Russia and the petrostates in the Middle East will lose their stranglehold on the world’s energy supply when more countries exploit their renewable resources. Hydrogen could further reshape the global economy by giving countries long bypassed by the promise of industrialization a shot at development by leveraging their access to the sun and the wind.
And because the capital-intensive hydrogen economy relies heavily on technological know-how to transform renewable energies into a storable, movable substance, it is harder to “capture” than a fossil fuel economy. That may allow some of the world’s poorest countries to exploit their energy resources without falling prey to the resource curse that has dragged so many of those endowed with hydrocarbon deposits into a miasma of corruption and stagnation.
In a world desperate to cut carbon emissions to zero by the middle of the century, hydrogen is something of a Hail Mary pass. But the high-tech fuel once dismissed as prohibitively expensive is now seen as essential to helping address a challenge that seems unsolvable without it.
International Renewable Energy Agency forecast that hydrogen would satisfy 12% of the world’s total energy demand by 2050, up from virtually nothing today, and account for about a third of the global demand for electricity. And that’s on the lower end of the forecast range.
Hydrogen could power industries like steel, glass, and cement — which suck up massive amounts of energy to produce heat. A single steel plant using hydrogen to reduce iron would use about 300,000 tons of hydrogen per year and emit no carbon dioxide.
Patagonia is a long way from the rest of Chile. Moving electricity from its windswept plains to the center of the country, where most of Chile’s population and industry are concentrated, would require building transmission lines tracking a thousand miles of complicated topography along the Andes Mountain range.
The electric power generated by the turbine is used to split water, or H2O, into H2 plus O through a process called electrolysis. The hydrogen is mixed with oxygen and carbon which will be captured directly from the air in the pilot but drawn from wood chips and other biomass in future stages to make methanol, one of the simplest alcohols. The methanol molecules are then transformed into gasoline, a more complex carbohydrate, that can be burned while adding no net carbon into the air.
Government officials hope that wind can transform the backwaters on the southern tip of Chile, drawing power-hungry industries like steelmaking to its newly energy-rich lands. But the ambition is greater. In the capital of Santiago, the talk is about a new economic dawn fueled by renewable energy.
Chile is in a unique spot. The “unparalleled renewable resources in the Atacama and Patagonia make it the lowest cost place to produce Green Hydrogen in the world.