Energy Exports

Key requirements that impact hydrogen storage for energy export

Safety is important because huge quantities of hydrogen are going to be delivered to busy port areas.

Environmental impact & toxicity are important because while shipping is incredibly safe these days, shipping at energy volumes means that accidents will happen, and statistically most accidents happen close to the coast.

Ease of handling is important because hydrogen will need to be transported in vast quantities and complex or entirely new ship designs will slow down the transition away from fossil fuels.

Transition costs are important because this will slow down the transition away from fossil fuels.

Hydrilyte™ for energy export

Safety

Hydrilyte™ is safe and non-toxic and it has been classified as “Non-Hazardous for Transport” in the US. We think that safety for people and the environment should be one of the most important, if not the most important factor when we consider which technology(ies) will replace oil and gas

Shipping is extremely safe these days and spills are very rare. However, liquid fuels, which hydrogen will replace, are shipped in vast quantities (about 2 billion tons per year) and as this chart shows, spills do happen, most years, at some level.

Ammonia is the main competition to Hydrilyte™ for energy export.

An ammonia spill would be catastrophic to the environment and, if it happens close to shore, to people too. According to UK based, ship pollution response providers ITOPF, “the consequence of a chemical spill can be more wide reaching than that of oil … the different ways in which they behave in the environment and the potential for effects on human health mean that response to chemical spills is not as straightforward as for oil”

According to Randal 2004 in the Marine Pollution Bulletin: Ammonia in water “is toxic to all vertebrates causing convulsions, coma and death”. Ammonia is toxic in concentrations above 8mg/l in sea water and is transported in cargoes of up to 80,000 tonnes. There is a lack of modeling to show how this kind of spill would be managed or how quickly it would diffuse to concentrations below 8mg/l (the chronic toxicity threshold) in the event of an accident. On entering the water, approximately 50% of liquid ammonia is released as gas. Most shipping accidents happen in coastal waterways and in many parts of the world there is a daytime sea breeze, which would bring the gas cloud ashore. Ammonia gas can be fatal if inhaled. While there have been no major ammonia spills to date, the large increase in cargos from the 150 million tons of ammonia shipped today to the 2 billion tons of crude oil, increases the likelihood of an environmental and human catastrophe if we decide to use ammonia as a carrier for hydrogen.

Carbon280 CEO Mark Rheinlander says:

“If we are going to replace fossil fuels with a new fuel, let’s start with a safe one that isn’t going to screw the environment when we get it wrong.”

Ease of handling

Hydrilyte™ can be pumped like a crude oil, this means that existing infrastructure, used today for transporting liquid fuels, including ship, road tankers and rail cars, can be repurposed with minimum modification to transport Hydrilyte™.

Transition costs

As hydrogen replaces oil as the major form of transportable energy, the ships, trucks and rail cars used to transport oil today will become “stranded assets” - assets which no longer have a purpose. Hydrilyte™ can give these ships an extended life which means that the cost of transitioning to a hydrogen economy doesn’t include an entirely new fleet of ships as would be the case with ammonia.

Energy Export Products

Hydrilyte™ Storage Systems for Energy Export

Expanding around the core Hydrilyte™ Storage System for Major Grids, the The Energy Export product line will include large scale storage to facilitate rapid loading of vessels. Fixed roof storage tanks currently used for crude oil storage can be retrofitted to store Hydrilyte™. These are available in sizes of up to 120,000M3

A Suezmax carrier with a DWT of 134,000 tonnes can carry 120,000M3 of Hydrilyte, which contains around 4000 tonnes of hydrogen at our commercial pilot efficiencies. At our target efficiencies the same carrier will transport 6,500 tonnes of hydrogen.

At our commercial pilot efficiency, 4,000 tonnes of hydrogen, net of dehydriding and conversion to electrons (by fuel cells or turbines) is equivalent to 38GWh of electrical energy delivered to customers.

At our fully optimised target efficiency, 6,500 tonnes of hydrogen, net of dehydriding and conversion to electrons (by fuel cells or turbines) is equivalent to 83GWh of electrical energy delivered to customers.

Equally customers could be using the hydrogen directly in industrial processes such as steelmaking or injecting it into existing gas pipelines.