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It’s been touted as the new way to a green energy transition and green hydrogen seems to be the big game in town. More from the AFR:
Paul Bogers, vice-president of hydrogen at Shell, captured the dichotomy
when he called hydrogen “the Swiss army knife of the energy transition”.
Like a good Swiss army knife, he said, hydrogen isn’t cheap. “The third or fourth conversation with any customer is on affordability, and how you walk further down the cost curve,” he told conference-goers.
“All of that needs a tremendous amount of innovation … The level of investment that will have to go into R&D and innovation in hydrogen is still massive.”
Hydrogen is also like a Swiss army knife, he said, in that when you first look at buying one you don’t always know which of its tools you’re going to end up using most.
How hydrogen will be used, how it will be transported, how much it will cost — all of these things are still hazy, making it hard to gauge cost, risk and return.
“It’s a bit like when people talk about eating an elephant and you need to take your first bite. I feel like we’re still kind of walking around the elephant,” the Australian Hydrogen Council’s Simon says.
“We’re still so pre-commercial, that the economic gap is too great for anyone to take that level of risk with their shareholders’ funds, and reasonably so. I don’t think markets create themselves at a loss.”
