PEM

When it comes to blogs on the developing hydrogen sector, many subjects can seem quite foreign to the traditional hydrocarbons expert. We have found ourselves spending a considerable amount of time over the last few months slowly peeling back the layers on this sector in an effort to be prepared should hydrogen enter a new phase of importance in the energy industry. Today’s blog is likely a much more straightforward one for the typical hydrocarbon-focused reader. That’s because, in our view, Monolith Materials’ unique process for transforming natural gas into “turquoise” hydrogen while sequestering the carbon, is easier to wrap your head around. This is not just because of the company’s clear goals and process, but also because what it does is proving to be economically viable. That’s not always the case when we discuss hydrogen, so covering Monolith’s operations is a welcome break. Today, we detail a truly one-of-a-kind method of low-carbon hydrogen production.

When it comes to energy markets analysis, there’s nothing quite like spending the better part of an afternoon piecing together a long chain of unit conversions only to find the next day you’ve misplaced the sticky notes on which you wrote them. We’ve all been there, though for most of us it’s become commonplace to memorize the few hydrocarbon conversions needed to get through a lunch or happy hour. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said when it comes to hydrogen, which brings its own set of unique units of measure, many of them not usually bantered around your typical business development discussion. Crunching through them is tough, in our experience, and we find ourselves writing them down over and over again. Which gave us an idea: why not write a blog on the topic? Fortunately, we are in that business, and today we continue our series on hydrogen with a look a green hydrogen production projects and the math needed to make sense of them.

When it comes to energy markets analysis, there’s nothing quite like spending the better part of an afternoon piecing together a long chain of unit conversions only to find the next day you’ve misplaced the sticky notes on which you wrote them. We’ve all been there, though for most of us it’s become commonplace to memorize the few hydrocarbon conversions needed to get through a lunch or happy hour. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said when it comes to hydrogen, which brings its own set of unique units of measure, many of them not usually bantered around your typical business development discussion. Crunching through them is tough, in our experience, and we find ourselves writing them down over and over again. Which gave us an idea: why not write a blog on the topic? Fortunately, we are in that business, and today we continue our series on hydrogen with a look a green hydrogen production projects and the math needed to make sense of them.

When it comes to hydrogen, it’s fair to say that hard data on what it costs to produce the fuel is difficult to come by, particularly for “green” hydrogen. If you’ve followed our current work on the fuel, we hope you know at least a few more facts than the average person on the street, though we must admit we’ve really just been scratching the surface so far. Diving deeper into the nitty gritty of hydrogen production costs and economics is not for the faint of heart, but it’s necessary, unless you are of the mind to dismiss the fuel altogether. (We are not.) While it’s very early days for many production pathways to hydrogen, especially green hydrogen, time will tell if the costs to produce it follow a downward trend similar to those for producing hydrocarbons from shale or remain at levels so high the current hydrogen bubble bursts like others before it. We’re optimistic the former may pan out, and in today’s blog we continue our series on hydrogen with a look at the factors impacting production costs.

Based on the response we received to our first-ever hydrogen blog last fall, it’s fair to say we didn’t waste this space on a fringe subject. To be honest, the level of interest in hydrogen far exceeded our expectations, and suggested that we might have even been a little bit late to the party — but fashionably so, if you ask us. In the weeks since then, we’ve spent a fair amount of time distilling the tremendous amount of news flow and reading material that was either sent our way or popped up in the daily news feeds. You could go a lot of different directions with hydrogen and it’s still very easy, in our view, to get lost in the forest of green energy technology. So, as we are wont to do, we have stuck to our simple approach of tackling this fuel just like we do with hydrocarbons, and we are first turning our attention upstream. Today, we continue our series on hydrogen with a look at the top production methods for the fuel.