The Hydrogen Council this week released Path to hydrogen competitiveness: A cost perspective. The report carries some big news. Low-carbon hydrogen can become much more cost-competitive, much more quickly, than is generally appreciated.
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Tri-State announces clean energy plan, retires coal assets
Yesterday, Tri-State Generation & Transmission Association launched its "transformative" Responsible Energy Plan, which will "dramatically and rapidly advance the wholesale power supply cooperative’s clean energy portfolio." Last week, the utility announced the retirement of its last coal-fired power plants in New Mexico and Colorado. These two announcements provide context for a presentation at the Ammonia Energy Conference in November 2019, entitled Market Integrated Ammonia. Its conclusion — highly relevant for a utility that is closing its coal plants and increasing renewables to 50% by 2024 — is that in a wholesale electricity market with increased volatility, renewable ammonia could be produced at the extremely low cost of $96 per tonne.
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The cost of hydrogen: Platts launches Hydrogen Price Assessment
What does hydrogen really cost? Apparently, there's now a good answer to this question. $0.7955 per kg. This is according to the new daily hydrogen price assessment launched yesterday by Platts. Price assessments like this are invaluable for thriving markets, supporting transparency and developing into the benchmarks and indexes that underpin investments, trade, and regulations. This is a welcome innovation from the universe of financial product development. It will be interesting to see how Platts's hydrogen prices evolve, in terms of the cost structure of hydrogen production, of course, but also from the perspective of ammonia energy. If the purpose is to support commodity trading, these price assessments must eventually expand to include hydrogen carriers — molecules, like ammonia, that can be stored and transported more economically than hydrogen itself — in other words, commoditized hydrogen.
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Ontario Tech Develops Its Own Flavor of Direct Ammonia Fuel Cell
How simple can a fuel cell be? How about if it’s a direct ammonia fuel cell? This question came to mind during perusal of a paper that appeared in the June 2019 edition of the journal Chemical Engineering Science. The paper, “Development and performance evaluation of a direct ammonia fuel cell stack,” was written by Osamah Siddiqui and Ibrahim Dincer, both active within the Clean Energy Research Laboratory at Ontario Tech University in Canada. Their design may or may not ever reach the point of commercialization, but there is no denying its essential simplicity.
