Welcome to the Hydrophiles, the HR Wallingford Podcast. I'm Sally Jackson, and today I'm joined by Mike Case, who's an expert in clean energy in terms of its markets and its technology. And we've been getting together to talk about the future of energy and what that might look like. There are three other episodes, and this is the third. The first two are on the industrialization of
floating wind. This one is going to be all about solar, which you might not think has much to do with water, but we'll find out why it does in a moment. The last will be on carbon capture and storage. So welcome Mike.
Hi, Sally!
First of all, before we find out about how the solar industry is linked to water, let's find out about what the big ideas are in solar at the moment, and how that might help with our energy crisis.
So what we're seeing is quite interesting on solar, actually. So what we're seeing is the number of projects coming through that are developing solar purely for hydrogen or ammonia production. So looking at areas of hot, arid countries where they have very high solar radiation that they can use to convert that power to electricity and then ultimately use an energy carrier, such as hydrogen or ammonia, to transport that energy somewhere
else. So you've got potential there for large areas of Africa, North Africa, and Australia, or other countries where you could sensibly produce solar. Actually the cost of solar has come down enormously over the last 20 years. So solar is one of the cheapest ways of producing renewable energy, and you could produce large-scale renewable energy and then export that in empty energy carriers, such as hydrogen or ammonia, to other countries and markets.
So, before we come onto hydrogen and ammonia, what you're really talking about, could we see vast swathes of the Sahara covered in solar farms to power Europe, for instance?
Yeah, or other global markets. I mean, if you look at the LNG market, something like that, I mean they're global markets. So you could be transporting that ammonia, or that hydrogen all over the world. So it opens up a huge global market if you can produce it cheaply enough. There's a number of markets that are opening up, which are high
carbon intensity. As the carbon price in Europe and across the world increases, then the 'hard to abate' sectors such as manufacturing, chemical uses and some transport, heavy transport, shipping and so on (they are the 'hard to abate' sectors), you'll see a huge increase in the hydrogen market for those sectors.
So, I imagine that means that there is a real way out for hot arid countries at the moment that rely on oil. Is this right? They could actually be replacing their fossil fuel sector with clean energy sector, because they actually have those assets too. Is that right?
Yeah, yeah. Why not? And I think a number of countries are waking up to that fact that they could produce very cheap solar, and they can produce an exportable energy product from cheap renewable energy.
So what we are really talking about in terms of
Well, it depends on where your market is. If your how this interacts with water, then, is how we get this energy that's produced in a desert or high sun area in arid market is in Europe, and you're close to the market, then conditions, to where it's needed. One thought on this is you just put a giant cable under the sea at wherever it needs to pipeline is the most sensible way forward. So, producing
be. But what you're saying is actually it's more sensible to try to transport it using green hydrogen. hydrogen and then piping it to where you need it is the most sensible way forward. Transporting hydrogen is very difficult.
So tell us the process. You've got a solar farm in the Sahara, say, and you want to transport the energy to somewhere else in the world that's quite far away. Tell us how that works.
From a solar farm, what you need to have an exportable energy product, you need an energy carrier. That energy carrier is going to be either hydrogen or a derivative fuel made from hydrogen. So, you'll produce hydrogen. You need water for electrolysis, but relatively small amounts of water for the electrolysis. So, you'll produce hydrogen. Then from that, there's a number of chemical processes. I think it's a Haber-Bosch process. You can produce ammonia, or you can
produce synthetic fuels. So, you can produce synthetic methanol, or you can produce synthetic aviation fuels on site, and then you can transport them in the same way you transport aviation fuels now.
So you would go that step further, because hydrogen is hard to transport on its own.
Yeah, hydrogen is very hard to transport because you could transport it in compressed form and be able to liquefy it at extremely low temperature. So transporting it produces a huge amount of heat which requires huge amounts of energy in order to liquefy it. So your losses are enormous. If you want to liquefy hydrogen, you'll have huge losses to get to liquefied hydrogen and to be able to transport it.
Transporting the gasses at that temperature is very difficult as well, and expensive, and then you have the regasification at the other end.
Because it's so cold?
Because it's so cold. So, the easiest way of transporting hydrogen, and the cheapest, most effective way, is probably ammonia. You manufacture ammonia on site, and then you move liquid ammonia. Now liquid ammonia, I think, is about minus 33 degrees, so it's much more akin to LNG, something like that. There's other challenges with it, because it's
toxic. You can transport it in a very similar way, similar technology that you'd use for Liquid Natural Gas, and then you can transport that to markets around the world, and then the offloading facilities will be quite similar in scope to LNG offloading facilities.
You said it yourself, it's toxic, and it's not just toxic, is it? Ammonia is really toxic.
Yes, it's quite a dangerous thing to transport. You can actually use ammonia, it's quite useful. You can use it directly. You can combust it directly in engines. So it could be used in ships, for example, to power ships instead of diesel or heavy oils. But it does have the downside of it, it's toxic. So on top of the challenges of the danger element from LNG, you also have the toxicity element
of it as well. There are a number of challenges around that that need to be overcome to transport it globally in a safe way.
And those challenges are in ports, in terms of the facilities in ports, and also on ships.
Yeah, exactly. So in ports you have to obviously, LNG, it's liquified natural gas, explosive, you have to be very careful. So there's a lot of rules and a lot of engineering around how you do that in a safe manner. It would be the same for ammonia, but with the increased danger element of the fact that if you do have a toxic release, it won't just release into the atmosphere. You'll have the
toxic impact of that. Whereas if you have a release of LNG, once you've overcome the explosive nature of it, you don't have that secondary toxic implication.
So ports are going to have to do quite a lot of thinking about how they adapt their existing facilities for ammonia if we're going to get solar energy around the world.
Exactly. So you'll have to adapt existing LNG ports, where you offload, where you want to offload the ammonia, also where you produce it and where you liquefy it and put it onto the ships. So, they'll have to be carefully thought through how you do that. And, of course, we have the actual transport itself. But ammonia is transported, at the moment. You know, it is a commodity, it is a bulk commodity at the moment.
So, ammonia is transported. You will see ammonia trucks on our roads at the moment transporting ammonia for chemical processes and other things. So, we do know how to do it. The technology is there. It's just scaling it well.
And are we helping clients to do this for solar at the moment?
So these are starting. We're starting to see inquiries coming through for solar projects. So there's a number of areas where HR Wallingford could help with these large solar projects. So, in the hot, arid areas, one of the issues they have tends to be flash flooding. So if it's hot, you have these wadis, these dry riverbeds and so on, and you see these wadis, and they're
enormous. You're thinking: "Well, how are they created?" But then when you see a flash flood, when you do get rainfall and desert, you have these flash flood areas. So one of the areas we're looking at for these solar farms is what the likely impact is on fluvial and pluvial flooding. And then we've started seeing inquiries coming through looking at port infrastructure for the offloading and for the export facilities for ammonia and the import facilities for
ammonia as well. They're starting to come through now.
Something that came up the other day when we were chatting before this podcast that was really interesting is that you actually need water in solar farms for cleaning solar panels. Is that right?
Yeah, I think in some areas, they use water for cleaning because, of course, particularly if you're in an arid and in a dusty area, if your solar panels become covered in dust, they become less efficient. So, the cleaner you can keep them, the better. In some areas they use water, or in other areas they just brush them off. But of course, you obviously scratch the glass and so on, and you reduce efficiency
over time. So there's a number of different ways of doing that, but yeah, water is is one of them.
That's really interesting, isn't it? Because actually, you've mentioned water in a couple of areas that's needed in the process, you know, for cleaning and also for production of hydrogen. So, if you're going to be producing energy in a desert, is there a possibility you need to ship water to a desert to do this?
If you're producing hydrogen, you'll certainly need desalinated water. You'll need a water source for the hydrogen production. I think in terms of washing, I think that's fairly small volumes compared to what you might need for the actual hydrogen production.
So you might be looking at desalination plants alongside hydrogen production?
Yeah, potentially.
Absolutely fascinating. It'd be interesting to see how this plays out over the next few years.
Yeah, it's very, very exciting area.
Thank you so much for joining me on that one, and we'll be back for the last in our series, which is on carbon capture and storage next time. Thank you, Mike.
Okay.