World's largest green hydrogen project 'has major problems due to its Chinese electrolysers': BNEF

[NNadir]

Below, I'll point out, how trivial, on a planet currently consuming roughly 630 Exajoules of energy each year, this "world's largest" is.

The article did not put the word "green" in quotation marks, so I won't, even though the fossil fuel dependence of so called "renewable energy" leads me to reject any implication that it is sustainable or environmentally acceptable.

The article: World's largest green hydrogen project 'has major problems due to its Chinese electrolysers': BNEF

The subtitle:

All the electrolysers at Sinopec’s 260MW Kuqa facility in China — made by three prominent manufacturers — have safety issues related to renewable-energy fluctuations, says analyst

I added the bold, which was not in the original.

Some excerpts from the full article, which, among other things explains the danger of hooking up electrolyzers to unreliable energy sources:

The world’s largest green hydrogen project — Sinopec’s 260MW Kuqa facility in Xinjiang, northwest China — has been operating at less than a third of its installed capacity due to various factors, including some missing safety features in the system design and lower-than-promised efficiencies, research house BloombergNEF (BNEF) tells Hydrogen Insight.

The alkaline electrolysers — supplied by three different Chinese manufacturers: Cockerill Jingli (120MW), Longi (80MW) and Peric (60MW) — each have their own technical issues, but all have one common problem related to their flexibility, according to BNEF analyst Xiaoting Wang.

She tells Hydrogen Insight that all three manufacturers promised an operating range of 30-100% of their electrolysis systems’ nameplate yield. In other words, if the amount of renewable energy entering the systems results in the production of less than 30% of its maximum output, the machines will stop releasing hydrogen.

“However, all those electrolysers failed tests at the 30% working point,” said Wang. “The actual working range could be narrower than 50-100%...”

It's an interesting technical description of why this situation is dangerous:

...The problem comes up when the input electricity is less than the nameplate value: oxygen generation volume is reduced in a way that is almost linear, while the amount of hydrogen that can cross the membrane is affected more mildly and remains relatively high. The net effect is the concentration of hydrogen in oxygen rises, resulting in an explosion.

All three manufacturers use “almost the same raw materials and have the same internal structure, so that is a fundamental issue”, Wang explains.

“So the result is a safety problem that will limit the operating range. The already poor economics [of the Kuqa project] will likely become worse.”

The San Francisco-based analyst wrote in a recent note to BNEF subscribers: “BNEF expects the Kuqa project to alarm many potential investors in green hydrogen, especially international developers considering importing cheaper electrolyzers made in China.”

The issue has to do with diffusion. It is notable that hydrogen, to a first approximation, has a rather remarkable ability to diffuse, owing to the diffusion "constant" in Fick's law being a function of molecular weight and molecular size for each gas: Mass Diffusivity. (Fick's law is generally written (in one dimension) as a first order differential equation containing the diffusion constant, itself a function of the inverse of molecular weight and molecular size, of the concentration gradient with respect to distance. The lighter and smaller the gas molecules are, the faster they diffuse. Hydrogen (diprotium) is the lightest gas known. One can certainly expect that there are far more complex analyses that apply, but it's good to a first approximation.)

If one understands the capacity utilization of so called "renewable energy" one will recognize that the use of a power unit, W, (J/s) as in MW, which is typical of the dishonesty associated with wind and solar advertising hype, one will understand exactly how little energy this "world's largest" "green" hydrogen plant is producing, how fucking trivial it is on a planet in flames, largely because of "bait and switch" scams like the "hydrogen economy."

At the 30% capacity utilization the article implies - generous for solar, but generally close, if only a little generous, for wind, depending on the climate, the "240 MW" of so called "renewable energy" is actually 80 MW of average continuous power, assuming the electrolyzers don't blow up from diffusion effects. If the electrolyzers avoid too much hysteresis, not always a good bet with unreliable energy, generally lasting about an hour on start up, we can say, at roughly 80% thermodynamic efficiency, as well as high Faradaic efficiency we should get around 60 to 65 "MW" of hydrogen. Let's be generous and say 65 MW. There are 31,557,600 seconds in a sideral year.

65 X 10⁶ watts X 31,557600 seconds = 3.5 X 10¹⁵J (approximately). This is 3.5 PJ, one thousandths of an Exajoule. In the year 2022, the last year for which the EIA, in the 2023 World Energy Outlook reported (the WEO comes out in November each year), world energy demand was 632 Exajoules, dominated in production by oil, coal and gas, some of which went to make hydrogen via steam reforming.

Thus the fraction of energy produced by the world's largest "green" hydrogen plant, a dangerous plant subject to blowing up apparently, is 3.5 millionths of the world energy supply, or in the dishonest "percent talk" hyped by apologists for the failed wind and solar business that has soaked up trillions of dollars for no real environmental result, 0.00032% of world energy demand.

Um, we're saved?

If one wishes to know why the planet is burning, why glaciers on which the world water supply depends are disappearing, why extreme weather is energized, it would do to understand the inherent dishonesty of advertising about, among many other things, "green hydrogen." It's a trivial scam, designed to greenwash fossil fuels.

Have a nice evening.

[captain queeg]

1. Makes me think of the push to do away with plastics bags "recycling" of plastic bottles.

Big companies push that stuff to distract us from the fact these personal efforts are meaningless compared to the amounts of plastics coming from big companies.

[NNadir]

2. On reflection, I think you've hit the nail on the head. Hydrogen is, of course, advertised mainly by fossil fuel...

...interests, companies dependent on fossil fuels or fossil fuel producing companies, the latter companies being very involved in the polymer business, because most polymers are in fact, petroleum or natural gas derived.

The general figure is that about 10% or less of plastics actually end up recycled; of course the amount of hyped hydrogen used as a fuel is miniscule compared to the amount of natural gas, coal and oil - all of which are used to manufacture hydrogen - burned.

To be perfectly honest, I'm ambivalent about plastics. I object strongly to single use plastics - if forced to use a plastic spoon by circumstances, I wash it, and I feel bad when I use foods or beverages that come packaged in plastics - but I endorse permanent plastics, such as structural plastics, plastic furniture, and the like. They represent sequestered plastics.

Thanks for your comment.