Being hydrogen-ready is the big question
Published Thu 14 Jul 2022
The Australian Financial Review | James Sherbon
While the nation’s energy transition road map continues to inflame discussion from all sides there’s no doubt Australia is “experiencing a complex, rapid and irreversible energy transformation”, as Australian Energy Market Operator Chief Executive Daniel Westerman said last month when he launched the 2022 Integrated System Plan (ISP), outlining a 30-year road map of investments for the National Electricity Market (NEM).
Part of the problem with our plans is we don’t have a whole of system view that looks right across our electricity and gas markets.
AEMO released a Gas Statement of Opportunities back in March, but it did not really address the potential of renewable gas and hydrogen beyond stating future releases would review “the potential to extend the regulatory frameworks to include hydrogen and renewable gases”.
Interestingly, Energy Networks Australia and the Australian Pipelines and Gas Association’s Gas Vision 2050 update published earlier this year suggested Australia’s gas networks could be fully decarbonised, able to deliver 100 per cent renewable fuel for heating and manufacturing.
The update published identifies key actions needed in the next decade for gas to go green and transition to net zero emissions in line with global and national targets.
Back in April, ENA chief executive officer Andrew Dillon who last month spoke at the Energy Solutions roundtable co-hosted by The Australian Financial Review, Jemena and Australian Gas Networks, said the best and least-cost way to achieve net-zero was to repurpose existing gas pipelines and networks to allow clean renewable hydrogen and biomethane and develop our renewable electricity grid.
“There is no single best pathway to decarbonise – this report shows that the size of the energy transformation demands a mix of solutions including electrification and renewable gas. This gives us diversity of energy supply and retains customer choice,” Dillon said.
“The challenge is to find the right mix of these solutions to reach net-zero emissions in a way that ensures the reliability and security of our energy system and minimises costs so power bills either stay the same or are reduced.”
The Gas Vision Update 2050 highlighted that blending biomethane and renewable hydrogen into the gas network is rapidly progressing in Australia and is already widely practiced in Europe.
Importantly, the main advantage of this pathway is that no changes are required to pipelines, networks or appliances.
At the recent Energy Solutions roundtable general manager of renewable gas at Jemena Gabrielle Sycamore spoke of the potential to use existing gas distribution infrastructure to distribute renewable gas such as biomethane and hydrogen.
She spoke of how large parts of our distribution network are already capable of carrying 100 per cent hydrogen although the challenge is how it can be distributed over longer distance transmission pipelines.
“Right now, we have long skinny, high-pressure pipelines that don’t really lend themselves to high hydrogen, unless you reduce the pressure in which case it becomes less economic, but I think technology will accelerate to enable those pipes to be used or we will be able to future-proof them.
“When we look internationally, Italy and other places, they operate very large pipelines with different metal in them at far lower pressures because of the built-up nature of Europe, which means they can put more hydrogen into transmission faster than Australia,” Sycamore says.
“At Jemena, we’re doing a lot of research into solutions so we can enable biogas distribution.”
Roundtable participant Matthew Warren from Boardroom Energy agreed, there’s no simple answer as illustrated in Europe where some pipelines are “running at a 100 per cent hydrogen now that were just gas pipelines before”.
Chief executive of Bioenergy Australia, Shahana McKenzie, says the beauty of biomethane for example, is its ability to operate within the existing infrastructure.
“We’ve done some work recently that showed we could be injecting five per cent by 2025 and we currently have 45 projects that could be injecting within the next 18 months if there was a favourable policy environment for that to take place.