Following up on last week’s column on Christopher Boodoosingh’s proposed “purple” hydrogen patent, this week more of the industry jargon around hydrogen is explained. As discussed last week, T&T’s downstream energy industry uses natural gas to produce hydrogen, which is the basis for ammonia, methanol, and urea production—important export products.
If industrial-scale quantities of hydrogen gas were made available, it would be possible to revitalise many downstream industries, significantly increase GDP, and help alleviate the foreign exchange shortage.
Hydrogen is the lightest and most abundant element in the universe. It is the fuel that powers stars like our sun, combining through nuclear fusion to form heavier elements.
Due to its volatile nature, hydrogen on Earth tends to be stored in water (H2O) or combined with other elements to make molecules such as carbohydrates (C6H12O6), which we eat, or hydrocarbons such as methane in natural gas or diesel, which are major fuel sources for industry (CH4, C10H10).
Media reports on the energy industry began classifying hydrogen by colours to explain their climate impact, with the mainstream colours being green, blue, and grey. It should be noted that hydrogen itself is, ironically, colourless and invisible.
Grey hydrogen is produced in industry by processing natural gas (CH4) and discarding the carbon as waste carbon dioxide.
Blue hydrogen is grey hydrogen with an additional carbon capture step, making it a low-carbon option.
Green hydrogen is produced from the electrolysis of water molecules to produce hydrogen and oxygen; however, the electricity for this process must come from renewable sources such as wind, solar, or hydroelectric dams to ensure minimal carbon emissions.
Brown hydrogen is made using coal and has the highest CO2 emissions. It is produced by heating coal with steam in a high-temperature process called gasification, used in industries including steel manufacturing.
White hydrogen exists naturally in geological formations, though doubts remain about whether these deposits can ever be commercially viable, as they are often harder to exploit than petroleum deposits.
Before explaining the remaining colours, a brief overview of power plants is necessary. Most power plants use heat derived from oil, natural gas, or nuclear power to make steam that drives a turbine, converting heat energy into electricity. Within the turbine, a magnet spins within a coil of wire to produce electric current. Nuclear reactors produce immense heat by splitting atoms of fissile materials, typically uranium, though cleaner and safer thorium reactors are being built in China and Europe.
Pink hydrogen is produced by electricity from nuclear power, used to split water (H2O) into hydrogen and oxygen via electrolysis.
Red hydrogen is produced using heat from nuclear power in a process called thermolysis, which is more efficient than electrolysis because it avoids the efficiency loss associated with converting heat to electricity and then to hydrogen.
Purple hydrogen involves a combination of resistant heat via electricity and thermolysis. Christopher Boodoosingh patented a purple hydrogen process designed to take full advantage of existing infrastructure and technological equipment.
Consultants Pat Sonti and PhD holder Babul Patel provided detailed statistics on the economic importance and climate impact of global hydrogen production in a blog post:
“As the global industry seeks to decarbonise transportation and industrial processes, the versatility of hydrogen-based fuels creates many technically feasible and economically viable opportunities to displace fossil fuels and feedstocks in different parts of the economy. Since elemental hydrogen is rare, hydrogen must be produced from other compounds.
“For this reason, not all hydrogen is created equal for the climate. Hydrogen production can have a large greenhouse gas (GHG) environmental footprint depending on how it is produced. Currently, close to 95 per cent of hydrogen production is from fossil-based fuels and feedstocks such as natural gas and coal. The 74 million tonnes of hydrogen produced each year emit ~830 million tonnes of CO2 annually.”
The 74 million tonnes of hydrogen produced globally per year are valued at least US$ 1 per kilogramme, making the minimum value of the global hydrogen supply used in multifaceted industrial processes USD 74 billion per year. Products made from low-carbon hydrogen (green, blue, red, purple) fetch much higher prices, pushing the global hydrogen market into the hundreds of billions as countries emphasise decarbonisation to meet climate goals.
T&T stands to benefit if it can move to produce high-value, carbon-conscious hydrogen products, as proposed by Christopher Boodoosingh in his patent.
