24/08/2019

Hydrogen’s Plunging Price Boosts Role As Climate Solution

Bloomberg -  | 

The cost of producing hydrogen gas with renewables is likely to plummet in the coming decades, making one of the most radical technologies for reducing greenhouse gases economical.
That’s the conclusion of an analysis by BloombergNEF, which said the most abundant element is likely to play a growing role in reducing pollution from power producers and industry.

The findings add to the potential for widespread use of hydrogen. While the gas has been hailed for decades as a carbon-free energy source, the cost and difficulty of making it has confined it mainly to niches like fueling rockets and helping upgrade blends of oil.
“Once the industry scales up, renewable hydrogen could be produced from wind or solar power for the same price as natural gas in most of Europe and Asia,” Kobad Bhavnagri, BNEF’s head of special projects, said in the report on Wednesday. “These production costs would make green gas affordable and puts the prospects for a truly clean economy in sight.”
If produced on a large scale, hydrogen could feed into a range of applications, fueling long-haul transport and steel-making and the manufacture of cement. Each of those industries requires the sort of energy hydrogen packs, delivering temperatures hot enough to melt metal and stone.
It’s those industries that are finding it difficult to remove emissions. Hydrogen also can also be stored, shipped, and used to produce electricity or fed into fuel cells that are increasingly appearing in cars and small power plants.
BNEF looked at how to generate hydrogen from renewable sources such as wind turbines and solar panels. It also examined how the gas that’s produced can be stored to provide energy at times when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine.
Renewable hydrogen costs may fall to as low as $1.40 a kilogram by 2030 from the current range of $2.50 to $6.80, BNEF said in the report. That could slide further to 80 cents by 2050, equivalent to a natural gas price of $6 per million British thermal units. Gas in New York closed at $2.17 per million Btu on Wednesday. It last traded above $6 in 2014.
The most cost-efficient strategy would be to connect a hydrogen operation directly to both wind and solar energy sources. That would maximize the time the hydrogen plant could run as wind often blows when it’s not sunny and vice versa, according to the report. Countries where the renewable energy is expected to be more expensive, such as Japan, will face higher costs to produce green hydrogen.
Using a “fully optimized” system design, solar and wind can provide power to electrolyzers, which extract hydrogen gas from water, for as little as $24 a megawatt-hour by 2030 and $15 by 2050, according to BNEF.


Political Support
Lawmakers will need to support renewable hydrogen in order to spur advances and growth of electrolyzers in the years ahead, according to BNEF’s analysis.
About 3 gigawatts of electrolysis projects are currently underway to test new applications of hydrogen according to data from the International Energy Agency. Over the following decades, the amount of total capacity of electrolyzers could skyrocket 1,000 times that amount if a significant demand builds for renewable hydrogen.
Without political support, a hydrogen economy wouldn’t likely develop, leading to a slight rise in electrolyzers by 2050.


Look to China
Chinese manufacturers lead the way in low-cost manufacturing of hydrogen production equipment. Those companies mostly sell domestically and to markets other than Western Europe, Australia and the U.S.
While companies that experiment with hydrogen haven’t bought equipment from China, the country could show the way to a drastic decrease in production costs through a combination of increased scale, automation and moving production to countries with cheaper workers. By 2030, BNEF anticipates European and American manufacturers to catch up with Chinese prices.



Rising Demand
Many factors would have to come together to develop what BNEF calls a “hydrogen economy.” With government support, technological advances and increased scale, costs would come down and demand would rise.
Between now and 2030, demand would slowly grow from being basically non-existent today. Once costs come down after 2030, that demand would take off over the next couple decades, to reach as much as 275 million metric tons of renewable hydrogen per year by 2050.


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Australia's Climate Change Inaction Is Now Bipartisan. Protest Is All We Have Left

The Guardian - *

Queensland Labor gearing up to criminalise activism is only a taste of the kind of intimidation that’s likely to come
‘“Blocking roads is dangerous, reckless, irresponsible, selfish and stupid,” Palaszczuk tweeted. “The sinister tactics some protesters are using are dangerous and designed to harm.”’ Photograph: Darren England/AAP
“Even though I was the one who had been assaulted, I was charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. […] I will never forgive or forget what came next. I was ‘verballed’ by the police who manufactured the most incredible statements about the whole thing.”
That was Peter Beattie, who would later become ALP premier of Queensland, detailing his treatment by police during anti-apartheid protests against the South African rugby team in July 1971.
The Springbok demonstrations stirred an entire cohort of Labor activists, appalled by the state of emergency Joh Bjelke-Petersen declared to protect the racist tour. Beattie was one such protester; Wayne Goss – Labor premier between 1989 and 1996 – was another.
Annastacia Palaszczuk also seems to have been inspired by the events of 1971. But not, unfortunately, by the protesters.
Her speech on Tuesday attacking climate activists echoed all the arguments made to justify the repression unleashed against Beattie and Goss and their comrades.
In 1971, Premier Bjelke-Petersen also explained that police needed more powers “in the face of the threat of real violence and defiance of law and order with subsequent dangers to life and property.”
On Twitter, Palaszczuk posted an image denouncing “extremist protesters”.
“Blocking roads is dangerous, reckless, irresponsible, selfish and stupid,” she tweeted. “The sinister tactics some protesters are using are dangerous and designed to harm.”

Any sizeable rally or strike – from the Vietnam moratorium to the Change the Rules marches – blocks roads.
The Bjelke-Petersen government gave exactly the same justification for criminalising protests. The anti-Springbok marches disrupted law-abiding citizens, he said.
Yet it would be wrong to see Palaszczuk simply as a throwback to the reactionary politics of Queensland’s past. Rather, her comments reflect a new development, with the two major parties forming a united front against climate action.
In Queensland, the ALP has granted Adani all the environmental approvals necessary for its Galilee Basin mine, as well as opening up tenders for coalmining in five other areas.
Federally, Labor MPs have rushed to join Craig Kelly’s Parliamentary Friends of Coal group, while Penny Wong has told Insiders that her party doesn’t support shutting down the coal industry in Australia.
Wong’s statement was applauded by Ian Macfarlane, the former resources minister now working as a lobbyist for Queensland mining.
“Penny is a very pragmatic person”, he said. “Anthony Albanese should be congratulated for aligning Labor on this and taking a bipartisan approach with the Coalition.”
That “bipartisan approach” means that those concerned about climate change can’t realistically hope for any action from parliament.
Oh, there are minor parties, of course. But the world’s leading climate scientists gave us, in the most recent IPCC report, a mere 12 years to prevent temperature rises above 1.5C – and one of those years is nearly up.
There simply isn’t time to wait for the Greens or independents to become electoral forces.
That’s why activists are sitting on roads in Queensland. It’s why school students plan to walk out again in September and why a new coalition intends to blockade the International Mining and Resources Conference in Melbourne in October.
For what else can they do?
Scientists tell us, with increasing desperation, that the planet’s ecosystems are collapsing everywhere. Should we simply sit back and watch it happen?
In the context of environmental emergency, the civil disobedience employed by activists of the past offers the only realistic option.
That’s why Palaszczuk’s speech matters.
Her plan to criminalise protest isn’t simply a manifestation of old-fashioned Queensland conservatism.
It’s a taste of the future.
All over the world, the governments that refuse to act on the climate catastrophe are gearing up to fight the environmental rebellion they recognise as inevitable.
In Britain, George Monbiot notes the campaign of demonisation launched by what he calls “dark money-funded lobby group[s]”, including a smear report labelling Extinction Rebellion as an “extremist organisation”.
In America, legislation criminalising environmental activism has become increasingly common, with Trump’s administration proposing an offence of “inhibiting the operation” of an oil or gas pipeline – a crime punishable by 20 years’ jail.
On Tuesday, leaked audio revealed Derrick Morgan, from a lobby group called American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, boasting about its success in secretly pushing model legislation to be used against protesters.
As The Intercept’s Lee Fang notes, the text Morgan describes “has been introduced in various forms in 22 states and passed in nine states: Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Missouri, Indiana, Iowa, South Dakota and North Dakota.”
It would be naive not to expect something similar here.
Already we saw a French television crew arrested in July for filming protests near the Abbot Point coal terminal, a preview of the kind of intimidation that’s likely to come.
In the 1970s, the Bjelke-Petersen government mobilised huge numbers of police to suppress the anti-Springbok protesters. As many activists noted at the time, the brutality in Queensland was only the faintest echo of the repression experienced by the movement within South Africa itself.
Here’s the thing though: apartheid still fell.
Just as an entire generation became radicalised through those marches in 1971, young people today are stirring, rediscovering the tactics of the past.
With the major parties choosing coal over the planet, what other choice do they have?

*Jeff Sparrow is a Guardian Australia columnist

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Some ‘Sinister Tactics’ Those Brave Protesters In Queensland Could Have Used But Also Didn’t

The Guardian - First Dog On The Moon

In case you were wondering:
civil disobedience is supposed to be inconvenient.
If it wasn’t there wouldn’t be any point in doing it would there





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