, a litre of which costs less than $1.5 at wholesale.
To date, only a few cases of natural hydrogen have been recorded in the world. For example, in Mali (Africa), a hydrogen generator operates on gas that comes from a well drilled in search of water: 98% of this gas consists of hydrogen. Hydrogen outlets have also been recorded from the subsurface in the Voronezh and Lipetsk Regions.
Creation of new methods of hydrogen production in order to reduce its cost has become a new challenge for the world scientific community in the last decade. Thus, in 2003, Russian scientists developed a technology of hydrogen production by oxidation of aluminium particles under the influence of laser radiation, which makes it possible to use half as much energy as electrolysis. According to media reports, the issue of scaling up such a technological process is currently being considered. In addition, in April 2024, British scientists created a method of turning metal waste into an effective catalyst for the production of hydrogen from water. The Australian company Hysata has also made significant progress in improving the efficiency and, consequently, reducing the cost of green hydrogen production. In May this year, it announced the completion of tests on a new plant that can split hydrogen and oxygen with an efficiency of 95 %, compared to 75 % for its analogues. If the current pace of technology development and its production scaling is maintained, experts estimate that the price per kilogram of green hydrogen by 2050 could fall to an average of the usual $2 per kilogram.
Thirdly, the development of hydrogen energy can cause serious material damage to the giants of the oil and gas industry and the car manufacturing industry. According to the Statista resource, in 2023, only one of more than twenty large companies involved in hydrogen generation was able to make a profit: on average, the industry made a loss of $1.4 billion. Experts attribute this to the lack of government support lobbied by oil and gas or car corporations. However, even among oil and gas companies there are more and more pioneers of hydrogen energy, one of the first was the French company TotalEnergies, which announced the implementation of a major project in the field of green hydrogen. Russia's Gazprom also announced its participation in the development of green hydrogen in 2021: the project is planned to be implemented as early as 2024. And the British British Petroleum in one of its programme documents has set the goal of gaining a 10% share of global hydrogen production by 2030. The giants of the engineering industry are not lagging behind and every year present new models of hydrogen fuel cell cars, although given the high cost of their maintenance, this trend seems to be nothing more than an advertising campaign in an attempt to keep up with new trends.
The state of hydrogen energy today
China, the US, the Middle East, India and Russia accounted for more than 70% of global hydrogen production in 2022. Russia's share of the global hydrogen production market today is about 7% (approximately 5 million tonnes per year), the country ranks fifth in the world after China, the US, the EU and India. Despite the existing problems in the development of hydrogen energy, every year states start paying more and more attention to this industry.
Recently, European countries have started to actively develop hydrogen energy to increase energy autonomy and reduce dependence on Russian gas. Thus, the adoption of the hydrogen strategy at the EU level in 2020 was followed by the adoption of similar documents at the national level in Germany, Spain, France and a number of other European countries, where the construction of relevant production facilities began a few years later. In 2023, it became known that Germany plans to use the capacities nationalised from Gazprom to develop hydrogen energy by 2025. And in January 2024, an agreement was signed on the development of technical documentation for a hydrogen pipeline under the auspices of the Polish company Gaz-System from Finland through the Baltic States to Germany and Poland. Also, six months later, the media reported that TotalEnergies and EREN Groupe, a joint venture specialising in the development of green hydrogen projects, and the Austrian electricity company VERBUND would implement the H2 Notos project to produce green hydrogen and export it to Central Europe via pipelines from Southern Tunisia.
Such actions by Western countries seem logical in view of the May decision of the EU Council on the possibility of imposing a temporary ban on gas supplies from Russia and Belarus after 31 December 2025.
The trend of increasing demand for hydrogen energy is also observed in some Asian countries dependent on energy imports. For example, China will surpass its national hydrogen production targets by the end of 2024, strengthening its leading position in the markets for electrolysers and fuel cell vehicles.
Japan, whose energy industry is 93% dependent on foreign energy sources, in addition to technological improvements in hydrogen production, signed a memorandum of cooperation on hydrogen with the European Union in 2022, under which the parties agreed to provide each other with all possible assistance in the development of hydrogen energy and endeavour to gradually shift to hydrogen as an alternative energy source. The reason for this agreement is the mutual interest of the EU member states and Japan in finding an alternative to the rising cost of liquefied natural gas.
China is currently the world leader in the production of green hydrogen, along with Saudi Arabia, Sweden, the USA and the UK. At the same time, according to Hydrogen Insight, by 2025, such countries as Australia, Spain and Japan, which have a large resource of renewable energy sources - sun and water - may join them. According to experts, Russia also has a huge potential in hydrogen production. Relevant production facilities are already being created in the Kaliningrad region, Krasnodarsky Krai, Murmansk region and Sakhalin. However, the Government of the Russian Federation is paying more attention to the natural hydrogen reserves discovered in the Voronezh and Lipetsk regions, the extraction of which will increase Russia's role in the global hydrogen production market.
Thus, the global climate agenda and political events of the last decade have catalysed the development of hydrogen energy. Nevertheless, the main challenge for the global community is the creation of cheap and energy-efficient ways to produce and transport hydrogen. In this regard, this element is unlikely to replace traditional energy carriers in the near future, but it can be used as a worthy alternative. So, taking into account the emergence of new technologies and the increasing attention of states to this industry, it can be assumed that in the future hydrogen will become one of the most important and at the same time affordable sources of energy in the world.
