Hydrogen-focused nations should work together to develop hydrogen hubs that are open to international collaboration and knowledge-sharing, according to a report from the UK-based Net Zero Technology Centre titled Closing the Gap.

These facilities would develop skills and job creation, improve safety and develop a regulatory environment that could then be deployed within the respective participants’ energy infrastructure.

High-priority, mid-technology-readiness-level technologies such as electrolysers and storage compressors could then be fast-tracked within these ‘living labs’ to accelerate their development.

“The scale of the energy transition, coupled with growing global power consumption and a need for diverse energy sources, means countries should not consider the development of low-carbon hydrogen technologies as a competitive field but as a collaborative playground,” says the report.

“Countries should not consider the development of low-carbon hydrogen technologies as a competitive field” NZTC

“Pooling approaches and resources internationally will enable greater cost reductions and more scalable innovation than working in isolation,” it adds.

Such a collaboration could help reduce the costs of low-carbon hydrogen production to less than $2/kg globally by 2030, a goal considered vital if the world is to achieve net-zero emissions by mid-century.

Countries that are individually looking to develop hubs—such as Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, the UK and the US—would be good candidates for the project, according to the report.

Many of these countries are developing hubs as collaborative partnerships between companies, but none are yet sharing information in the way described in the report.

Green vs blue

A similar approach should be developed for carbon capture and storage (CCS) clusters, which are likely to feature blue hydrogen projects, according to the report.

These clusters would help improve efficiency and reduce the cost of capture technologies, leading to reductions in the overall costs of CCS from around $100/t CO₂ currently to under $50/t CO₂.

Although the same countries are likely to be interested as in the hydrogen hubs, not all are equally well-suited to the development of a first-mover cluster, the report notes, going on to recommend Canada as the best location.

“Given Canada’s expertise in CCUS technologies and Alberta’s active technological ecosystem supporting the development of geological carbon storage, the country has the knowledge and geological resources to be an effective partner in the development of a collaborative CCUS demonstration facility,” says the report.

A crucial part of storage site identification is ascertaining the certainty of permanent storage over long periods of time. To achieve this, improved appraisal processes for viable CCS storage sites are required, as they can help bring prospective sites to a commercial level rapidly and drive down storage cost. This will involve subsurface modelling to predict the behaviour of injected CO₂ and its impact on the surrounding geology, as well as monitoring, measurement and verification approaches.

“Fully coupled models are needed, taking into account fluid flow in the wellbore and reservoir that consider geomechanical, geochemical and transient flow. This can greatly improve the evaluation and prediction of caprock behaviour and effects of long-term CO₂ storage, greatly reducing geomechanical risk and helping reduce the risk of unintentional leakage,” concludes the report.

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Author: Tom Young