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Juggernaut or boondoggle—it’s too soon to tell
The Sun Metals solar farm, completed in 2018, supplies electricity to a zinc refinery in Townsville, Qld., Australia. The AUS $200 million, 120-hectare plant can supply 124 megawatts under ideal conditions. The plant is now owned by Ark Energy, a subsidiary of Korea Zinc, which also owns the adjacent refinery. By the end of 2023, Ark Energy plans to commission a fleet of fuel-cell trucks powered by green hydrogen to haul zinc concentrates and ingots between the refinery and a nearby port.
For several months now, 20 teams of Australian high-school students have been designing fuel-cell cars to compete in the country’s inaugural Hydrogen Grand Prix. They’ve been studying up on renewable energy, hydrogen power, and electric vehicles, preparing for the big day in April when their remote-controlled vehicles will rumble for 4 hours in Gladstone, a port city in Queensland. The task: make the most of a 30-watt fuel cell and 14 grams of hydrogen gas.
A few months later and some 800 kilometers up Queensland’s coast, Grand Prix corporate cosponsor Ark Energy aims to apply the same basic hydrogen and fuel-cell components—albeit scaled up more than 3,500 times. By 2023’s third quarter, Ark expects five of the world’s largest fuel-cell trucks to be hauling concentrated zinc ore and finished ingots between a zinc refinery and the nearby port of Townsville. The carbon-free rigs will pack 50 kilos of hydrogen zapped from water using electricity from the refinery’s dedicated solar power plant.
Welcome to Australia, where a green-hydrogen boom is in full swing. Both the massive and the toy-size vehicles are about selling Australians on the transformative potential of green hydrogen—hydrogen gas produced from renewable energy—to decarbonize their fossil-fuel-based economy. And while coal plants still supplied over half of Australia’s power in 2021, change is afoot. The government elected last year passed the country’s first climate-action law in more than a decade. And green hydrogen is the centerpiece of its clean-economy growth plan.
Resource-poor Asian neighbors such as Japan and Korea are also counting on Aussie green hydrogen to help get them off fossil fuels in the decades ahead.
Add up the capacity figures in all of Australia’s current proposals to produce green hydrogen and the sum exceeds Australia’s power-generating capacity. It’s all part of a green-hydrogen wave that’s spreading worldwide.
Observers caution that some of these green-hydrogen projects will never produce a thimbleful of hydrogen—an echo of the hydrogen boom a generation ago that ultimately went bust. “It’s very easy in this current phase for two people you’ve never heard about to create a 30-gigawatt project and put out a press release,” says David Norman, CEO for the clean-energy research organization Future Fuels Cooperative Research Centre in Wollongong, New South Wales.
Phantom projects are not a problem confined to Australia. Only 10 percent of the US $240 billion worth of hydrogen projects announced worldwide are actually moving forward, according to a September 2022 study by consultancy McKinsey & Company. Yet many more are actually needed. Building every electrolyzer promised for 2030 would provide only about one-sixth of the green hydrogen required to meet climate targets, according to figures from the International Energy Agency in Paris.
Amid this noisy background, Queensland is home to the two projects most likely to boost the credibility of Australia’s green-hydrogen juggernaut in 2023. Ark Energy’s project is part of a clean-energy blitz in Australia by its parent company, Seoul-based metal-refining giant Korea Zinc. The other glimmer of reality is a project in Gladstone to build one of the world’s largest electrolyzer-manufacturing plants, which promises to provide a local source of equipment amid ongoing chaos in global supply chains.
The 124-megawatt solar plant adjacent to Korea Zinc’s Townsville refinery, completed in 2018, cut a quarter of the coal-heavy grid power it had been using to run its power-intensive electrolytic process. The coming fuel-cell trucks will trim its diesel consumption.
Ark Energy CEO Daniel Kim says Korea Zinc launched his firm in 2021 to help shift its Australian operations to 80 percent renewable energy by 2030 and, in the process, pave a path for 100 percent renewable energy group-wide by 2050. Kim says the 2050 goal requires green hydrogen—or a more exportable fuel made from it—because Korea Zinc does most of its refining in South Korea, where there’s limited space for solar and wind plants.
Ark’s first move was to access more renewable power in Australia by buying into a 923-MW wind farm that’s expected to spin up in 2024. Next it ordered equipment for the Townsville truck project to begin exploring green hydrogen’s capabilities and challenges. “To become a low-cost producer of green hydrogen, we first have to become an extreme user—to make it pervasive across our business. Diesel replacement for heavy trucks was the best prospective use,” Kim says.
Today, 28 heavy-duty diesel-powered trucks operate at the Townsville refinery. When ships arrive at port with zinc concentrate, or tie up to take on zinc ingots, the rigs haul triple-trailers and loop the 30 km from port to plant and back nonstop for as many as eight days. Time is money, says Kim, because occupying a berth in port can cost a whopping AUS $22,000 (US $13,800) a day. Even if a battery-powered truck could handle the refinery’s 140,000-tonne loads, Kim says his company couldn’t afford to wait for batteries to recharge.
Fortescue’s growth plan anticipates shipping most of its green hydrogen out of Australia to clean up heavy vehicles, industries, and power grids worldwide.
In 2021, Ark Energy took a stake in Hyzon Motors, one of the few firms working on ultraheavy trucks powered by fuel cells. Hyzon, based in Rochester, N.Y., agreed to equip some of its first extra-beefy fuel-cell rigs with the right-hand drive and wider carriage required in Australia—something other developers couldn’t offer until 2025 or 2026. “We’re bringing forward the transition of Australia’s ultraheavy transport sector by several years,” says Kim.
To fuel the trucks, Ark Energy ordered a 1-MW electrolyzer from Plug Power, based in Latham, N.Y. Kim anticipated that construction of the electrolyzer facility would start around the end of 2022, and vowed that five fuel-cell trucks would be looping to port and back on hydrogen gas in the third quarter of 2023 or sooner.
Kim says these vehicles will cost “a little over three times” that of an equivalent diesel-fueled hauler, up front, but the overall project should break even or even save money over the trucks’ projected 10-year operating life. Government grants and loans and high diesel prices help make hydrogen competitive. The trucks’ unchanging route was also a plus: The relatively flat loop enabled use of a smaller, cheaper, fuel cell. “This is a dedicated truck for a dedicated purpose,” Kim notes.
Ark Energy expects to start exporting renewable energy around 2030. In contrast, the team delivering Queensland’s second dose of green hydrogen realism this year could begin commercial-scale exports in 2025. The AUS $114 million (US $72 million) electrolyzer plant rising in Gladstone is the first brick-and-mortar green-hydrogen move by mining magnate Andrew Forrest, Australia’s boldest, and wealthiest, green-hydrogen proponent.
Forrest became the second-richest man in Australia running Perth-based Fortescue Metals Group, which disrupted the global iron-ore business through vertical integration and aggressive cost cutting.
Now Fortescue is applying the same strategy to green hydrogen. Forrest vows to invest US $6.2 billion to produce 15 million tonnes of green hydrogen per year by 2030—50 percent more than what the European Union says it needs to import to get off Russian energy and to cut carbon emissions. Doing so will require about 150GW of wind and solar generation—more than the total installed generating capacity of France. The move is projected to eliminate 3 million tonnes of carbon per year—slashing Fortescue’s emissions to zero and saving it US $818 million per year.
BloombergNEF predicts that the annual manufacturing capacity worldwide for hydrogen-producing electrolyzers will more than triple in the next two years.
Cameron Smith, head of manufacturing for Fortescue’s green-energy subsidiary, Fortescue Future Industries, says getting there means cutting costs until the company’s renewable energy is cheaper than fossil fuels. “Our objective here is to make fossil fuels irrelevant,” Smith declares.
Fortescue is building its own electrolyzer production plant in spite of a global glut. Market analysts at BloombergNEF project that manufacturing capacity for electrolyzers will exceed demand 10- to 15-fold this year. Smith says that’s not a major concern for Fortescue, given the company’s imperative to cut costs and to quickly bring green-hydrogen production on line. “We don’t need to make everything, but we need a credible pathway to do so if we can’t get the equipment we need at the cost and quality we need to make all our projects viable,” he says.
The Gladstone plant’s 13,000-square-meter envelope is already in place, and Smith anticipates installation of one line’s robotic machines during the second quarter of 2023. He expects the plant will end the year as a “gigawatt-scale” electrolyzer factory: producing enough electrolyzers in a year to consume 1 GW of electricity. And he expects production capacity to double with a second line early in 2024.
Fortescue expects green hydrogen to help its own operations reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2040. But its growth plan, like Ark Energy’s, anticipates exporting most of its green hydrogen to clean up heavy vehicles, industries, and power grids worldwide. First, though, they will have to make it shippable.
Shipping hydrogen is pricey. As either a gas or a liquid, it has relatively low volumetric energy density. So most of Australia’s prospective green-hydrogen mega-producers expect to move their energy overseas by converting green hydrogen to ammonia—a chemical precursor for nitrogen fertilizers that already ships worldwide. Ammonia is primarily produced from hydrogen, although today it’s typically done using hydrogen made with natural gas rather than electrolysis.
Exported ammonia made in Australia from green hydrogen could already outcompete ammonia produced in Europe with natural gas, according to calculations by BloombergNEF, and proposed projects are multiplying. Ark Energy recently formed an industrial consortium to use 3 GW of renewable power to produce “green ammonia” for export to Korea, although first shipments wouldn’t happen until after 2030.
Fortescue has even bigger long-term plans, and is already sizing up a way to jump-start ammonia exports. It is considering refitting a 54-year-old fertilizer plant in Brisbane, which was slated to shut down early this year due to skyrocketing natural-gas prices. Fortescue and the plant’s owner are considering installing 500 MW of electrolyzers so they can restart the plant on green hydrogen around 2025.
“It’s very easy in this current phase for two people you’ve never heard about to create a 30-gigawatt project and put out a press release,” says one observer.
Amid all of these grand plans, what remains to be seen, says hydrogen analyst Martin Tengler at BloombergNEF’s Tokyo office, is whether green-ammonia exports can truly meet people’s energy needs.
Ammonia doesn’t burn well on its own, he notes, and converting exported ammonia back to hydrogen for steel plants or fuel-cell vehicles requires a lot of energy. “You’re using energy to import energy. If you need green hydrogen in Europe, it’s probably cheaper to make green hydrogen in Europe,” Tengler concludes.
Some plans for green ammonia could actually extend fossil-fuel consumption and thus delay climate action. For example, some Japanese and Korean power producers have announced plans to burn green ammonia in coal-fired power plants to reduce emissions.
In September, BloombergNEF estimated that power from Japanese coal plants burning 50 percent green ammonia from Australia would cost US $136 per megawatt-hour in 2030—more than it projects for power from offshore wind and solar plants in Japan backed up with battery storage. “It’s not the most economical way to use ammonia,” Tengler says, “or the cheapest way for Japan and Korea to decarbonize.”
In other words, even if green hydrogen gets real this year, there’s much to learn about what it should be used for, and where.
Peter Fairley has been tracking energy technologies and their environmental implications globally for over two decades, charting engineering and policy innovations that could slash dependence on fossil fuels and the political forces fighting them. He has been a Contributing Editor with IEEE Spectrum since 2003.
Policymakers differ on how to incentivize automakers and consumers
Robert N. Charette is a Contributing Editor to IEEE Spectrum and an acknowledged international authority on information technology and systems risk management. A self-described “risk ecologist,” he is interested in the intersections of business, political, technological, and societal risks. Charette is an award-winning author of multiple books and numerous articles on the subjects of risk management, project and program management, innovation, and entrepreneurship. A Life Senior Member of the IEEE, Charette was a recipient of the IEEE Computer Society’s Golden Core Award in 2008.
Heavy traffic moves along the 101 freeway in Los Angeles, California.
With less than eight years for the United States to meet the objective of a 50-percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, many environmental advocacy groups argue that an even faster transition to EVs is mandatory. For instance, the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) estimates that 1-in-4 light-duty vehicles, or about 70 million EVs, must be on US roads by 2030 to meet the GHG reduction target. The latest Edison Electric Instituteprojection is that only about 26.4 million EVs will likely be on the roads by then, although some others estimate the number could be as high as 35 million. However, that is still far short of RMI’s 70 million target.
To accelerate EV uptake, the Zero Emission Transportation Association, a lobbying group formed by Tesla, Lucid and Rivian along with some EV charging suppliers, asserts that sales of new internal combustion vehicles must be banned by 2030 and diesel trucks by 2035. Greenpeace, agrees, and argues that sales of all diesel and petrol vehicles, including hybrids must end by 2030. In addition, gasoline vehicles 15 years or older and diesel trucks over 10 years old should not be allowed on US roads, as is happening in some Indian cities.
There is also a push to make those who own SUVs pay a steep annual registration fee to discourage their ownership, as is happening in Washington, D.C. Furthermore, there are demands that policies should be enacted to cease construction or upgrades of gasoline stations as is happening now in some California cities.
The 50 percent GHG emission reduction target by 2030 is indeed entirely possible according to a report from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. This can be accomplished by building upon the above EV and ICE vehicle policy recommendations, coupled with 100 percent methane capture, retiring all coal-fired electric generation as well as converting the US electric grid with 80 percent clean energy by 2030. A coordinated effort by US policy makers is all that is preventing this happening, the report states.
Recommendations on how to complete the numerous global and domesticate systems engineering efforts across multiple industries required to carry out such policies in such a short time frame is conspicuously absent from LLNL’s report, however.
Even for California, the approach outlined above is an EV too far. California’s Air Resources Board (CARB) Chair Liane RandolphtoldReuters that its 2035 EV mandate was the “sweet spot,” given “where the automakers are, where the supply chains are, and where the production vehicles are.” Not all CARB members are so confident, however, with some questioning whether the board had enough information to set such an aggressive mandate.
Even if California does meet its 2025 mark, more than 400 charging ports would still have to be installed every day to meet the 2030 objective.
One reason to be skeptical about the state’s ability to meet that mandate is that California’s EV infrastructure support is a bit fraught. For instance, California’s Energy Commission (CEC) projects the state will need 1.2 million public and shared EV charging ports at workplaces, multi-unit dwellings and other public spots by 2030. However, CEC Commissioner Patty Monahanadmits the state, with 79,000 EV charging ports installed to date (up from 73,000 from 2021) is unlikely to meet its 2025 target of 250,000 charging ports. The number also assumes that most charging stations will be in good working order, something that EV drivers unhappily have not found.
Yet even if California does meet its 2025 mark, more than 400 charging ports would still have to be installed every day to meet the 2030 objective. It is uncertain whether given the rapidly rising demand for charging stations across the U.S. and elsewhere, enough can even be manufactured to meet California’s need in time.
Further, the California Air Resources Board states in its environmental analysis of transitioning to EVs by 2035 that “special attention” and “investment in transformers, meters, breakers, wires, conduit, and associated civil engineering work will be necessary.” California’s electricity distribution grid, especially in the rural areas, the report states, will need to be upgraded to handle the increased electricity demand by up to 25 percent in the morning and 20 percent in the evening.
Red lines indicate areas where the grid cannot accommodate additional load without any thermal or voltage violations. Grey hatched areas indicate regions where gaps in utility grid data exist. Colored lines, keyed in the legend, indicate the available circuit capacity in megawatts.California Air Resources Board
Included in the CARB environmental analysis is the California Electricity Commission’s electric capacity assessment map above depicting in “red lines where the grid cannot handle any additional loads because of thermal or voltage violations.” Gray hatched areas indicate regions where gaps in utility grid data exist (mostly in Publicly Owned and Investor Owned Utility service areas). Colored lines, keyed in the legend, indicate the available circuit capacity in megawatts.
Automakers are also split over governmental EV policies in the U.S. and elsewhere. As mentioned, pure EV automakers and EV charging companies would like ICE vehicles to be banned by 2030 in the U.S., for obvious reasons. GM, too, is in favor of an accelerated EV mandate, believing this gives the automaker a commercial advantage over its rivals. GM wants the US Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) to make the Administration’s aspirational 50 percent EV sales goal by 2030 a national mandate instead.
However, automakers like Stellantis and Toyota are not enthralled with current EV mandates or the proposed outright bans of ICE vehicle sales. Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares has been very vocal in saying the speed demanded for the transition to EVs by politicians is “beyond the limits” of what the auto industry can support, and worries it could end up being counterproductive.
Toyota President Akio Toyoda, who has been receiving strident criticism for not committing the company to an all-battery EV strategy, reportedly stated that meeting the California EV requirements will “realistically speaking … be difficult to achieve.” He also believes that BEVs will take longer to become the dominant everyday vehicle than “the mainstream media” touts. Toyoda also argues that only selling EV powertrains would not serve Toyota’s customers well in other countries, a similar argument made by automakers BMW, Mazda and VW.
One issue that all automakers can agree on is that the new US electric vehicle incentives need revision. For example, to receive the full $7,500 tax credit available, 40 percent of a battery’s critical minerals must be extracted from or processed in the United States or a US free-trade agreement partner, or be recycled in North America; 50 percent of the battery components must be manufactured or assembled in North America before 2024. Thereafter, the percentages go up by 10 percentage points each year. Additionally, there are also price caps on the EVs that are eligible,—$55,000 for autos and $80,000 for SUVs or vans. Further, once a particular EV model reaches 200,000 in US sales, the EV tax credit is phased out.
“I don’t think that you can transform the mineral production and extraction within the next two to three years. You cannot change the sources from Congo, China and other places within two to three years.” —Pablo Di Si
There are also income caps. Even if a US taxpayer buys an EV that meets the credit, but their tax liability is not at least $7,500 in the year they purchase the vehicle, they do not reap the full benefit. An individual using the standard tax deduction would have to earn around $70,000 to get the full federal tax benefit. So the value of the credit means little to the less well-off.
Automakers had previously agreed they could meet the Biden Administration’s 2030 EV sales objectives, providing there are substantial subsidies given to potential EV buyers. However, under the current incentive scheme, automakers say it will be nearly impossible to meet the content requirements. The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, which represents GM, VW and other major automakers warns the credit structure likely will “jeopardize our collective target of 40-50% electric vehicle sales by 2030.”
President and CEO of Volkswagen Group of America Pablo Di Si adds, “I don’t think that you can transform the mineral production and extraction within the next two to three years. You cannot change the sources from Congo, China and other places within two to three years.”
The automakers do have a point. Only about 20 EVs on the market today are currently eligible for the tax credits. The US Congressional Budget Office (CBO) further estimates only some 11,000 new EVs will be sold in 2023 that meet the component requirements. The CBO further states that only 237,000 incentive-meeting EVs will be sold between 2022-2026. Automakers were hoping to sell at least 6 million mostly subsidized EVs over that period.
GM’s CEO Mary Barra says she expects that its EVs will qualify for the full $7,500 tax credit within the next two to three years. If they do not, GM’s $50 billion in projected future revenue and healthy profit margins from EVs will be at risk. Ford, which has previously stated before the new content rules that it did not expect its EV business to be fully profitable until model year 2025, may also need to redo its profitability calculations. Rising EV battery prices do not help. It is undoubtedly one reason that Ford, along with other automakers, is lobbying fervently for a liberal interpretation of the EV content requirements.
However, not everyone is sympathetic to the automakers’ plight. Some believe, as US Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) famously stated, corporate EV incentives are “ludicrous”: If EVs are so much better than ICE vehicles, and there are year-long waiting lists to buy them, why do automakers need incentives to sell them?
The multitude of arguments and counter arguments over EV subsidies and incentives, their focus, efficacy and fairness illustrate just a small part of the conflicts, uncertainty and politics involved in EV policy making.
Manchin, chief architect of the current consumer-oriented subsidy regime, has recently cautioned that he will not favorably look upon efforts to weaken the scheme, because, he reasons, it’s the best way for the US develop its own EV supply chain capability.However, the US Treasury Department has delayed its final ruling on which electric vehicles might qualify for subsidies for a few months, setting up a potential political firestorm in early 2023 if more are added than Manchin believes should be.
Other observers contend that EV incentives are misdirected or misplaced altogether. For instance, a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) study indicates past incentives seemed to cannibalize fuel-efficient vehicles, leading to over-estimating emissions benefits supposedly gained by EVs by almost 40 percent. A Massachusetts government-sponsored study of the effects of the more than $50 million of EV subsidies the state doled out found that they did not influence EV buyers—they would most likely have bought one anyway.
World Bank data indicate that funding EV charging station expansion is more cost-effective than EV purchasing subsidies to getting people into EVs. The UK has gone this route, stopping its decade-long EV subsidy program to improve EV charging across the country instead.
Still other EV advocates contend that some form of EV purchasing subsidies will be needed probably until 2050 but paid through “feebates” rather than by taxpayers. Taxpayers themselves, however, want immediate rebates at the conclusion of the sale, and not tax credits that they may not qualify for.
Perhaps, other EV advocates say, but whatever subsidies or rebates are provided, they need to be targeted to support the less affluent EV buyer and not reward the well-off, which Massachusetts is now trying to do with its subsidies.
There are also concerns of what happens to EV demand if subsidies are stopped. China, which originally planned to stop EV subsidies at the end of 2020, extended the program to the end of 2023 based on a drop-off in EV sales. The UK decision to end subsidies has not gone without complaint, either.
The ending of government EV subsidies altogether is applauded by other groups, because they “distort the competitive landscape.” Still others believe that with EV-ICE parity by 2025 or 2026, they are no longer needed anyway. Volvo CEO Jim Rowan recently claimed that parity in that timeframe is entirely possible.
The multitude of arguments and counter arguments over EV subsidies and incentives, their focus, efficacy and fairness illustrate just a small part of the conflicts, uncertainty and politics involved in EV policy making. The conflicts get even more complicated and fraught when EV policies must be put into engineering practice.
In the next several articles of this series exploring transition to EVs at scale, the challenges to implementing EV policies will be explored.
Dexter Johnson is a contributing editor at IEEE Spectrum, with a focus on nanotechnology.
A team at New York University's Tandon School of Engineering is playing a key role in forging a collaboration involving over a dozen US universities and national laboratories aimed at sparking — literally — a fundamental change in how the US chemical industry operates.
The goal is to address the most daunting task looming over the industry: how to make industrial chemistry — especially petrochemistry — greener and more sustainable, partly to meet the escalating demands of greenhouse emission regulations. The nascent, multi-institutional effort will be called “Decarbonizing Chemical Manufacturing Using Sustainable Electrification," or DC-MUSE.
DC-MUSE was conceived this summer in a workshop attended by over 40 companies and institutions, and organized by a planning grant from the National Science Foundation to build capacity in convergent research. Its aim is to develop technologies and strategies to help the US chemical industry migrate from thermal-based manufacturing processes to electricity-based ones.
A range of government regulations aimed at achieving zero-carbon emissions are driving this migration. These greenhouse emissions regulations will progressively come into effect in the coming decades, culminating, for example, in the European Union's aim to reduce 95 percent of 1990 level greenhouse emissions by 2050. These and other international regulations on greenhouse emissions could threaten up to 12 percent of all US exports ($220 billion), if the US chemical industry is not able to decarbonize its processes. The task is clearly enormous, not just for the industry itself but for the larger economy.
Andre TaylorNYU Tandon School of Engineering
“Thirty percent of US industrial CO2 emissions comes from the chemical industry, and 93% of the chemical processes use fossil fuel heat," noted Andre Taylor, associate professor at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering. “We're talking about changing a whole industry that also involves a huge societal impact, encompassing 70,000 products, and 25% of the US gross domestic product."
Many experts believe that the first step in overhauling the chemical industry will involve moving away from thermally-driven chemical reactions and separation processes that require heat from fossil fuels and moving towards reactions that use electricity generated by renewable resources, like wind and solar.
While this migration has already started to occur, with penetration of renewable sources into the US electrical grid doubling in the past decade, the technologies for integrating these sources into cost-effective electrified chemical processes has remained practically non-existent.
Yury DvorkinNYU Tandon School of Engineering
“After meeting with many chemical industry representatives, we learned that technologies that would enable electrification on the industrial scale don't exist at this time," said Yury Dvorkin, assistant professor at NYU's Tandon School of Engineering. “The industry needs support to develop these technologies so they can be adopted in a way that's economically feasible."
One of the areas that Dvorkin and his colleagues believed they needed to focus on was overcoming emerging reliability issues that inhibit and increase the cost of using renewable energy in the electrical grid. In other words, how do you ensure that there are no supply interruptions to the delivery of electricity when energy from the sun and wind can be intermittent?
At the moment, energy storage technologies are not entirely up to the task of balancing out the intermittency of renewable electricity. As a result, NYU Tandon researchers have been looking at storing energy in the form of chemical bonds, as opposed to electrons, as a possible solution.
In energy storage approaches like this, energy is stored chemically in the form of hydrogen, and that hydrogen is reused later in a fuel cell. The fuel cells used to capture the energy are referred to as redox-flow batteries (RFBs). RFBs consist of a positive and negative electrolyte stored in two separate tanks. When the liquids are pumped into the battery cell stack situated between the tanks, a redox reaction occurs and generates electricity at the battery's electrodes.
Several NYU researchers recently published a paper in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science that looks at improving the energy storage capabilities and economics of these RFBs.
The NYU researchers didn't simply tweak RFB technology to improve its energy density or reduce their costs. Instead of just plugging RFBs into renewable energy sources to store their intermittent energy production, the NYU researchers demonstrated how you could use RFB concepts to completely integrate chemical manufacturing into the whole energy storage process.
Miguel ModestinoNYU Tandon School of Engineering
“In principle, you can imagine chemical plants acting as energy storage reservoirs, but at the same time producing chemical products," explained Miguel Modestino, an assistant professor at NYU, and one of the co-authors of the Cell Reports paper. “The storage value it provides lowers the cost for the production of the chemical that you want to make at the end of the day."
Modestino added that this approach also allows the chemical companies to integrate fluctuating sources of electricity, like renewables. You can thus decarbonize the industry in a way that is both economic and functions well with the dynamics of a renewable-driven grid.
The DC-MUSE project has expanded dramatically since its ideas first took root a few months ago. The project has already put together a group of 30 investigators from 11 universities and 3 National Laboratories that cover a wide spectrum of research areas.
At NYU Tandon, Ryan Hartman, associate professor, is leading a group to develop plasma catalysis technology for these types of chemical reactions. Taylor's and Modestino's groups are working on electrochemical reactors for chemical manufacturing. And Dvorkin has been working on integrating these plants within the grid. Other groups outside of NYU are investigating using membranes for separations and system integration.
In addition, the NYU team has been consulting with faculty at the law school and the business school on how to design policies that can enable the economic transition towards renewable energy-driven chemical manufacturing.
The researchers are also reaching out to industry to get early involvement. In fact, the genesis of the DC-MUSE project was a workshop in which NYU invited 50 industry experts and people from academia to come together to talk about the challenges in the chemical industry, such as process intensification.
DC-MUSEMiguel Modestino
“We have been talking with people in the big chemical manufacturing companies, who have started to develop pilots for electrified chemical production," said Elizabeth Biddinger, City College of New York. Biddinger and Modestino recently published an article in ECS Interfacesdescribing how environmental advantages of electro-organic syntheses such as minimizing waste generation, utilizing non-fossil feedstocks, and on-demand chemical manufacturing are also large drivers for sustainability in chemical processes across multiple sectors.
The involvement of petrochemical companies is not by accident. Petrochemical processes—and actually a very small subset of petrochemical processes—account for more than 80 percent of the energy and CO2 emissions from chemical processes, according to Modestino.
As the DC-MUSE picks up momentum, its architects at NYU envision the project as a go-to Center for the fundamental engineering research that is needed to enable these technologies. Said Modestino, “The way that we see it is that you do the research in the lab, you develop with lab-scale demonstrations, but then through partnerships with the companies you'll develop them into processes."
While the DC-MUSE project awaits its expanded aim though increased funding, it is already having an impact on the pedagogical approach of the NYU professors.
“We already have had discussions about joint Ph.D. positions so that a student can have multiple advisors," said Dvorkin. “In this way, we can really work together on these problems and provide students with a multidisciplinary perspective, because without this sort of collaboration, without this input delivered to the students, there is no way to solve societal problems."
Taylor added: “From the applications we've seen into our program, we know that people want to pursue things that actually have an impact on changing society and improving the world. People want to discover something fundamental, but if it has a broader societal impact, people can see its importance. This is why I do research in this area."
To learn more about initiatives that are going on at NYU's Tandon School of Engineering, please visit its website.
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