China will have installed enough renewable energy generation capacity by 2060 to produce 100-150mn t/yr of green hydrogen, according to forecasts given at the recent China-Africa Hydrogen Forum.

China’s installed capacity of solar projects and wind farms is expected to total 4,810GW by 2060, according to Shi Yixiang, a member of the hydrogen energy technology expert group for the National Key R&D Plan under the Ministry of Science and Technology.

The installed capacity will be enough to generate 7,900TWh/yr, and the surplus from this will be sufficient to produce 100-150mn t/yr of green hydrogen, says Shi, also a professor at the energy and power engineering department of Tsinghua University.

4,810GW – China’s targeted renewables capacity by 2060

The China Hydrogen Alliance, a government-backed thinktank established in 2018, gave similar figures, saying last year that domestic hydrogen output could reach 130mn t/yr by 2060, of which 100mn t/yr would come from renewables-based sources.

That level of production would meet a significant proportion of global hydrogen demand, which is expected to be 500-800mn t/yr by 2050.

Ramping up

China’s hydrogen output amounted to 34.66mn t in 2021, most of which came from fossil fuels or was produced as an industrial byproduct. A long-term industry development plan, released in March, calls for green hydrogen output to reach 100,000-200,000t/yr by 2025. This compares with a goal of 1mn t/yr by 2024 proposed by the European Commission in 2020, while the more recent RepowerEU plan targets 10mn t/yr by 2030.

Shi says half of China’s renewables capacity by 2060 will be concentrated in western provinces—amounting to 2,400GW—and the surplus power generated will be enough to produce 50-75mn t/yr of hydrogen.

Using spare electricity to generate hydrogen could help China solve grid bottlenecks that lead to huge amounts of renewable energy production being wasted, says Shi. He points to how solar made up 34.6pc of Tibet’s installed power capacity in 2030 but supplied only 16.3pc of the region’s power output. In Xinjiang, solar supplied just 3.9pc of the region’s power despite representing 11.7pc of regional capacity.

“In this situation, hydrogen is very important because it is not only an energy carrier… it is also a very important material carrier—so it has dual functions,” says Shi.

Costs to come down

China’s massive renewables buildout over the next several years will push down domestic hydrogen production costs significantly. Solar generation costs are expected to fall by 25pc from present levels, according to Shi, to RMB0.1/kWh (1¢/kWh) by 2030, while onshore wind power costs will halve, to RMB0.2/kWh, and offshore wind will decline by one-third, to RMB0.27/kWh.

Electrolyser systems will come down in price over the same period, decreasing from RMB7,100/KW currently to RMB 1,200-1,600/kW by 2030.

“Hydrogen has dual functions” Shi, Tsinghua University

The hope in China is that hydrogen production costs by the end of this decade will be at the low end of the $2-2.5/kg range. This would be cheaper than Japan and South Korea, on par with the US, but not as cheap as Spain, Chile and Saudi Arabia—which could produce at $1.5/kg or less.

There is confidence that there will be adequate domestic demand for green hydrogen as production scales up, with speakers at the forum noting applications in transportation, industry, heating and power generation. In steelmaking alone, a 1mn t/yr metallurgical steel mill using green hydrogen to fuel 90pc of the smelting process would consume 100,000m³/hr of green hydrogen.

In eastern China’s Shandong province—a major petrochemicals hub—a 300km ‘hydrogen highway’ is being tested between the provincial capital of Jinan and three cities of Zibo, Weifang and Qingdao, involving 3,000 fuel-cell electric vehicles and 15 refuelling stations.

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Author: Shi Weijun