Labor Government Launches Bid to Build ‘World’s Largest’ Renewable Hydrogen Plant

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The federal Labor government has launched a bid to build what it claims to be the “world’s largest renewable hydrogen” facility in Brisbane, Australia.

The government-backed Australian Renewable Energy Agency will put $13.7 million into the development of a green hydrogen facility dedicated to decarbonising an ammonia plant.

The grant will go to billionaire Andrew Forrest’s Fortescue Future Industries, along with Incitec Pivot Limited, to investigate and design a $38 million facility capable of producing up to 70,000 tonnes of renewable hydrogen per year with a 500 megawatt electrolyser.

“The project will provide valuable insights into the cost of producing renewable hydrogen and adapting infrastructure to facilitate exports of renewable ammonia,” Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen said in a statement.

“If successful, the electrolyser will be the largest built to date, feeding renewable hydrogen directly into the first fully decarbonised ammonia facility.”

Bowen said the study was critical for understanding how Australia could develop a hydrogen export systems.

Generating hydrogen is a key puzzle piece in the push for net-zero and the phasing out of coal-fired generation.

An energy grid powered by renewables requires enormous amounts of storage—and billions of dollars and materials—to provide back-up electricity when the wind is not blowing or the sun is not shining.

Currently, giant lithium batteries are the preferred method of storing excess electricity.

Although battery technology is improving, there are still numerous drawbacks; for example, the world’s largest battery system, the FPL Manatee Energy Storage Center in Florida, can provide only two hours of power to approximately 329,000 homes at a time.

For renewable energy systems like pumped hydro, the storage element is simply the building of dam systems to store huge volumes of water, which is then pumped back through turbines to generate electricity. However, not every country or region has access to the right environmental conditions to take advantage of hydro.

So governments have invested billions into hydrogen technology as another solution to complement battery storage.

Instead of funnelling excess electricity into batteries, they are fed through electrolysers (also an electricity-intensive process) which then creates hydrogen to fill reservoirs, which can be used as a new energy source or synthetic fuel.

Yet like many new technologies in the net-zero push, it is still in the early days of its development and not viable for widespread use.

“The main problem really is hydrogen is very low density,” said Nick Kastelstein, oil and gas engineer at GPA Engineering. “So it’s a third the energy density of methane, and it takes a lot of energy to compress it.”

“It also affects the material and ability of storage containers to resist fatigue when cycling. So if you have a big bottle and you fill it up and empty it, fill it up and empty it, the bottle would probably fail 10 times sooner than it would for natural gas,” he previously told The Epoch Times.