Green Hydrogen for Industrial Decarbonisation: Blended Interventions for Competitiveness
Green hydrogen supports decarbonisation of industry, but cost remains too elevated to compete with natural gas, blue and grey hydrogen. In this seminar, we will demonstrate how green hydrogen can achieve cost competitiveness through the combination of internal interventions (related to the feasibility of reducing electrolysis costs by selling waste heat to district heat networks) and external interventions (related to the use of market-based policies and private finance, focusing on sustainability linked bonds). Market-based policies include the use of incentives and disincentives. Sustainability-linked bonds (SLBs), firstly issued in 2019 from an energy company, are new, innovative and emerging financial instruments. We developed a novel temporal market penetration assessment model applied to show the impact of these interventions in achieving cost parity. The methodology is applied to a UK case study to examine these dynamics within the context of the energy landscape and policy framework. The results demonstrate that blending interventions, such as utilizing hydrogen from curtailed wind, electrolyser waste heat utilization, implement existing policy measures and SLBs results in significant cost reduction. This significant reduction makes it feasible to achieve cost parity with natural gas, requiring a 67.65% reduction under today’s mid-price scenario and a 29.82% reduction under the high natural gas price scenario. These findings show the substantial cost-saving potential of blended interventions (both internal and external) in the hydrogen economy.
Speaker
Dr Gbemi Oluleye is a Lecturer at the Grantham Institute – Climate Change and the Environment, and a member of the Sargent Centre for Process Systems Engineering. She leads GII (Green Industrial Interventions) Lab, where we develop decision support frameworks for evaluating, designing, and blending interventions for clean innovation adoption and diffusion. Our work emphasizes how to achieve competitiveness/ positive tipping points in clean innovations (focusing on CCUS, DAC, hydrogen, synthesis fuels, electrification) for decarbonising energy-intensive sectors like Iron and Steel, Chemicals, Cement, Refining and Petrochemicals, Aviation and Shipping. Gbemi has a multidisciplinary research experience and expertise at the interface of Engineering, Policy, and Economics, and over 12 years combined experience in industry (design, manufacturing, and consulting), and academia.
About Energy Futures Lab
Energy Futures Lab is one of seven Global Institutes at Imperial College London. The institute was established to address global energy challenges by identifying and leading new opportunities to serve industry, government and society at large through high quality research, evidence and advocacy for positive change. The institute aims to promote energy innovation and advance systemic solutions for a sustainable energy future by bringing together the science, engineering and policy expertise at Imperial and fostering collaboration with a wide variety of external partners.