Australia has a solution to sell hydrogen cheaper: transport it in powder form.
One of the great challenges of hydrogen is its transportation. As a gas it is flammable, unstable and difficult to handle in large volumes due to its low density. Compressing or liquefying it entails a significant energy and economic cost. But Australia, which hopes to become a powerhouse exporter of green hydrogen, has found an affordable method of transporting it in powder form.
How hydrogen is normally transported. Hydrogen is an energy vector that can be used to store and export renewable energy to other countries. Spain aspires to export green hydrogen to the rest of Europe through a corridor of hydrogen plants connected by gas pipelines: the famous H2Med .
Australia has no choice but to transport hydrogen by sea. Specialized vessels already exist to move liquid hydrogen, but it is more common to use reefer ships to transport ammonia and other liquid organic carriers, which then release the hydrogen through chemical reactions.
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Hydrogen in powder form. Why is it not transported in a solid state? A cheap and safe possibility is to use sodium borohydride powder as a carrier, but this is not usually done because the byproduct left in the process, known as sodium metaborate, is very expensive to recycle.
Now, an Australian team of researchers has developed a catalytic chemical process that can quickly and cheaply reconvert sodium metaborate into sodium borohydride.
Objective: reduce transportation costs. The Kotai Hydrogen Project, born at John Curtin University , seeks to reduce the costs of hydrogen production and transportation to become “the cheapest means of exporting hydrogen from Australia”, according to its creators.
While one ton of ammonia produces 178 kg of hydrogen, one ton of sodium borohydride produces 213 kg of hydrogen when water is added. The key to the method is that the resulting sodium metaborate can be recharged with proprietary electrolyzers to make sodium borohydride 20 times cheaper.
Australia as a hydrogen powerhouse. Australia has positioned itself as a key player in the hydrogen export market thanks to public and private investments. The country hopes to produce and export large quantities of green hydrogen on the international market by 2030.
In addition, Australia wants to become a natural hydrogen extractive power . The state of South Australia stands on a cratonized block of crust known as the Gawler Craton, whose iron and uranium mines could contain millions of tonnes of free hydrogen.
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Australia has a solution to sell hydrogen cheaper: transport it in powder form. source
