Cost comparisons of hydrogen produced from fossil fuels and renewable energy in 2030

抄録

Hydrogen is one of the most promising elements to accelerate the realization of low carbon society. Today many countries mention that the demand of hydrogen will be increased in coming decades. Although green hydrogen, produced from renewable energy using water or steam electrolysis (power to gas) is preferable, it is expected to be still costly in coming decade and also it requires enormous and rapid increase in the capacity of power generation facility for satisfying the increased hydrogen demand. Because of that, hydrogen produced from fossil fuels with carbon capture and storage (CCS) which is so called blue hydrogen (cf. without CCS is called grey hydrogen) is considered to play an important role. It should be noticed that even CCS is applied, certain amount of CO₂ is released during the blue hydrogen production due to the cost limitation of CCS. Therefore the present study focuses on analyzing the cost of blue hydrogen, grey hydrogen and green hydrogen, taking into account the amount of CO₂ emission and CO₂ price. The results show that blue hydrogen may be cost competitive to green hydrogen as CO₂ price would be higher than the long term expectation reported by IEA.