“The future belongs to hydrogen, it will play a dominant role since gas reserves are terminal and limited,” said Valeriy Bessel, Executive Vice-President of the company NewTech Services.
In the long-term prospect hydrogen will be made by electrolysis, without using hydrocarbon.
During the transition period, it is possible to organise the gas production by conversion of methane. “In the long-term prospect we should consider hydrogen production by electrolysis only. Hydrogen production from hydrocarbons is a transition period that always accompanies global transformation,” said Alexey Levchenko, head of the New and mobile energy sources centre of the Federal Research Centre of Problems of Chemical Physics and Medicinal Chemistry, Russian Academy of Sciences.
However, at the current phase of energy development use of hydrogen as fuel is not economically profitable and effective. “Now there are no economic considerations whatsoever in the production of hydrogen, in any production be that blue,’ ‘green.’ You will spend more energy to produce it than you will get while burning it,” V.Bessel noted.
As a rule, it is more or less optimal to use hydrogen as fuel cells or a storage battery in the event of excessive generation of energy and non-uniform consumption of the latter. One of the most graphic examples of such use is nuclear power plants (NPP). During the peak of the demand the electric energy generated by the NPP is fed to the energy system, while during a natural drop of the demand the electric energy is supplied to produce hydrogen by electrolysis.
Besides, the issue of hydrogen transportation and marketing remains unresolved. Now there are types of carbon steel, which allow hydrogen transportation, however, for the time being there is no point to build such pipeline systems because there is no market. One more option is hydrogen transportation and storage in organic compounds in the form of benzene, toluene and other compounds. If such method of storage is used hydrogen concentration reaches 6-8%.
