IEA report: the Future of Hydrogen
The time is right to tap into hydrogen’s potential to play a key role in a clean, secure and affordable energy future. At the request of the government of Japan under its G20 presidency, the International Energy Agency (IEA) has produced this landmark report to analyse the current state of play for hydrogen and to offer guidance on its future development. The report finds that clean hydrogen is currently enjoying unprecedented political and business momentum, with the number of policies and projects around the world expanding rapidly. It concludes that now is the time to scale up technologies and bring down costs to allow hydrogen to become widely used. The pragmatic and actionable recommendations to governments and industry that are provided will make it possible to take full advantage of this increasing momentum.
Hydrogen can help tackle various critical energy challenges. It offers ways to decarbonise a range of sectors – including long-haul transport, chemicals, and iron and steel – where it is proving difficult to meaningfully reduce emissions. It can also help improve air quality and strengthen energy security. Despite very ambitious international climate goals, global energy-related CO2 emissions reached an all time high in 2018. Outdoor air pollution also remains a pressing problem, with around 3 million people dying prematurely each year.
Hydrogen is versatile. Technologies already available today enable hydrogen to produce, store, move and use energy in different ways. A wide variety of fuels are able to produce hydrogen, including renewables, nuclear, natural gas, coal and oil. It can be transported as a gas by pipelines or in liquid form by ships, much like liquefied natural gas (LNG). It can be transformed into electricity and methane to power homes and feed industry, and into fuels for cars, trucks, ships and planes.
Hydrogen can enable renewables to provide an even greater contribution. It has the potential to help with variable output from renewables, like solar photovoltaics (PV) and wind, whose availability is not always well matched with demand. Hydrogen is one of the leading options for storing energy from renewables and looks promising to be a lowest-cost option for storing electricity over days, weeks or even months. Hydrogen and hydrogenbased fuels can transport energy from renewables over long distances – from regions with abundant solar and wind resources, such as Australia or Latin America, to energy-hungry cities thousands of kilometres away.
There have been false starts for hydrogen in the past; this time could be different. The recent successes of solar PV, wind, batteries and electric vehicles have shown that policy andtechnology innovation have the power to build global clean energy industries. With a global energy sector in flux, the versatility of hydrogen is attracting stronger interest from a diverse group of governments and companies. Support is coming from governments that both import and export energy as well as renewable electricity suppliers, industrial gas producers, electricity and gas utilities, automakers, oil and gas companies, major engineering firms, and cities. Investments in hydrogen can help foster new technological and industrial development in economies around the world, creating skilled jobs.
Hydrogen can be used much more widely. Today, hydrogen is used mostly in oil refining and for the production of fertilisers. For it to make a significant contribution to clean energy transitions, it also needs to be adopted in sectors where it is almost completely absent at the moment, such as transport, buildings and power generation.
However, clean, widespread use of hydrogen in global energy transitions faces several challenges:
Producing hydrogen from low-carbon energy is costly at the moment. IEA analysis
finds that the cost of producing hydrogen from renewable electricity could fall 30% by 2030 as a
result of declining costs of renewables and the scaling up of hydrogen production. Fuel cells,
refuelling equipment and electrolysers (which produce hydrogen from electricity and water) can all
benefit from mass manufacturing.
The development of hydrogen infrastructure is slow and holding back widespread
adoption. Hydrogen prices for consumers are highly dependent on how many refuelling
stations there are, how often they are used and how much hydrogen is delivered per day. Tackling
this is likely to require planning and coordination that brings together national and local
governments, industry and investors.
Hydrogen is almost entirely supplied from natural gas and coal today. Hydrogen is
already with us at industrial scale all around the world, but its production is responsible for
annual CO2 emissions equivalent to those of Indonesia and United Kingdom combined. Harnessing this
existing scale on the way to a clean energy future requires both the capture of CO2 from hydrogen
production from fossil fuels and greater supplies of hydrogen from clean electricity.
- Regulations currently limit the development of a clean hydrogen industry. Government and industry must work together to ensure existing regulations are not an unnecessary barrier to investment. Trade will benefit from common international standards for the safety of transporting and storing large volumes of hydrogen and for tracing the environmental impacts of different hydrogen supplies.
The IEA has identified four near-term opportunities to boost hydrogen on the path towards its clean, widespread use. Focusing on these real-world springboards could help hydrogen achieve the necessary scale to bring down costs and reduce risks for governments and the private sector. While each opportunity has a distinct purpose, all four also mutually reinforce one another.
Make industrial ports the nerve centres for scaling up the use of clean hydrogen.
Today, much of the refining and chemicals production that uses hydrogen based on fossil fuels is
already concentrated in coastal industrial zones around the world, such as the North Sea in Europe,
the Gulf Coast in North America and southeastern China.
Encouraging these plants to shift to cleaner hydrogen production would drive down overall costs. These large sources of hydrogen supply can also fuel ships and trucks serving the ports and power other nearby industrial facilities like steel plants.
Build on existing infrastructure, such as millions of kilometres of natural gas
pipelines. Introducing clean hydrogen to replace just 5% of the volume of countries’
natural gas supplies would significantly boost demand for hydrogen and drive down costs.
Expand hydrogen in transport through fleets, freight and corridors. Powering
highmileage cars, trucks and buses to carry passengers and goods along popular routes can make
fuel-cell vehicles more competitive.
Launch the hydrogen trade’s first international shipping routes. Lessons from the
successful growth of the global LNG market can be leveraged. International hydrogen trade needs to
start soon if it is to make an impact on the global energy system.
International co-operation is vital to accelerate the growth of versatile, clean hydrogen around the world. If governments work to scale up hydrogen in a co-ordinated way, it can help to spur investments in factories and infrastructure that will bring down costs and enable the sharing of knowledge and best practices. Trade in hydrogen will benefit from common international standards. As the global energy organisation that covers all fuels and all technologies, the IEA will continue to provide rigorous analysis and policy advice to support international co-operation and to conduct effective tracking of progress in the years ahead.
As a roadmap for the future, we are offering seven key recommendations to help governments, companies and others to seize this chance to enable clean hydrogen to fulfil its long-term potential.
09 October 2019 - 17:55 CEST