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2007 Hydrogen Energy
2007 Hydrogen Energy
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Hydrogen energy
Article in Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society A Mathematical Physical and Engineering Sciences · February 2007
DOI: 10.1098/rsta.2006.1965 · Source: PubMed
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Hydrogen energy
B Y P. P. E DWARDS 1, * , V. L. K UZNETSOV 1 AND W. I. F. D AVID 2
1
University of Oxford, Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory,
South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3QR, UK
2
ISIS Facility, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Chilton,
Oxfordshire OX11 0QX, UK
The problem of anthropogenically driven climate change and its inextricable link to our
global society’s present and future energy needs are arguably the greatest challenge
facing our planet. Hydrogen is now widely regarded as one key element of a potential
energy solution for the twenty-first century, capable of assisting in issues of
environmental emissions, sustainability and energy security. Hydrogen has the potential
to provide for energy in transportation, distributed heat and power generation and
energy storage systems with little or no impact on the environment, both locally and
globally. However, any transition from a carbon-based (fossil fuel) energy system to a
hydrogen-based economy involves significant scientific, technological and socio-economic
barriers. This brief report aims to outline the basis of the growing worldwide interest in
hydrogen energy and examines some of the important issues relating to the future
development of hydrogen as an energy vector.
Keywords: hydrogen; energy; production; storage; fuel cells; safety
The principal drivers behind a sustainable energy vision of our future centre on
the need to
— reduce global carbon dioxide emissions and improve local (urban) air quality,
— ensure security of energy supply and move towards the use of sustainable local
energy resources, and
— create a new industrial and technological energy base, crucial for future
economic prosperity.
All modern-day assessments of global energy futures take the view that the
growth in demand must be met increasingly by a diverse energy mix, including
renewable or sustainable energy sources (Johnston et al. 2005; Dorian et al. 2006;
Solomon & Banerjee, 2006). But it is the growth of tangible environmental
concerns—now surely more evident than ever—which is providing one of the
major driving forces towards sustainable energy development. Foremost among
these concerns is the issue of the release and accumulation into the atmosphere of
* Author for correspondence ([email protected]).
One contribution of 13 to a Discussion Meeting Issue ‘Energy for the future’.
carbon dioxide (CO2) and other climate-changing gases. These emissions are now
unquestionably far above pre-industrial levels and are deemed to be responsible
for raising the world’s (average) temperature through the now-famous green-
house effect. Unless there are drastic reductions in the amount of carbon dioxide
that we release from our activities, there will be potentially disastrous
consequences for our global climate. Such concerns are undoubtedly transforming
the way we assess and use energy and its carriers, shifting the balance away from
our traditional hydrocarbon base towards renewable or sustainable sources
of energy.
Hydrogen is an attractive alternative fuel. However, unlike coal, gas or oil,
hydrogen is not a primary energy source. Rather, its role mirrors more closely that
of electricity as a secondary ‘energy carrier’, which must first be produced using
energy from another source and then transported for future use where its latent
chemical energy can be fully realized. Hydrogen can be obtained from diverse
resources, both renewable (hydro, wind, wave, solar, biomass and geothermal) and
non-renewable (coal, natural gas and nuclear). It can be stored as a fuel and used
in transportation and distributed heat and power generation systems using fuel
cells, internal combustion engines or turbines, with the only by-product at the
point of use being water. The ability of hydrogen to replace fossil fuels in the
transportation sector could address one of the world’s major environmental
problems (Jacobson et al. 2005). Automotive exhaust emissions are among the
largest single sources of air pollution in the world today, especially in urban areas,
and also contribute significantly to the world’s carbon dioxide emission.
Hydrogen can also be used as a storage medium for electricity generated from
intermittent, renewable resources, such as solar, wind, wave and tidal power; it
thereby provides the solution to one of the major issues of sustainable energy,
namely the vexing problem of intermittency of supply. As long as the hydrogen is
produced from non-fossil fuel feedstock, it is a genuinely ‘green’ fuel. Moreover,
locally produced hydrogen allows for the introduction of renewable energy to the
transport sector, provides potentially large economic and energy security
advantages and the benefits of a new infrastructure based on distributed
generation. It is this key element of the energy storage capacity of hydrogen that
provides the potent link between sustainable energy technologies and a sustainable
energy economy, generally placed under the umbrella of ‘hydrogen economy’
(Muradov & Veziroglu 2005).
The importance of hydrogen as a potential energy carrier has increased
significantly over the last decade, owing to rapid advances in fuel cell technology.
Fuel cells, operating using hydrogen or hydrogen-rich fuels, have the potential to
become major factors in catalysing the transition to a future sustainable energy
system with low carbon dioxide emissions. The importance of such developments
is rapidly increasing; many countries are now compiling roadmaps, in many cases
with specific numerical targets for the advancement of fuel cell and hydrogen
technologies. A main avenue of hydrogen R&D activity has been in the
transportation sector, where most of the world’s major vehicle manufacturers are
investing heavily in fuel cell vehicle R&D programmes.
Figure 1 illustrates the central role of hydrogen as an energy carrier linking
multiple hydrogen production methods and various end-user applications. One of
the principal attractions of hydrogen as an energy carrier is obviously the
diversity of production methods from a variety of resources. Hydrogen can
Figure 1. Hydrogen as an energy carrier linking multiple hydrogen production methods, through
storage to various end-users. Shaded production routes can involve substantial carbon dioxide
(by-product) generation.
The vision of such an integrated energy system for the future would combine
large and small fuel cells for domestic and decentralized heat and electricity
power generation with local (or more extended) hydrogen supply networks,
which would also be used to fuel hydrogen fuel cell or internal combustion
vehicles. In the following sections we outline just some of the challenges facing
the transition to the hydrogen economy.
Hydrogen is the third most abundant chemical element in the Earth’s crust, but
it is invariably bound up in chemical compounds with other elements. It must,
therefore, be produced from other hydrogen-containing sources using energy,
such as electricity or heat.
At present, hydrogen is produced in large quantities from fossil fuels by steam
reforming of natural gas and partial oxidation of coal or heavy hydrocarbons (see
also the article by Sigfusson 2007). These methods can take advantage of
economies of scale and are currently the cheapest and most established
techniques for the large-scale production of hydrogen. They can be used in the
short to middle term to meet hydrogen fuel demand and enable the proving and
testing of technologies related to hydrogen production, storage, distribution,
safety and use. However, in the long term, it is clearly unsustainable that the
hydrogen economy is driven by hydrogen derived from hydrocarbons.
The manufacture of hydrogen from fossil fuels using reformation and
gasification processes always yields carbon dioxide as a by-product. Carbon
dioxide emissions, the principal cause of global climate change, can be efficiently
managed at large-scale facilities through the so-called carbon dioxide
sequestration, which involves the capture, liquefaction, transportation and
storage of carbon dioxide underground (e.g. in depleted natural gas and oil wells
or geological formations). However, all the operations associated with
sequestration are energy intensive, costly and potentially damaging to our
environment. The key risk results from the uncertain long-term ecological
consequences of carbon dioxide sequestration. A more promising route of
hydrogen production without carbon dioxide release is the high-temperature
pyrolysis (decomposition in the absence of oxygen) of hydrocarbons, biomass and
municipal solid waste into hydrogen and (solid) carbon black accompanied by its
industrial use and/or easy sequestration. At present, the cost of this process is
significantly higher than that of steam reforming of natural gas.
However, to achieve the benefits of a truly sustainable hydrogen energy
economy, we must clearly move to a situation where hydrogen is produced
from non-fossil resources, principal among these being water (Turner 2004;
Sherif et al. 2005; Penner 2006). Hydrogen can be produced by splitting water
through various processes, including electrolysis, photo-electrolysis, high-
temperature decomposition and photo-biological water splitting. The commercial
production of hydrogen by electrolysis of water achieves an efficiency of 75%;
however, the cost of hydrogen is currently several times higher than that produced
from fossil fuels (Dutton 2002; Ewan & Allen 2005; International Energy Agency
2006). Electricity derived from renewable energy resources (e.g. wind, wave,
tidal) might provide local hydrogen needs, but certainly will not meet the volumes
of hydrogen required globally for its widespread use as the new energy source.
Production of hydrogen via biological reformation of biomass using micro-
organisms and fermentation is clearly attractive if one could indeed demonstrate
that such an approach could be used to produce the necessary huge volumes of
hydrogen. This method releases carbon dioxide, but this can be recycled by the
growth of more biomass (thereby counted as a carbon dioxide neutral activity).
However, a cautionary point must be made; if fertilizers are used to grow
crops/biomass, this will of necessity incur a ‘CO2 cost’ since ammonia is used to
synthesize fertilizers, and this ammonia is synthesized from hydrogen and
nitrogen, the former currently produced from hydrocarbons.
The holy grail of hydrogen production will be the efficient, direct conversion of
sunlight through a photocatalytic process that uses solar energy to split water
directly into its constituents, hydrogen and oxygen, without the use of
electricity. This ideal production route therefore harvests ‘solar hydrogen’, the
power of the Sun, to split water from our oceans. A recent US Department of
Energy (DoE) report suggests that the solar photodecomposition of water is
probably the only major—but long-term—solution to a CO2-free route for the
mass production of the huge volumes of H2 needed if the hydrogen economy is to
emerge (US Department of Energy, Office of Science 2003). Achieving low-cost
and efficient solar energy production of hydrogen requires development of
innovative materials, emerging physical phenomena, novel synthetic techniques
and entirely new design concepts.
Current nuclear (fission) technology generates electricity that can be used to
produce hydrogen by the electrolysis of water. Advanced nuclear reactors are
also being developed that will enable high-temperature water electrolysis (with
less electrical energy needed) or thermochemical cycles that will use heat and a
chemical process to dissociate water. Fusion power, if successfully developed,
could be a good source of a clean, abundant and carbon-free resource for
hydrogen production.
The current transportation system for delivering conventional fuels to
consumers cannot be easily transformed for use with hydrogen. The present
options for transporting hydrogen include compressed gas (200 bar) in steel tube
cylinders, liquid hydrogen tanks and a few examples of local networks of
hydrogen pipelines. All these options are expensive and contribute significantly
to the cost of hydrogen for end-users. New concepts will be needed to reduce
delivery costs while retaining high safety standards from the point of production
through to refuelling end-users.
The basic components of a hydrogen delivery infrastructure therefore need to
be developed, initially to supply local hydrogen refilling stations for trans-
portation use—widely regarded as the first major inroad into the hydrogen
economy. Subsequently, the components of a national hydrogen delivery and
3. Hydrogen storage
Viable hydrogen storage is considered by many as one of the crucial and the most
technically challenging barrier to the widespread use of hydrogen as an effective
energy carrier (Crabtree et al. 2004; Harris et al. 2004). Hydrogen contains more
energy on a weight-for-weight basis than any other substance. Unfortunately,
since it is the lightest chemical element of the periodic table, it also has a very
low energy density per unit volume (table 1).
The hydrogen economy will require two types of hydrogen storage systems;
one for transportation and another for stationary applications. Both have
different requirements and constrains. The transportation sector is believed to be
the first high-volume user of hydrogen in the future hydrogen economy. The
hydrogen storage requirements for transportation applications are far more
stringent than those for stationary applications. These operating requirements
for the ‘ideal’ hydrogen storage system for transportation applications include
the following:
Table 1. Gravimetric (specific) and volumetric energy content of fuels, hydrogen storage options
and energy sources (note: weight and volume of the container are excluded).
(a) (b)
Figure 2. (a) The volume of 4 kg of hydrogen compacted in different ways, together with the weight
of hydrogen storage material (note: weight and volume of a container are excluded). (b) At normal
conditions, 4 kg of hydrogen occupies a volume of 48 m3, the volume of a medium size balloon.
140
diesel
DoE
80 target
liquid hydrogen density
60
0 5 10 15
gravimetric H2 density (wt% of H2)
Figure 3. Gravimetric and volumetric densities of various hydrogen storage options (note: weight
and volume of the storage container are included). ‘DoE target’ represents the US Department of
Energy target for 2015 set for an ‘ideal’ hydrogen storage material. Metal hydrides are
conventional, heavy metal hydrides such as LaNi5, etc.
Figure 4. Schematic of hydrogen (a) adsorption (physisorption) and (b) absorption (chemisorp-
tion). In adsorption, hydrogen molecules remain intact; in chemisorption, molecular hydrogen is
dissociated and occupies interstitial sites in the metallic (alloy) matrix.
4. Hydrogen utilization
m ca
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an
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o
d
e
fuel
o w e r
p
water, heat
low emissions
Figure 5. Schematic of a fuel cell (figure drawn by Karl Harrison, University of Oxford).
cells can produce electricity continuously as long as fuel and air are supplied.
Several types of fuel cells operating on a variety of fuels and suitable for different
energy applications have been developed, but all share the basic design of two
electrodes (anode and cathode) separated by a solid or liquid electrolyte or
membrane (figure 5). Hydrogen (or a hydrogen-containing fuel) and oxygen are
fed into the anode and cathode of the fuel cell and the electrochemical reactions
assisted by catalysts take place at the electrodes. The electrolyte or membrane
enables the transport of ions between the electrodes while the excess electrons
flow through an external circuit to provide electrical current.
Because fuel cells are not subject to the intrinsic limitations of the Carnot
cycle, they convert fuel into electricity at more than double the efficiency of
internal combustion engines. In transportation, hydrogen fuel cell engines
operate at an efficiency of up to 65%, compared to 25% for present-day petrol-
driven car engines. When heat generated in fuel cells is also used in combined
heat and power (CHP) systems, an overall efficiency in excess of 85% can be
achieved (Duttons 2002). Unlike internal combustion engines or turbines, fuel
cells demonstrate high efficiency across most of their output power range. This
scalability makes fuel cells ideal for a variety of applications from mobile phone
batteries through vehicle applications to large-scale centralized or decentralized
stationary power generation.
Fuel cells are now emerging as a leading technology to replace more polluting
internal combustion engines in vehicle and stationary distributed energy
applications. Hydrogen fuel cells emit only water and have virtually no pollutant
emissions, even nitrogen oxides, because they operate in the temperature range of
60–1208C, which is much lower than the normal operating temperature of
5. Hydrogen safety
6. Conclusion
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