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United States Power

The World's Largest Green Hydrogen Plant Will Be Built In Texas (interestingengineering.com) 135

Posted by BeauHD from the locally-sourced dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Interesting Engineering: Green Hydrogen International (GHI) has unveiled its plans to build a 60 GW green hydrogen production facility near the Piedras Pintas salt dome in Texas. The facility will be the largest of its kind in the world, the company claimed in a press release. While the world seeks cleaner alternatives to the energy that can power long-haul flights and stand in as a substitute for natural gas, green hydrogen appears to be one of the front runners. With countries such as China, Saudi Arabia, Chile, Spain having initiated green hydrogen projects on a pilot basis, GHI would have to make a big splash to announce its arrival.

The company is hopeful that its proposed plant, capable of producing 2.5 billion kilograms of green hydrogen every year, will do exactly that. According to its website, GHI has seven projects that are under development with a combined output of one terawatt. The largest and the first one to get off the ground is Hydrogen City in Texas. Using onshore wind and solar energy, the project aims to produce 60 gigawatts of green hydrogen every year. The Piedras Pintas salt dome in Duval County will serve as the hydrogen storage facility for the project which in its initial stages will see a 2-gigawatt production facility being drawn up. Green hydrogen production is expected to begin by 2026 and it will tap into renewable energy from the Texan electricity grid. Green hydrogen produced at the facility will be piped to the coastal city of Corpus Christi and Brownsville, where industries will convert them to other products. "Hydrogen City is a massive, world-class undertaking that will put Texas on the map as a leading green hydrogen producer," GHI's founder and CEO Brian Maxwell said. "Texas has been the world leader in energy innovation for over 100 years and this project is intended to cement that leadership for the next century and beyond."
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The World's Largest Green Hydrogen Plant Will Be Built In Texas More

The World's Largest Green Hydrogen Plant Will Be Built In Texas

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  • Cough cough challenger cough Hindenberg .

    • It's in Texas, Abbott will declare it frozen over the first time it gets a little chilly outside and screech about needing more oil and gas.

      • "It's Texas", you say.

        Texas that produces more renewable energy than any other state?

        Texas that produces 27% of all the wind energy in the entire country?

        Texas that produces THREE TIMES as much as California, where they talk a good game?

        I'm sorry, but he's right that being even more dependent on frozen windmills and snow-covered solar panels wouldn't have prevented the blackouts. He's right that wind and solar failed at a rate three times higher than natural gas, so relying more on those would have simply m

        • "He's right that wind and solar failed at a rate three times higher than natural gas, so relying more on those would have simply meant more blackouts." - where did you get that stat from? How can something that only supplies 25% of the power fail at 3 times the rate of fossil power? Fact Check [reuters.com]
          Quote from the article " As reported here by the Texas Tribune on Feb. 16, ERCOT said that thermal sources, such as coal, gas and nuclear, lost nearly twice as much power due to the cold than renewable energy sources

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Hodr ( 219920 )

            You guys aren't saying the same thing. He's saying it failed at three times the rate, you are saying thermal sources lost twice as much power.

            One is a rate of occurrence, the other is a measurement of amounts lost.

            You are both correct.

          • > How can something that only supplies 25% of the power fail at 3 times the rate of fossil power?

            You've asked "how can it be unreliable unless everyone depends on it". :)

            If thing A was supplying 25 gigawatts and now it's supplying 0 (because it's covered with snow), the failure rate would be 100%.

            If thing B was supplying 45 gigawatts and it's now supplying 40.5% gigawatts, that's a 10% failure rate.

            So looking at your question again:

            > How can something that only supplies 25% of the power fail at 3 time

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jbengt ( 874751 )

          What would have prevented blackouts from a freak cold spell is doing the things they do to protect from such weather up north. Things like putting power substations inside a metal building, rather than outdoors exposed to the weather.

          Your first sentence is true. But I go by plenty of electrical substations here up north that are not enclosed in buildings, metal or otherwise. Enclosing the substations causes its' own problems in the summer. And most of the problems in last winter's Texas blackouts were

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Tailhook ( 98486 )

        Possibly. He won't have to fake mourning over the burned to death victims of PG&E, however.

      • I'm waiting for the Texas winter when all the hydrogen reserves froze. It's a one in a millennia occurrence

    • Cough cough challenger cough Hindenberg .

      Far more people have died from gasoline explosions.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fermion ( 181285 )
      So unless we are planning to rocket fuel to paint the hydrogen plant green, very little can go wrong. Used hydrogen for years. Never had an accident. Certainly is not more dangerous than natural gas. And things like CO that will displace oxygen and suffocate you.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jbengt ( 874751 )

        Certainly is not more dangerous than natural gas.

        Methane (natural gas) has an LEL of about 5% and a UEL of around 17%.
        Hydrogen has an LEL of about 4% and a UEL of around 75%.
        Natural gas is used indoors all the time and it's rarely a problem until some contractor breaks a main or something.
        Codes I'm familiar with treat hydrogen with much greater respect than methane.
        Hydrogen is notoriously difficult to contain in piping or storage containers, so some amount of leakage is inevitable.

    • Cough cough challenger cough Hindenberg .

      You are giving everyone a lot of confidence. If the last incident you can remember occurred over 80 years ago that is a good sign that hydrogen is very VERY safe considering how much of it is in use in the world on a daily basis.

      To be clear the Hindenburg (with a u, it's named a castle not a mountain) is not the most recent hydrogen related incident causing fatality or property destruction, but if that's what you point then then really all is well in perception of the industry.

    • Cough cough challenger cough Hindenberg .

      Well, we kept building planes after Hindenberg, ships after Titanic, and dreams after Challenger.

      Thankfully we don't allow a random disaster, to stop progress completely.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by necro81 ( 917438 )
      Given the concentration of oil refineries and industrial chemical production facilities - including facilities that sometimes go boom [google.com] - I doubt that anyone would notice.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tragedy ( 27079 )

      Cough cough challenger cough Hindenberg .

      Hydrogen does have the downside of being extremely flammable, but it's hardly responsible for the Challenger disaster. This actually came up in another discussion I was in very recently. It wasn't the shuttle fuel tank that was responsible for the Challenger disaster. It was a seal on one of the solid rocket boosters that failed and a flame jet from that either cut directly into the liquid fuel tank or cut through the SRB support and it crashed into the liquid fuel tank or both. That did trigger the fuel to

    • the project aims to produce 60 gigawatts of green hydrogen every year

      Watts are a unit of power which is energy per second. You cannot produce watts per year you produce watts - the "per time" is built into the unit.

      Worse, it states that they aim to produce a terawatt and that this 60 GW project is the largest of seven projects. Even if all the other projects were the same as this one then 7*60GW = 420GW which is less than half a terawatt.

      Getting simple physics and basic maths wrong does not inspire any confidence in their projects.

      • the project aims to produce 60 gigawatts of green hydrogen every year

        Watts are a unit of power which is energy per second. You cannot produce watts per year you produce watts - the "per time" is built into the unit.

        That annoyed me as well. At first I thought 60 GW? Fuck me, that's big. Then I realized they must be talking bollocks. The largest power plant in the world is the 3 Gorges Dam & Hydro plant, and that's only 23 GW. The largest nuclear is 8 GW,

  • Green hydrogen produced at the facility will be piped to the coastal city of Corpus Christi and Brownsville

    Am I the only one that did a double-take after misreading it as suggesting that there was a single, coastal citynamed "Corpus Christi and Brownsville"? I was about to post a correction to the obvious error when I realized it was just a poor phrasing.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dgatwood ( 11270 )

      From the law offices of Corpus, Christi, and Brownsville?

    • Green hydrogen produced at the facility will be piped to the coastal city of Corpus Christi and Brownsville

      You'd think that a process that electrolyses water would have been build on the coast in the first place but not in Texas.

      • As someone else pointed out, it is 40 miles over a plain. Practically speaking, it is on the coast. It is built near the power source, and the salt dome that they are using for storage.

  • Or the next time the state's power grid shits the bed he'll blame it on that.

    • Maybe... but for the near future at least, the vast majority of hydrogen is not used for power, but for industrial purposes. Current global consumption is for:
      • Producing ammonia (55%)
      • Refining petroleum (25%)
      • Producing methanol (10%)
      • "Other," which includes hydrogen vehicles and who knows what else (10%)

      Actually I don't think producing green hydrogen just to burn it or make electricity through hydrolysis is even very close to cost-competitive compared to other sources of green electricity like wind or s

      • Oops I meant "make electricity through fuel cells..."

        And here is the source for the stat.
        https://wha-international.com/... [wha-international.com]

        • According to the infographic in the article, it is being used for producing ammonia and rocket fuel, both of which are actually using the hydrogen as hydrogen, though there is argument to be made for alternate rocket fuels.

  • 1st law of thermodynamics: you can't get out more than you put in.

    Using renewable energy from the grid is a stupid idea. They are going to waste a lot of energy that could have been used to directly do something useful like reducing the load on a coal/gas fired plant so it doesn't put out as much CO2.

    My 1 Yen: only time I would consider using renewables to directly generate Hydrogen would be if the electricity source was located somewhere that it couldn't be directly connected to the grid in the first pla

    • The biggest problem with renewables - at lest, solar and wind - is that they produce power when the conditions are right, not necessarily when you need it. So if you want renewables to provide a lot of your power, there are going to be many times when there is spare electricity and no one to use it. That is why projects like this are a good idea - they can spin up when there is excess energy, and slow or shut down when there isn't.

      Also important is storage in the form of pumped storage hydro and batteries,

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by chefren ( 17219 )
      You can't feasibly run everything with electricity. Kilns for example. Steel works alone produces some 7-9% of all man-made CO2 emissions and kilns are also use in other industries, like ceramics.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Viol8 ( 599362 )

        Google electric arc furnace.

        • A kiln and an electric arc furnace are not interchangeable and do not serve the same purpose. An electric arc furnace can replace a blast furnace. But little more.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Viol8 ( 599362 )

            Electric kilns exist too. Probably not cost effective right now but if gas becomes scarce then things will change.

            • Yes they do. Just know you're solving one end user requirement not upending the hydrogen economy with your comment.

              We're not building green hydrogen exclusively for new emerging tech / problems. The world consumes a metric fuckton of hydrogen already, mostly produced from natural gas via steam methane reforming. It has done this for over 100 years. There's a reason the proposed pipe this proposed facility will attach to runs down to Corpus Christie, and that town does not have any steel or metal processing

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by Viol8 ( 599362 )

                Sorry, there are very few use cases for H2 in providing energy for manufacturing. For a start it burns at a considerably lower temp than methane and secondly creating H2 from electricity simply to use it again for heat is utterly asinine given the energy loses involved. Any sane process would simply use the electricity directly unless the H2 is needed for a chemical process.

      • You can't feasibly run everything with electricity. Kilns for example. Steel works alone produces some 7-9% of all man-made CO2 emissions and kilns are also use in other industries, like ceramics.

        you are 100% correct.

        That is the dirty little secret that those who advocate switching over to 100% solar and wind don't want to talk about. A notable portion of the CO2 emissions from industry and agriculture are not related to generating electricity.

        Though most of the applications you mentioned could easily use an arc or other electric furnace.

        Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating switching everything else over to electric right now. Hydrogen is a fantastic fuel in the right applications, like as a roc

        • They generally talk of using excess renewable power for green hydrogen, its small steps as there is no overnight "silver bullet" solution They can use hydrogen instead of fossil for powering kilns etc e.g. Green Steel produced using hydrogen [theguardian.com]

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jbengt ( 874751 )

          That is why I think pulling electricity off the grid to make Hydrogen is such a bad idea at this time.

          According to the graphics in TFA, they will not be pulling any electricity off the grid. The hydrogen plant will have its' own wind and solar power to generate the hydrogen. The prime benefit is that they can use that 100% of that power when the sun is shining or the wind blowing, and store the hydrogen, so there's no "baseload" to worry about in their plant.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

            This sort of thing could be a substitute for batteries to assist grid stability.

            Any kind of process where brief interruptions are tolerable, like say a heating element that must keep the temperature within a certain band, is suitable. When there is heavy demand some of the energy can be diverted to the grid, even if it's only for a few seconds. With a bit of planning ahead longer periods are possible.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tragedy ( 27079 )

        You can't feasibly run everything with electricity. Kilns for example. Steel works alone produces some 7-9% of all man-made CO2 emissions and kilns are also use in other industries, like ceramics.

        You're going to have to be clear on exactly what kinds of kilns you're referring to, because there are most definitely electric kilns. You might be referring to kilns that produce a reducing atmosphere inside the kiln, which is something that electric kilns don't automatically do, but gas fired ones can. Of course, there are other ways to get a reducing atmosphere in an electric kiln. Also, you can probably fire a kiln with hydrogen and that would produce a reducing atmosphere as well, but I'm not completel

    • Using renewable energy from the grid is a stupid idea. They are going to waste a lot of energy that could have been used to directly do something useful like reducing the load on a coal/gas fired plant so it doesn't put out as much CO2.

      No it's not. Not all green energy is useful. We are constantly talking about problems with storage and grid stability. One of the main benefits of hydrogen electrolysis is that it converts energy from one form to another in a way that can be batched and stored (providing it isn't needed in a continuous process like a refinery).

      In that way hydrogen plants can become a peaking load on the grid providing stability while generating energy allowing an ever larger capacity of green non-baseload power on the grid

    • Dunning Kruger. You know a lot less than you think you do. This idea makes a lot of sense.

      Information you did not have/use: The main problem with wind and solar is it's intermittency. Texas has a lot of wind and solar energy plants, and has gotten to the point where, at peak production times, they produce so much energy they have to not just shut down the fossil fuel plants, but have to take the wind and/or solar off line. Of course, other times they do not have enough wind/solar.

      This project is des

      • The first law of thermodynamics (assuming you are referring to that) has nothing to do with transmission losses. Perhaps you want to look up Ohm's Law.

  • Power plant are typically described with a unit of power (MW, or GW). A 600 MW power plant can produce a peak output of 600 MW. Run it for an hour, and you've got 600 MWh of electric energy.

    This plant is described as "60GW in size" and that it "will be powered by 60GW of behind the meter solar and wind power." Surely they're not using units the same way; no way it's powered by 60 full-size nuclear units worth of power.

    Elsewhere in the writeup, we see "60 gigawatts of green hydrogen every year." I'm

    • They claim in their little diagram that's it's really 60 GW of wind and solar power being fed into the plant. I'm baffled by the use of GW in this case anyway. If they're talking about energy consumption to produce the H2, what's the value of making a big deal of that number? I have no idea if a plant drawing 60GW to produce 2.5 billion kg of H2 is a good thing or not, especially when the H2 isn't being directly used for energy production. Does that imply high hydrogen production efficiency?

      • Thank you for pointing this out. Hydrogen can be measured by mass, or by volume at STP. Measuring by wattage is nonsense.

  • I don't know what's worse - the scientifically illiterate author, or whoever keeps posting articles from these junk sites.

    • Haha. Did you see the article about the current nordstream pipeline where the capacity was quoted as kilowatt-hours per hour?

  • "Hydrogen City is a massive, world-class undertaking that will put Texas on the map as a leading green hydrogen producer," GHI's founder and CEO Brian Maxwell said.

    Hydrogen City! (hydrogen city!) [youtube.com]

    He likes the hydrogen so much, he bought the company!

  • Hydrogen is an indirect greenhouse gas, and a strong one.

    https://www.euractiv.com/secti... [euractiv.com]

    The fact that it's an indirect greenhouse gas has been known for years, but the magnitude is less certain. All estimates are that the GWP is much greater than 1 (1 being the climate impact of 1 g CO2). If we could store, transport, and consume it it without leaks then its GWP is a non-issue. But hydrogen is historically hard to store and transport because it leaks so readily (even leaches through metal). We also have v

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by yog ( 19073 ) *
      Your link states that escaped H2 reacts to form ozone (O3) in the troposphere. Why is ozone in the upper atmosphere a bad thing?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by JoeRobe ( 207552 )

        The troposphere is the lowest layer of the atmosphere, going from ground level up to ~20 km. In that layer ozone is an air pollutant, in addition to its GHG impact. It can damage the lungs and cause a range of respiratory problems. Ozone exceeds safe levels in many parts of the U.S. every year.

        The saying goes "ozone: good up high, bad nearby" because in the stratosphere (next layer up) it effectively blocks UV radiation. It is still a GHG up there, but the UV blocking is more important, hence our effort

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jbengt ( 874751 )

      Hydrogen is an indirect greenhouse gas, and a strong one.

      Don't worry, they're planning on using that hydrogen (GWP 5.8) to make other things, like methane (GWP 25).

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by JoeRobe ( 207552 )

        Perfect, now if they can only use that methane to produce some nice HFC's like HFC-23 (GWP 12,000), then we're really maximizing damage....

    • This so 19hundreds.
      Yes, hydrogen 'even' leaks through metal.
      But it does not leak through plastics.
      Oops ...

  • What is green hydrogen? Is it anything like red phosphorous?

  • It will be the biggest plant ever.

    But have only a tiny production.

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