Transition from coal to hydrogen by Germany

 The Moorburg coal power plant boasts an eventful inception, a landmark closure, and now, a bright future.

It was opened in 2015 by Swedish utility Vattenfall on the banks of the Elbe , just outside the German port city of Hamburg. Its planning and construction were drawn out amid fierce opposition. consistent with Clean Energy Wire, an area newspaper marked its first day of operations with the headline “Greetings From the Stone Age .”

Now its next milestone might be together of the primary 100-megawatt scale green hydrogen sites in Europe.

The plans were revealed last week, with Shell, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and municipal heat provider Wärme Hamburg joining Vattenfall.

With a generation capacity of nearly 1.6 gigawatts, the anthracite plant will likely convince be one among the ultimate five new coal plants inbuilt Western Europe, consistent with data from Beyond Coal. Vattenfall acknowledged last year that the plant wasn't economically viable and would be closed down in 2021.

Swedish state-owned Vattenfall is getting to close all its remaining fossil-fuel generation by 2030. The approval of Germany’s €45 billion coal phaseout plan cleared the trail for a December tender which will compensate firms for the closure of 4,788 megawatts of capacity at a price to the govt of €317 million ($385 million).

Vattenfall, RWE and Uniper were the large winners. This was the primary of Germany’s anthracite phaseout tenders — a reverse auction with bidders naming the worth per megawatt of capacity they might close. The results are then skewed to form sure the foremost carbon-intensive electricity production is targeted first. That process ultimately yielded a mean bid of €60,000 ($72,878) per MW closed.

Moorburg’s green hydrogen future

The initial plan is to determine a 100 MW electrolyzer powered by wind and solar, with green hydrogen production starting around 2025. All of this is able to be subject to planning and financing requirements. The project is additionally applying for funds from the Important Projects of Common European Interest initiative.

Potential green hydrogen projects are arising around Europe and competing for an equivalent public funding. But Moorburg does have some advantages.

A lot of the basics that drew Vattenfall to the location remain, like port access via the river. The plant is connected to the national transmission network, the distribution system, the gas grid and therefore the district heating network.

Also working within the project's favor is that the range of offtakers already attached, with steel giant ArcelorMittal lined up.

“One of the key starting points was the commitment of the steelworks ,” Emmanouil Kakaras, senior vice chairman and head of innovation and new products at Mitsubishi Power Europe, said in an interview. “It's a building block to make the business case for the demand,” he said, describing it as “baseload demand.”

Hamburg’s industrial center offers a number of other potential customers, as does a hydrogen bus trial in Hamburg if it's expanded. The local gas network is already working toward developing a hydrogen pipeline connecting the port and therefore the city this decade.

Kakaras said Wärme Hamburg won’t immediately be a hydrogen offtaker, but he added that the partnership are going to be beneficial. By utilizing excess heat from the Wärme Hamburg, which is already connected to the location via the prevailing combined-heat-and-power plant, the electrolysis rate of reaction are often improved.

“It considerably improves the business case of the assembly . So given the specificities of green hydrogen, we've a comparatively attractive business case configuration,” he said.

The presence of the port also means provides the location access to other hydrogen carriers, like ammonia, that would be transported to the location .

Demand is king for green hydrogen

Green hydrogen certainly has many remaining skeptics. Energy veterans will have seen one hydrogen hype cycle come and go.

But the drive toward decarbonization, which hydrogen enables, means things are very different this point around, Kakaras said.

“In the first 2000s, we were calling it the web of energy. It never happened," he said. "The decentralized part is that the transport side. the important business is starting with the central supply generation and distribution to major customers."

To ensure things get off to a robust start, the primary wave of projects, which can enjoy public subsidy, got to be chosen carefully, he warned.

“They will create an example and [provide] the teachings for replication and therefore the rollout of this technology,” he said.

If everything goes to plan, Kakaras expects the journey for green hydrogen to scale from dependence on public funding to commercial independence to be shorter than that of solar PV.

In Europe, the EU features a 40 GW electrolyzer target for 2030. If the sole sectors using green hydrogen come from existing hydrogen users, like the fertilizer industry, then we’re headed for an oversupply situation.

Ben Gallagher may be a senior analyskikit at Wood Mackenzie and therefore the author of the company’s new report, The Hydrogen Possibility. He considers demand to be a serious challenge for the world .

“As of now...on the assembly side, there's enough support from these targets and from this money available for deployments,” Gallagher said in an interview. “Cost will probably be ready to fall fast enough, thanks to what's happened with wind, solar and lithium-ion [batteries]. But the demand for the electrons they produce was already very well established," he noted.

“It's the question of [whether] these sectors that haven't consumed it before are going to be ready to accept low-carbon hydrogen,” he added.

With that “baseload demand” already secured and infrastructure on the way for access to many sources of demand, Moorburg could well enter its second epoch but 10 years after opening. Greetings from the hydrogen age.