Hydrogen

As the hydrogen project in Appalachia moves on, American Airlines confirms its commitment to hydrogen aircrafts. Meanwhile, a Scottish distillery might soon run on hydrogen for whisky production.

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) claim they can efficiently produce hydrogen from recycled aluminum cans in seawater by combining them with gallium-indium and caffeine.

RWE has commissioned a 14 MW pilot electrolyzer plant in Lingen, Germany, while Thyssenkrupp nucera says market uncertainty has slowed growth momentum, despite a 12% increase in third-quarter order intake.

A German research team has compared the economic performance of an offgrid PV-electrolyser-fuel cell system with that of a standalone solar-plus-storage counterpart in a building in Niger. Its analysis showed that decentralized PV-driven hydrogen could achieve considerable lower levelized cost of energy and levelized cost of storage than the PV-battery system, with these values reaching €0.12 ($13.1)/kWh and €0.35/kWh, respectively.

BloombergNEF says clean ammonia supplies could expand by 30 times to 32 million tons by 2030, while MAX Power Mining has roughly tripled the size of its Rider Natural Hydrogen Project in western Canada.

Scientists in Australia have incorporated overload capacity and power-dependent efficiency of the electrolyser in a novel techno-economic model to calculate the levelized cost of hydrogen. The proposed methodology was applied to ascertain the impact of internalizing environmental costs on the cost-competitiveness of green hydrogen compared to grey hydrogen.

As Brazil starts its low-carbon hydrogen program, industry consolidation continues with two M&A operations in Italy and Texas. 

Canada and Italy announced funds for hydrogen projects. Meanwhile, a team of researchers explained that Australia should ship hydrogen to Japan by 2030 via methyl cyclohexane (MCH) or liquid ammonia (LNH3), not completely rejecting the option of liquid hydrogen (LH2).

H-TEC will be able to produce more than 1 GW of electrolyzers starting next year. “We installed the first production lines and will have our official opening in September this year,” Maximilian Kuhnert, sales manager at H-TEC, told pv magazine.

The country’s ecological transition ministry has published the regulatory bases of aid to large hydrogen clusters, industrial capacities in solar, wind energy, heat pumps, batteries and electrolysers; innovative renewable energy, storage and heat pump projects; and energy communities.