October 7th, 2020 by Tina Casey
Now that the New York Times has finally nailed the Trump administration for sealing the doom of the US coal industry, we now turn our attention to natural gas. Yesterday the Department of Energy announced a major new green hydrogen initiative with The Netherlands, which builds on a raft of other international collaborations aimed at squeezing natural gas out of the H2 market. Wait — why The Netherlands?
Green Hydrogen & The Netherlands
For the record, CleanTechnica was there first. Shortly after Trump took office in 2017, we noticed a strange disconnect — okay, so a yawning chasm — between President* Trump’s enthusiasm for saving coal jobs and the flurry of renewable energy activity undertaken by the Energy Department. The agency has been enthusiastically pursuing clean power and energy storage all they way through Trump’s stay in the Oval Office, right on up to yesterday’s big green hydrogen announcement.
Initially the main force driving coal out of the US power generation market was low cost natural gas, but Trump’s ham-handed attempts to influence the market early in his administration did not work out as planned for coal.
Thanks in part to the Energy Department — and continued support from the US Department of Defense — the cost of renewable energy is now down to the point where every household in the nation will have access to affordable solar power by 2025. Hey, don’t look at us — that’s the Energy Department talking.
As for The Netherlands, that’s easy — and it should send a shiver up the spine of natural gas stakeholders. The Netherlands is a case in point for the use of green hydrogen as an energy storage and transportation medium. In addition to generating electricity in a fuel cell, hydrogen can be moved over long distances in bulk by ship, truck, or pipeline.
The Netherlands has far more offshore wind potential than its can use onshore, and green hydrogen would enable it to offload all those clean kilowatts without having to engage in the expense of building major new transmission lines.
Green Hydrogen & The US
Wait, doesn’t the US also have more offshore wind resources than it can use? Maybe, maybe not, but building major new transmission lines in the US is easier said than done, so the challenge is how to move those offshore kilowatts over to onshore markets. For that matter, the US midsection has plenty of onshore wind power on its own and is already beginning to roll sustainable hydrogen into the mix.
Add in the potential for small scale, distributed wind projects to crank out green hydrogen all over the US to accommodate the domestic market, and we’re thinking that the Energy Department is thinking that green hydrogen could be the next big US energy export.
Just saying! Anyways, that’s what The Netherlands is thinking, and come to think of it, Australia is also eyeballing the green hydrogen market as a nifty way to export its vast wind and solar resources.
Collaborating On The COVID-19 Recovery, Hydrogen Style
For those of you new to the topic, all this should give nightmares to natural gas stakeholders because right now, natural gas (aka fossil gas) is the primary source of hydrogen for fuel. Hydrogen also plays a huge role in the global agriculture and food processing sectors among other applications.
Growth in the global hydrogen market would be a lifeline for natural gas stakeholders now that the power generation market is beginning to slip from their grasp, except not if the sustainable hydrogen trend catches hold.
Nailing down a more sustainable…
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