Electrolytic (green) hydrogen

Assembled from 22 blocks · 2 evidence · 17 related

1. Story
2. Hydrogen made by splitting water with electricity rather than by reforming natural gas, and the most over-claimed and under-delivered technology in the transition — which does not make it unimportant, only badly targeted. The world already consumes something in the region of ninety to a hundred million tonnes of hydrogen a year, almost all of it made from unabated fossil fuels for ammonia fertiliser and oil refining, emitting several hundred million tonnes of carbon dioxide in the process. Replacing that existing demand is the clearest case for electrolysis and requires no new market. Beyond it, hydrogen is a good answer where nothing else works — direct reduction of iron, high-temperature process heat, possibly shipping fuel as an ammonia precursor — and a poor one where electricity works directly, because the round trip through electrolysis, compression or liquefaction, distribution and reconversion throws away most of the energy. The arithmetic that governs everything is that an electrolyser system consumes on the order of fifty kilowatt-hours of electricity per kilogram of hydrogen, whose lower heating value is about thirty-three kilowatt-hours; so the cost of hydrogen is mostly the cost of electricity, and cheap hydrogen means very cheap electricity running many hours a year. The 2023–2025 record was one of announcement followed by cancellation, with only a small minority of announced 2030 capacity reaching a final investment decision on the IEA's tracking. Not a place.
3. Knowledge
4. Photovoltaic solar generation
5. Electrolytic (green) hydrogen
6. Connections
7. Hydrogen direct reduction of iron
8. Photovoltaic solar generation
9. HYBRIT delivers the first hydrogen-reduced steel
10. The experience (learning) curve
11. The duck curve
12. Bhadla Solar Park
13. Electrolytic (green) hydrogen
14. Bell Telephone Laboratories announce the practical silicon solar cell
15. The conventional start of the photovoltaic module price series
16. Germany's Renewable Energy Sources Act takes effect
17. Chinese manufacturing takes over the photovoltaic supply chain
18. The photovoltaic learning curve is popularised as Swanson's law
19. The first Global Stocktake calls for tripling renewable capacity
20. Evidence
21. Supports the account of existing world hydrogen demand and its fossil origin, electrolyser system energy intensity, and the very large gap between announced low-emissions hydrogen capacity for 2030 and the capacity that has reached a final investment decision. V55 verification basis: not retrieved in this session; the final-investment-decision share is described as a small minority rather than as the single-digit percentage the series reports, because the figure differs between editions and none was read.
22. Supports the sectoral emission structure used throughout this pack, the treatment of industry process emissions as distinct from energy emissions, the assessment of technology cost declines in solar, wind and storage, and the identification of aviation, shipping and heavy industry as hard-to-abate. V55 verification basis: not retrieved in this session; no chapter, table or page number is cited because none could be confirmed, and every sectoral share attributed here is given as a range rather than a figure.