The switch to clean energy will come at a cost of both dollars and energy and a newly released paper examined the Alberta specifics of globally exporting three up and coming clean fuels.
Emissions Reduction Alberta (ERA) and Alberta Innovates released a paper “Hydrogen as an Alberta Export Opportunity: Gap Analysis” at the Canadian Hydrogen Convention in Edmonton in April.
The paper looked at the opportunities and challenges in exporting hydrogen, ammonia, and liquid natural gas (LNG) on a global scale from well-to-tank and well-to plant.
The paper found that ammonia and hydrogen exports come with big losses in energy when compared to LNG, but those losses might be worthwhile to cut global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
The metrics the paper used were lifecycle GHG emissions intensity and energy delivery efficiency.
“That's kind of a whole reason we're doing this. We want to reduce emissions from fossil fuels, so, how do we actually reduce emissions?
“The other (metric) we looked at, which is a bit of maybe a different way of looking at it, is energy delivery efficiency —how much energy are you getting out at the end compared to how much you put in, if you take energy out of the fuel stream as you go,” said Kelly Newnham, senior vice president at Worley, in a presentation on April 25.
The paper compared LNG, pure hydrogen exports, and ammonia — as it’s “a very commonly talked about hydrogen carrier.”
Newnham said LNG was looked at as a “kind of the incumbent fossil fuel. It's not as established as crude oil worldwide in terms of global trade, but a good baseline to compare against.”
“We wanted to inform investment in the near term of what (hydrogen export) might look like…Specifically, we wanted to look at the Alberta opportunity to the Asia Pacific region,” she said.
Currently the global hydrogen demand is 100 megatons a year, whereas the crude oil trade is around 5600 megatons per year with established global infrastructure, and LNG is around 400 megatons, Newnham said.
“(Hydrogen) is explicitly traded at a local level overland, there's no overseas transport whatsoever of pure hydrogen at a commercial scale,” she said.
According to the International Energy Agency (IEA) if the global hydrogen economy is to be a part of the net-zero transition there will need to be “about 500 million tons per year of new hydrogen trade happening,” said Newnham.
“That's going to require new trade routes and global infrastructure to do that,” she continued.
Canada is one of nine countries that have announced hydrogen strategies within the past two years, according to the paper.
Alberta, as an energy province, has shown a keen interest in the hydrogen opportunity.
Newnham said Alberta already exports oil and gas and the province is already a major low-cost producer of both hydrogen and ammonia.
And the market for hydrogen exports is promising. Both Japan and Korea are looking at Alberta “as an opportunity to import clean fuels to reduce their carbon footprint,” said Newnham.
But exporting hydrogen will come at a cost.
Newnham said fossil fuels are high emitting, but they have high energy density, whereas fuels such as hydrogen and ammonia are low emitting but also have a low energy content — which will have implications on infrastructure needs.
“If you're trying to export a fuel that's a third as energy dense and trying to meet the same demand, you're going to need three times the pipeline's, three times the train cars. That's just a consideration when we're talking about exporting these fuels,” she said.
Newnham said to export, the fuels need to be in liquid form as gas is not energy dense enough.
LNG liquifies at negative 163 Celsius, whereas hydrogen liquifies at around -253 Celsius.
“The problem that you run into is it takes a lot of energy to even get at that cold temperature. Then as you're moving in that cold form, it's very easy to boil off if it gets above that and hydrogen is really small, so you lose your fuel,” she said.
To export the hydrogen to the Asia Pacific, it would need to be produced, then moved through pipeline to the coast. From there it would need to be liquified and shipped out. But hydrogen ships don’t really exist yet and once the hydrogen reaches its destination there will be additional steps to get it into a useable form.
The ammonia supply chain is already established, and hydrogen is a “precursor to ammonia.” The net-zero hydrogen would be made the same and then synthesized into ammonia. From there it would travel by pipeline to the coast, and it would be liquified.
“Ammonia is a globally traded commodity, we have ships that carry ammonia, and even some ships that are looking at powering themselves on ammonia. So that's very much a near-term technology that we already have,” she said.
The problem with ammonia is most end-use cases talk about using hydrogen, not ammonia, said Newnham. The ammonia would have to be cracked back into hydrogen and nitrogen.
“That's going to take energy that is not a commercially available technology — at least at large scales,” she said.
For the study, Newnham said they wanted to look at an Alberta specific scenario and the gap between energy delivery efficiency — how much energy is being lost along the value chain and the lifecycle emissions intensity.
Newnham said the study assumed hydrogen or ammonia are produced from natural gas by conventional means.
“We took publicly available data. We assumed all our hydrogen is produced by autothermal reforming, plus carbon capture at a 95 per cent capture rate, which is what all the major facilities are planning to do,” she said.
They also assumed hydrogen was produced by a Haber Bosch process — the traditional way of producing ammonia and that the hydrogen production facilities would use hydrogen to power themselves.
The results between LNG (66 per cent), hydrogen (31 per cent), and ammonia (26 per cent) were that LNG is the best in well-to-tank uses, or transportation and end use.
“You’re getting most of the energy you put in, out,” she said. “(With LNG) you're going to get 66 per cent of the energy out that you put in, and hydrogen and ammonia are both way worse, they're both less than half.”
Newnham said the big energy loss happens when you convert LNG into hydrogen and ammonia, liquification loses energy, and reclassifying and compressing near point of use also loses energy.
The numbers for well-to-plant are “a little bit different.”
LNG remains the same at 66 per cent, ammonia increases energy delivery efficiency to 43 per cent, and pure hydrogen comes in at 38 per cent energy delivery efficiency.
“Ammonia starts to look like a compelling alternative to hydrogen, they're both obviously worse than natural gas. But this case starts to get a little bit closer… you can still see that big energy loss from the conversion the first place to hydrogen and ammonia that we can't avoid.
When it comes to emission reductions hydrogen and ammonia are less than half of the total GHG footprint across the lifecycle as natural gas, she said.
The best-case scenario, according to the study, was liquid ammonia in the well-to-plant case compared to natural gas from an energy delivery point of view and a lifecycle emissions point of view, said Newnham.
The worst case from a well-to-tank point of view was ammonia because of the extra conversion steps.
“Maybe that's not something we care about as an exporter in Alberta. But if you're Japan that’s probably something you're going to care about,” she said.
Newnham said the key takeaways from the study are that if we want to switch away from fossil fuels, we are going to have to accept some energy loss, and if we want to optimize energy delivery efficiency, we need to minimize conversion steps near the point of use.
One way Alberta can make hydrogen and ammonia to be net-zero across their whole lifecycle is to reduce emissions at the upstream natural gas production point, she continued.
“One more point, we don’t have the infrastructure to do this out to the coast. That’s a big gap just getting it out to the coast in the first place and building that terminal port infrastructure.
“While this remains a compelling opportunity, there are some gaps that still need to be addressed,” she said.
