Raphael ThysMidjourney generated image of Norwegian hydrogen manufacturing facility on fjord collapsing into ruins
Norwegian Cryogenic Hydrogen Shipping Fuel Effort Fails, Predictably
Hydrogen advocates promote MOUs and other weak press release fodder endlessly, yet are silent on the regular failures of the initiatives
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Published in
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8 min read
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Aug 29
Every week there are breathless announcements about some new hydrogen for energy play. It might be about a 121 km hydrogen passenger train route. It might be about a memorandum of understanding to maybe, at some point in the future, build a lot of renewables to make hydrogen in Namibia. It might be about a plane flying for ten minutes with one propeller turned by hydrogen.
Less breathlessly announced and hyped are the quiet abandonment of scheme after scheme after scheme as they don’t pan out.
The one that brought this to mind this morning was the announcement that Equinor, Air Liquide, and Eviny were completely abandoning their Norwegian green hydrogen shipping fuel project. They had a site picked out next to an Equinor refinery where they were going to build an electrolysis plant and manufacture six tons of liquified hydrogen a day.
At about 50 MWh per ton of hydrogen for electrolysis, that’s about 300 MWh per day. And at about a third of the energy in the hydrogen to liquify it, that’s another 67 MWh or so. Add in energy for everything else in the facility and let’s call it around 380 MWh per day. That would have been about 140 GWh per year, assuming fairly constant production. The electrolyzer itself would have been in the 12.5–20 MW range depending on utilization.
They’d have been paying industrial prices for major users, about $58 USD per MWh at average rates over the past 15 years. That covers multiple generation sources, transmission, firming, and regulatory prices. That would have been about $8 million annually, just for electricity. That’s about $3,700 per ton of liquid H2, or about $3.70 per kg. This cost of electricity isn’t going to go down. It’s already among the lowest rates for electricity that exist or even can exist until late stage grid decarbonization with massive amounts of renewables, HVDC, and storage having mostly been amortized. That’s 2100 or so, and can safely be ignored.