Is blue hydrogen the solution to our problems?

Blue hydrogen could offer better costs as it could take advantage of low natural gas prices, although it is not free of several challenges and questions:

1.- Taking into account the emission levels that we put in place to consider a molecule of H2 renewable and the issues with the emissions around natural gas, what extra costs do we need to consider to avoid these emissions?

2- How do these costs impact the final blue hydrogen production costs?

3- Is the natural gas industry willing to avoid these emissions? Will this business continue to be profitable for them?

At the same time, blue hydrogen requires the development of rather new technologies in terms of carbon capture. Latest studies tell us that even with very clean natural gas, high levels of CO2 capture is needed (up to 95 %). This put pressure on these technologies, very similarly that we put to electrolysers and with similar questions.

a) How ready we are to produce blue hydrogen in a competitive manner at this scale?

b) Where are the challenges to do it?

We need to realise that this project was planning to double the capacity of the current grey ammonia factory to produce around 250 000 tonnes per year of hydrogen with a need to capture around 2 million tonnes of CO2 to reach the level of capture needed (90-95 %). We are currently operating plants with much less capture rate (~60 %) and at lower scale.

Therefore, it seems that everything is not either so straight forward as one would think with blue hydrogen, and do not get me wrong, I think blue (and turquoise) could be a good thing to consider, but it is probably a good thing to try to start small and little by little that to build frustrations in large projects very difficult to take to the end.

And again, not to forget R&D investments, the ones who allow us to progress faster in any technology.

Source: Carlos Bernuy-Lopez