It used to be said, until fairly recently, that the next big thing in clean-tech is storage. Now, it has gone a bit further. The new next big thing is e-mobility, which basically means electricity-based transportation. Since providing continuous electricity to moving objects, except to those that run on rails, such as trains and trams, is extremely difficult, e-mobility means ‘battery-powered vehicles’.
India is following the same path as others and there is a new National Mission for Transformative Mobility and Battery Manufacturing.
All this seems a waste of time. Believe me, battery-based mobility has limited life, it will last maybe a couple of decades. After that, batteries will go back to where they are most appropriate — powering appliances like laptops and cell phones. For transportation, there will be something else that is far more efficient, cheaper and cleaner. Nobody in the world is quite there yet, but everybody is trying and, therefore, on the same plank. India has a great opportunity to leapfrog batteries and get ahead of the others. Regrettably, that does not seem to be happening.
Safe, environment-friendly
In case you have not guessed yet, I am talking about hydrogen. The gas is the transportation fuel of the future. The sooner we realise this and put our energy and resources behind it, the better off we will be.
Hydrogen is a great future in terms of its ‘greenness’. Burn it, and you will only end up with water at the other end. It cannot live in the atmosphere on its own, it will marry some other element, mostly oxygen, and therefore, it is safe to be let out.
Earlier this month, the International Energy Agency brought out a report on hydrogen — you can check it out on its website ( https://www.iea.org/tcep/energyintegration/hydrogen/ ) . The report makes some interesting observations.
Production costs, pricing
First, hydrogenisation of the global economy will begin sooner than earlier believed. To quote one key line, “there have been many false starts, but this time it might be different”, because of the falling prices of renewable energy and the big support that governments are giving to hydrogen. Production of hydrogen takes some energy, and low-cost renewable energy will help.
Second, hydrogen is expensive today, but its costs will come down by 2030. There is no established retail price of hydrogen today because the price of hydrogen depends upon how it is produced. Most of the gas is produced by processing natural gas, and the process emits carbon dioxide, which is not helpful.
Hydrogen is also produced as a by-product in the manufacture of caustic soda and in oil refineries. Broadly, it costs about $9 to produce a kg of hydrogen. But this will change, new technologies emerge and mature. There are literally dozens of ways of producing hydrogen and, for sure, a few of them will turn out to be low-cost producers of the gas. You can produce hydrogen by splitting water using electricity and if the electricity is supplied by wind or solar, costs could be brought down.
Another way of producing the gas is by splitting water at high temperatures, which means you could design nuclear plants—much smaller than those we have today—for the purpose of producing the gas. Yet another way is by using algae and one more is by using a combination of sunlight and semi-conductors. Research is going on at a furious pace in India and abroad many different processes and it is only a matter of time before the scientists arrive at cheap hydrogen.
Storage
However, even after producing the gas, there are a few technological challenges to be overcome. For instance, how to store hydrogen in tanks in vehicles? hydrogen is very light — in fact, if you remember, it is the first, and therefore the lightest, among the elements — because it has only one proton and one electron, but no neutron. You can imagine how light it is — one cubic metre (a box that is one metre long, one metre broad and one metre tall) of hydrogen at atmospheric pressure weighs just 82 grams! So, you have to pack a lot of gas in a cylinder for the vehicle to run a reasonable distance.
However, hydrogen carries a lot of punch — its ‘energy density’, or the amount of energy per unit of mass is very high. One kilogram of Hydrogen carries energy between 120 and 140 mega joules — three times as much as natural gas. This means, one cylinder of Hydrogen is like carrying three of natural gas, the size of cylinder and pressure of the gases being the same.
Fuel-cell powered cars
Car-makers seem to have cracked the technology for this, which is why you have 11,200 hydrogen-powered (fuel-cell based) cars on the roads today. The rough global target is to raise this number to 2.5 million by 2030. In a ‘fuel-cell’ powered vehicle, hydrogen is used in a ‘fuel cell’ to produce electricity; thereafter the electricity drives the vehicle, just as a battery does.
Now, an interesting point here is, it is the cost of the cars — roughly $ 50,000, or ₹35 lakh — that is a barrier, not the fuel itself. One kg of hydrogen, taken at a normative cost of $10 or around ₹700, will run a vehicle for about 110 km — therefore, even before the cost of its production falls, hydrogen stands on a par with petrol.
Another observation the IEA report makes is that the gas is very versatile, it can be used to power not just cars, but all modes of transportation, including aircraft and ships. It can be used to supply power to homes and cater to the energy needs of industry.
Hydrogen will be, in 20 years, what petrol and diesel are today. People — students, in particular — should realise that the electro-chemical battery is an interim affair, just a stop-gap, before hydrogen takes off. You can’t have batteries going around because you still have to collect the dead ones and dispose of them — a polluting process in itself. With 11,200 hydrogen cars on the roads now, you may assume that the future is already here.
India, more than any other country, needs to recognise this change and provide the policy and financial push for it. The message to the new government is simple: stop thinking of lithium-ion, sodium-ion etc. Instead, focus on hydrogen.