A Primer on Hydrogen with Al Rettenmaier

In this episode of The Top 3 by E3, Al Rettenmaier, practice leader of E3's Oil, Gas, and Chemicals Sector, and Ginger Elbaum, E3's Managing Director, discuss the reasons that hydrogen, particularly green hydrogen, has been on the tip of everyone's tongue lately. It's almost impossible to miss the myriad conferences, articles, and podcasts about hydrogen generation and markets.  But why is that? During this episode, Al will provide an introduction to the topic, explaining some of the reasons that the project finance community is waking up to the opportunities and challenges of this emerging market. 
 
Listen as Al Rettenmaier explains how hydrogen works, why it's such an exciting new opportunity and why there are challenges to developing these types of projects.  During this episode, Al outlines three takeaways including: 

1. Green hydrogen is a 100% renewable source of fuel
2. There are three grades of hydrogen: green, blue, and gray
3. Hydrogen can be stored in a number of ways, as compressed gas, liquids, or solids, leading to a number of storage techniques.

For additional information about hydrogen or to discuss E3's hydrogen project capabilities, please contact Al at ar@e3co.com. And listen for additional episodes on this topic! There's a lot to explore, and Al is just getting started. 

Transcript

(0s):
Ginger Elbaum: Welcome to the top three by E3, a monthly podcast about the intersection between Engineering energy and project finance. We all know that Hydrogen is a hot topic right now in the market. And as such, we wanted to give a high level introduction to Hydrogen as the first part of a series on Hydrogen that will be doing so today and talking with Al Rettenmaier E3's head of oil, gas, and chemicals. Welcome Al.

(32s):
Al Rettenmaier: Thanks, Ginger. Yeah. Happy to be here.

(35s):
Ginger Elbaum: Happy to have you here. So what are you going to be talking about today, Al?

(38s):
Al Rettenmaier: Well, I think we're going to start out. This is our first session on Hydrogen and we're going to kind of cover some of the fundamentals about Hydrogen. So I'll just dive right in to that. If you're ready,

(49s):
Ginger Elbaum: That'd be excellent. Looking forward to hearing what you have to say.

(52s):
Al Rettenmaier: Great. Well, you know, I think a lot of folks in, in our sphere, like the financial community, the power generation community, and so forth, they've heard of Hydrogen, but they may not know much about it. So I'm going to talk about some of the unique aspects of Hydrogen. One of the things that's unique about Hydrogen is it is an atom and it is the smallest simplest atom that's in the universe. It's basically one proton and one electron. So it doesn't really get much simpler than that here on earth. We see Hydrogen in the form of H to which is a molecule of Hydrogen. It is the most abundant element in the universe. Actually, if you were to weigh out the universe, you'd find that 74% of the universe is hydrogen.

(1m 38s):
So there's a lot of it out there it's formed in the big bang. Hydrogen atom is a very fundamental building block of everything around us, and it has this sort of space connection. In fact, when Hydrogen has released on earth, it, it will actually find its way into outer space. And that's the only molecule on earth that does that. It's because it's so light, it will actually go straight up into the atmosphere and find its way in outer space. So that's one reason why we don't have really an appreciable amount of hydrogen in our atmosphere.

(2m 19s):
It's a very small percentage of our atmosphere, cause it, it takes off and head stout, stouter space. Probably one of the interesting, another interesting thing about Hydrogen is the sun and all the stars are basically Hydrogen fusion reactions. So it's converting hydrogen into helium and that's where we get our warmth and heat and light is from that reaction. So without hydro, and this will be a cold dark place. We wouldn't be here now on earth. Hydrogen makes up about less than a percent like 0.1, 4.1, 4% of the Earth's crust is actually Hydrogen, but in the ocean, it's about 10% by weight of the ocean.

 (3m 6s):
And then in humans and all animal life, it's about 10%. That's about percent of your weight is, is Hydrogen let's switch. And let's talk a little bit about how do we produce hydrogen for this? You know, one of the really neat things about Hydrogen that has people enamored is the fact that you can produce hydrogen from renewable electricity and water. And it's a direct pathway from renewable sunlight to fuel. That's why it's so important. It's the only, it's the only way that we know to do that.

(3m 46s):
And further, that pathway does not have a carbon element in it. So there's new, no CO2 generated in that pathway. So you can imagine you can take a solar panel, you can take the electricity off of that. You can do electrolysis with water. And in electrolysis, you're basically applying a current to a cathode and anode, and then you're generating Hydrogen by the disassociation of water, into hydrogen and oxygen. And the hydrogen is generated at the cathode. And so you take it off there and it is capturable depending on the type of electrolysis, it comes off, it can come off at a pretty high pressure.

(4m 33s):
And so it can immediately be compressed up further or used at that pressure. And, and it's a pretty straightforward, simple process.

(4m 44s):
Ginger Elbaum: So I'll, what's your what's you're describing here though, is, is Green Hydrogen, right?

(4m 49s):
Al Rettenmaier: That is correct. This is the, this is the way you make Green. Hydrogen is a a hundred percent renewable energy and electrolysis and you get green hydrogen, and that has the highest value. So there's different grades of Hydrogen. Green is certainly the highest value. There's a blue Hydrogen. And the way that blue Hydrogen is formed, it's formed from fossil fuels. And it's actually like if you had methane and then you did a partial oxidation of that and produce synthesis gas, then the synthesis Gas is hydrogen and carbon monoxide.

(5m 29s):
And you can go through a shift reaction and shift it all to Hydrogen. So you can produce a, a a hundred percent Hydrogen stream. And then you can also capture the carbon that came in with the methane. You can capture that in that process and take that off for sequence duration underground. And, and it's also used for enhanced oil recovery and as well as permanent sequence duration. Now that Hydrogen grade is blue as what we commonly refer to as blue Hydrogen, if you're doing the CO2 capture and you're sequestering it, even though your using a fossil fuel degenerate it, you know, you're, you're cleaning up the carbon dioxide, putting it down in the, in the earth for permanent sequence duration, permanent storage down there, that's blue.

 (6m 18s):
Ginger Elbaum: Okay.  We - you and I - attended Projects & Money earlier this year. And I feel like we heard quite a bit about the blue Hydrogen during the conference as well with the carbon capture, being a hot topic,

(6m 35s):
Al Rettenmaier: Right? Yes it is. And carbon capture is in itself is a hot topic. In fact, there may be a future podcast just on cap carbon capture that will do the final type of Hydrogen. There's a lot of Hydrogen that's produced today, but it's, it's, what's termed as grey hydrogen. So it is from fossil fuels and it does not have that carbon sequestration component. So in, in areas like the Gulf coast to the United States, they're our Hydrogen pipelines, Hydrogen storage facilities. There is a Hydrogen cavern that we were somewhat involved with on one of the projects we did for storage.

 (7m 17s):
There's a big Hydrogen network in the Gulf coast because of all of the industrial uses for Hydrogen. It's, it's actually a very valuable gas for a number of things. Actually, fuels like ultra-low sulfur diesel are produced by reacting Hydrogen with diesel that is not ultra-low sulfur. It, it actually serves to remove sulfur. So, so that network is, is there, but it's mostly, I would say it's probably a 99.9% great Hydrogen at this point, but the infrastructure is there and it can start to change. It could be a pathway for, for companies to produce and sell Green Hydrogen or blue Hydrogen.

 (7m 58s):
Now, one of the things about Hydrogen, we touched on storage a little bit and transportation. It can be transported in a pipeline as a Gas. It can also be liquified and stored in cryogenic tanks, and that's similar to liquified natural gas, but one of the things about it is it's very it's light actually. So when you let go of Hydrogen, the weight of that is only about 7% of the same, a volume of water. So it's, it's really light. And so, you know, you think about energy density, you know, how do I store this energy?

1 (8m 38s):
You know, it, it, it takes quite a bit of volume for a given unit of energy. So you can sort as a liquid that's minus 423 Fahrenheit as the coldest liquid in the universe, but you have a density issue. You can also sort as a Gas and some of the storage tanks that are out there are, you know, 2000, 3000 pounds per square inch, ah, at room temperature. And the density of the Hydrogen is about 7% of what the density of compressed air would be at the same pressure and temperature.

(9m 20s):
So it's interesting in, in looking up at some of these numbers for this podcast, you know, you have, the density is the liquid 7% of water in the density of the Gas is about 7% of air kind of coincidentally, but you can store it as a Gas. You can transport it in the pipeline. The other thing you can do is you can store it is bound up in a chemical form and probably the most common chemical form is ammonia. So, you know, ammonia fertilizer for instance, is a produced in great quantities actually for fertilizing our crops. And it sometimes gets upgraded to urea or other forms of a fertilizer, but ammonia historically was actually a, a, a way that people used to store Hydrogen and transport it.

(10m 13s):
So it is available to us today. We can, the energy density and Hydrogen of Hydrogen in pneumonia is actually a pretty good. And so will probably explore that a little further on another podcast, how that method and how that ammonia cycle looks for storing hydrogen. And then one thing I wanted to mention, we get a lot of questions about Hydrogen and one of the questions is, is it dangerous? Well, it is. I mean, it's, it's no more dangerous than natural gas to be honest, but there's a couple of things about Hydrogen. One is that it's such a small molecule. It will leak through right through the walls of a pipe.

(10m 56s):
So you have to be very careful when you select your metallurgy for Hydrogen to make sure that the leakage rate, if there is a leakage rate is acceptable and it won't build up into an explosive atmosphere. And also that you're not losing some of your valuable product. So it does have that aspect is also very easy too. You know, there's a kind of an ignition energy that's required, and hydrogen is, is the lowest ignition energy of any fuel. So it takes just a little bit of a spark. It just set it off. So we'd have to be careful about those things as we go forward. But as I mentioned, there was a good infrastructure. There's lots of history with Hydrogen to use in a number of processes.

(11m 36s):
Ginger Elbaum: So you just have to pay attention,

(11m 39s):
Al Rettenmaier: Right? So it sounds like I'll with, you know, proper handling and proper considerations and the engineering design, then you can certainly mitigate that risk down to, you know, a low risk. Yes, yes, absolutely.

(11m 55s):
So Engineering will produce an acceptable risk with the right metallurgy and so forth. So we call it a top three because we like to provide three takeaways from each session. So in this session, what I hope you'll take away is, is the pathway to make Hydrogen number one, you can actually produce it from 100% renewable energy with nothing more than water and an electrolysis system. So wind or solar power electrolysis make hydrogen a fuel that could be used in a number of different ways.

(12m 36s):
So that's probably the, the biggest thing about Hydrogen. That's why it's on, everybody's the tip of everybody's tongue right now. And we were quite busy actually with Hydrogen at <inaudible>. So we've got a couple of projects we're working on and hoping to help people get these projects through financing and, and put it into a commercial operation. Now, the other thing is there's three grades of Hydrogen. So this is our second big takeaway. So when you hear people talk about Green, well, that is, that is that first pathway. It's, it's renewable energy electrolysis, Hydrogen, and that is the highest value personally, I think blue Hydrogen can be very interesting and it could be a, maybe a significant portion of the Hydrogen that ends up in our system.

(13m 25s):
And that is fossil fuels, partially combusted capture the CO2, sequestered the CO2, and then take the Hydrogen from that system that is the blue pathway. And then gray is what we have today for the most part. And that is simply making Hydrogen from fossil fuels. So that's our second takeaway. The third type or takeaway really comes down to the storage and it's because it's so such a light molecule, the liquid is very cold. You got to get it super cold. So that takes specialized liquefaction equipment. You've got to store it at that temperature that takes cryogenic storage.

 (14m 4s):
And even then the energy density is less than a lot of other forms of energy. You can compress the gas, so you can do the liquid, you can compress the gas and you can put that into, you know, basically you like a steel tank that with thick walls, it's designed for 3000 pounds or, or somewhere in that range, and that's done routinely. You can also store that compressed gas in a salt cavern, and that's a great way to store Hydrogen. The only problem is they're our only so many salt caverns in the, in the U.S. and in the world. They're kind of unique geological formations. And there aren't quite a few on the Gulf coast to the United States.

(14m 46s):
The third way to a store hydrogen is as a chemical bound up in a chemical, and we talked about ammonia and there's also hydride. And so you can make a metal hydride with Hydrogen and you can store it that way and repeat that cycle. You can store it and then release it. And then, and then recharge basically in some cases. So those are kind of the three key takeaways, a hundred percent renewable energy, the three grades of Hydrogen, and then the storage aspects of it.

(15m 18s):
Ginger Elbaum: Al,thank so much. Such a great topic and so timely. I'm looking forward to the next session in this Hydrogen series. And thanks to all of our listeners, we hope you enjoyed today's topic. If you have any questions for Al regarding Hydrogen or any oil, gas, and chemicals questions, we'd love to hear from you. Please send a note to e3@e3co.com.