Role of Integrated Nuclear-Renewable Energy Systems in The Hydrogen Economy
Hello everyone, my name is Les Jacobs. I'm the Vice President of Research and Innovation at Ontario Tech University. I serve as the Director of the International Atomic Energy Agency Collaborating Center. Welcome and thank you for joining us on our second day of our work show on integrated nuclear renewable energy systems, hosted by Ontario Tech University in the Greater Toronto Area. I'll begin today by first acknowledging the lands and peoples of the Mississaugas of Scugog Island First Nation. We are thankful to be welcomed on these lands in friendship. The lands we are situated on are covered under the Williams Treaties and the traditional territories of the Mississaugas, a branch of the greater Anishinaabeg Nation, including Algonquin, Ojibwe, Odawa and Pottawatomi. These lands remain home to a number of Indigenous nations and people.
We acknowledge this land out of respect for the Indigenous nations who have cared for Turtle Island, also called North America, from before the arrival of settler peoples until this day. Most importantly, we remember the history of these lands has been tainted by poor treatment and a lack of friendship with the First Nations who call them home. This history is something we are all affected by as we are all treaty people in Canada. We all have a shared history to reflect on, and each of us is affected by this history in different ways. Our past defines our present, but if we move forward as friends and allies, then it does not have to define our future.
Because everyone is tuning in with us remotely across a variety of cities and countries, I'd like to encourage everyone to take a moment to acknowledge the land they're on. As a university community we are dedicated to increase our awareness, understanding and gratitude for the lands we share with Indigenous people. for those of you who did not join us yesterday on the first day of the this workshop i'd like to bring to your attention that last year ontario tech university was designated as an international atomic energy agency collaborating center we are the first iaea collaborating center in canada in this capacity we support the iaea activities to advance nuclear power technology including small modular reactors uh we strengthen the synergies between nuclear and renewable energy sources in integrated energy systems which is obviously the principal focus of today's workshop and we leverage these energy systems for multi-purpose applications to sustain support sustainability and meet the goals of the climate change action plan of canada and other nations as well as more broadly the sustainable development goals yesterday we had some interesting talks and discussions on nuclear energy and the synergies with renewables in integrated energy systems and you can expect more of the same today we have over 700 registrants for the event event from more than 75 countries so the representation is very wide indeed i will now turn it over to today's invited talk session chair francesco gande who is the lead of the non-electric applications project at the iaea francesco okay thank you les good morning and good afternoon to everyone my name is francesco gandes less just said i am the lead for non-electric applications of nuclear energy here at the iaea the international atomic energy agency so in our project we look at helping member states with cogeneration and effective utilization of heat from nuclear plants including for hydrogen production desalination district heating other industrial applications of nuclear heat and also water management and of course uh we have efforts ongoing also in the area of the assessment of the synergisms offered by integrated energy systems utilizing both heat and electricity so before i introduce today's speakers i have a few housekeeping items to address so first of all um this is an interactive section so sessions so if you have any questions please type them at any time in the q a panel not in the chat panel in the q a panel and we will try to address as many of your questions as possible during our q a session we definitely encourage your active participations and in game engagement however please also keep in mind that because of the large number of participants as less just pointed out we will not of course be able to address every single question uh if you are experiencing any technical problem and uh please use the chat panel to let us know and our technical team will try to help you out with that and of course as is common in every virtual event all the participants will be muted for the duration of this session with exception of our speakers and for our speakers please try to stay within the allocated 20 minutes today as we have a full agenda so now i'm looking forward to hearing the talks from our speakers today which will focus of course on integrated nuclear renewable energy systems and their role beyond electricity generation with focus on hydrogen and in particular nuclear hydrogen production now let me introduce our first speaker today which is jan castillo jan serves as the head of the hydrogen encryption technology directorate for the canadian nuclear laboratory c l in this role ian leads the strategic direction capability development and execution of the research and development activities of the directory this includes understanding various stakeholders needs with the government assessing market trends and establishing a technology portfolio to leverage cnl's decade of hydrogen isotope experience in canada and internationally and use the c l unique differentiating facilities and capabilities now jan please join us on camera and the floor is yours good morning everybody and thank you very much to the organizing committee for this invitation i believe the session it is uh uniquely positioned to achieve some of the objectives that have been discussed so far and i would like very much to thank you the for the organizers to give me the opportunity to talk to you today so um the title of my talk is the canadian nuclear laboratory experience in integrated nuclear renewable energy systems and as francesco indicated with a focus on the hydrogen economy the picture that you see on the right hand side is a nice day in the summer for our chuck river campus the agenda for today i would like to begin with giving you a global landscape that's usually a good place to start then i will go to the next level of the canadian opportunities now with those two pieces i think we can connect with how hydrogen and nuclear can be put together especially um in this area of small molar reactors and uh and then we'll move into how hydrogen enables this a strategy of creating the carbonized water and achieving net zero emissions as well as what c l is doing in this arena we move later on to a future production processes that c l has been uh developed over the course of the last 20 to 30 years and finally we conclude with a broader integrated energy system tool that c l has developed called uh hiso so without further ado for those of you uh especially uh international that may or may not be a familiar with the canadian nuclear laboratories as i mentioned we are the national research center for nuclear in in canada we are about about we are about 3 000 staff out of which over 500 to 600 staff are research and development a people mostly with advanced degrees such as phd recently we concluded a report for the canadian government called gaps in consideration for collocating or coupling hydrogen production with a nuclear asset that is a good summary as a starting block as to where canada sits in the development of hydrogen and nuclear and cogeneration the picture on the center as you can see this is what we're trying to solve we all want to prevent global global warming and would like to see more pictures of the left and less pictures on the right all right starting with global trends i'd like to um draw the attention to you to these uh really useful graphs they are taken from our report recently uh produced by arena they are pie graphs the one on the left is from 2020 the one on the right is for 2050 and it shows in general the market size when it comes to energy commodities as you can see in 2050 it's roughly about 1.5 trillion dollars u.s and in 2018 2020 and 2050 it's expected to more or less uh remain the same with some small growth but what i think is key here is to show the switch of the composition of the pie chart largely on the left hand side you see a major change going from oil and gas energy very much being reduced to in the order of 15 to to to 12 percent in 2050 but the remaining of that energy capacity is largely taken by electrification bio energy and hydrogen so as you can see this is a dramatic dramatic switch in terms of infrastructure in terms of policy and in terms of energy generation okay let's go to the next slide all right so the next slide shows um in a very simplified way what are the clean hydrogen policy priorities on the y-axis you can see is the level of maturity of the solutions and on the x-axis is the difference between having distributed applications based on centralized applications and what you see is two sort of squares one that is blue and one that is a green the green really relates to hydrogen the blue relates to electrification so if we if i draw your attention to the center of the screen these are really areas in which is suspected that electrification will really advance the switching in uh in energy technologies and it will affect transportation as you can see fairies trains long-haul drugs it will affect aviation and it will affect uh to some extent district healing but as the centralized applications move into well people start calling hops this is where hydrogen starts taking a bit more of a central role because it's very clear that hydrogen has a very strong decarbonizing potential if the electricity and heat are connected with a production capacity that is connected to a demand center and this is where we can see these hops started deforming and where hydrogen can be produced and used for refineries used for steel manufacturing and if it's connected close to a large body of water it can produce synthetic fuel or synthetic diesel for shipping as well as for a aviation so this is what this graph tells us now going back to the canadian opportunities what i this is a this is a business life but i will do my best to try to explain and let's start at the top left corner so the top left corner shows the grid in canada and as as you can see the grid in canada is very clean to start with largely because it depends uh about 60 percent of it on hydro and a lot of it is starting to come from renewables and nuclear the center of this of your screen shows the opportunity between 2020 and 2050 for hydrogen and the expectation of the hydrogen deployment for for canada so in 2030 roughly is expected to go about four megatons of hydrogen production for for canada currently we're about three by 2050 considering all that major switch that is um it was presented on the first slide where the electricity and generation moves to the to the renewables that amount of capacity is expected to grow to about 20 megatons conversely as you have more greener production electrification the amount of co2 equivalent emissions that hydrogen can truly decarbonize go from 45 megaton reduction to almost 190 megaton reductions which is quite large it's in the order of 15 of the total picture the the um schematic on the right hand side gives you a flavor that canada is a very diverse country that is really blessed with extraordinary natural resources on the right on everything that is in green is electricity produced by hydro everything that is in in in gray is produced by natural gas which is still could be a a a very important alternative especially combined with carbon capture and utilization and ontario in the center has a combination of nuclear and anhydrous so when we start to project how the life will look into the future you will look at the bottom of your slide where you superimposed the country with this creation of hubs and how the hops evolved from 2030 to 2050 this material is courtesy of the canadian hydrogen fuel cell association and as you can see the hopes starting by seeds in areas that are heavily industrialized in ontario and in quebec and alberta british columbia in the middle those seats start to connect with other seats and the linkage between the hubs happen largely through pipelines or largely to transportation and the one on the right hand side you can see that the linkage has increased dramatically and you start having arrows towards export opportunities towards europe and towards asia now it's going back to the topic of the presentation in terms of applications between hydrogen and and nuclear this is like the game is busy but trying to do my best on the left hand side what you have is renewables as well as nuclear what they give you is low carbon intensity electricity and heat in the form of a steam anywhere between 250 to 750 degrees celsius depending on the reactor design in the center of your screen are the different technologies that can either generate hydrogen by using electrolyzers or thermochemical processes hydrogen also gives you a stream of oxygen which is important to keep in mind and at the bottom of your slide you have seen gas production so if you are able to combine this source of clean electricity and heat with a source of carbon such as carbon dioxide capture from emissions from let's say cement plants uh or a source of biomass that canada is really blessed then you can consider a secondary stream that is extremely helpful called syngas which is a combination of hydrogen and co when you have now clean hydrogen oxygen syngas you have the opportunity to go to a secondary set of processes such as heavier bulge alcohol production fissure drops and others that give you hydrogen derivatives such as ammonia methanol synthetic fuel and other products so this is important to keep in mind because often it means that hydrogen is the only substance that is being produced that's not true there are many hydrogen derivatives out there now switching the conversation a little bit more and connecting with with the nuclear and being more specific these graph shows two schematics one on the left and one on the right the one on the left shows a what we call collocation which means connecting a hydrogen production plant with a nuclear power plant that is already existing and the schematic doesn't have everything but overall it gives you a sense that if you take a a view at the big square the hydrogen plant is on the right hand side the nuclear plant is on the left-hand side and they are connected through electricity and heat through switch jars but they live on the same island the picture on the right is what we call coupling where the hydrogen plant is entirely um disconnected from the nuclear station but it could be 10 kilometers away a fence away 20 kilometers away for this all sort of as a separate infrastructure and the intention here is that to uh do not um to simplify the perhaps the safety and licensing of these of these facilities by um having a black boxes and as you can think of a black spot for nuclear and a black spot for hydrogen connected to with piping but it allows you to perhaps have electricity and heat generated uh 20 30 60 kilometers away from where the demand for hydrogen and hydrogen derivatives might be might be found so these are the examples for existing nuclear power plants now if we look at potential examples with uh some of the small molar reactors then the situation is slightly different uh first of all the small vulnerable reactors have uh the advantage that can be designed from the very beginning with the thinking of hydrogen and hydrogen derivative products in mind you can consider having two or three reactors for electricity production and let's say a four reactor which is providing heat as an example you can connect in slightly different functions one could be a sort of peak following some of they could be base following um but that gives you lots of flexibility and adaptability based on their uh different sizes and designs and the picture on the right hand side gives you a preliminary idea of how they could be uh presented this comes from an iea report where the hydrogen production is on the left-hand side and the um the smrs are on the right hand side in uh in an arrangement now what has canadian nuclear laboratories done and how do we plan to support the hydrogen strategy for for the country so what we what we looked at it is that we see essentially sort of four big buckets of of or four areas of work um and they are arranging columns so one is really helping large scale production of hydrogen and clean fuels as well as uh finding ways to utilize a co2 with either thermochemical cycles high temperature electrolysis or a combination of co electrolysis when you have hydrogen and co2 being electrolyzed at the same time in a high temperature electrolyzers another major stream that we see is in the area of hydrogen safety solutions um in general the canadian nuclear industry has been particularly successful in dealing with potential hydrogen accidents in in nuclear stations by first of all modeling what a potential accident looked like and defining the the boundaries having a very specialized uh tools for that modeling and more importantly develop products and services that allow you to prevent that um a getting to a point of hydrogen explosion but that knowledge of combustion dynamics generation dispersion accumulation of hydrogen in an environment we believe to be particularly helpful and useful for the industry especially as the codes and the standards are being developed into the future the third pillar it comes down to hydrogen storage there is no question that there is a need for uh having large storage for for hydrogen as a vector um they it goes anywhere between underground salt caverns to let's say uh quote-unquote hydrogen batteries uh and this this could be in the form of liquid organics or methane alloys and finally the the last one on the right hand side it is very important at this stage of the game to do what we call techno-economic assessments which means you look at a particular industry let's say the maritime industry and see what is currently available what are the vessels what are the engines what are their inputs and outputs in terms of a power consumption fuel consumption direction of travel and then you superimpose that with a solutions in a modular fashion so let's say if you were to change the diesel engines to methanol engines you were to change the diesel engines to nuclear propulsion or you were to change it into a combination of a hydrogen a propulsion with a storage and what would be the impact of that from the point of view of the technology from the point of view of emission reductions from the point of view of cost analysis and how you integrate all that into a grid that is what we call a techno-economic assessment and we develop a few tools for that going into the future and looking over the horizon what do we see as sort of interesting hydrogen production processes for the future especially in the area of thermochemical processes so as you all know i'm sure you are very familiar with hydrogen produced from electrolyzers and you have three options really you have alkaline electrolyzer spam electrolyzers and solid state electrolyzers when you combine and you park those options and then you consider okay you have other alternatives yes you have other alternatives and some of these alternatives what they're trying to do is take advantage of heat to reduce the potential and reduce the cost of electrolyzing hydrogen and there are options such as sulfur iodine process on the left hand side top corner copper chloride process that has been worked between cnl and otu the bottom left as i say high temperature esteem electrolysis and also a hybrid sulfur process on the on the bottom right all of them share the same commonalities that what you're trying to do is reduce the opex of the process by taking advantage of the of the heat moving towards the back end of the talk and uh trying to keep in the good timing here uh just want to uh share with you some of the other tools that i think are important when we think about the hybrid energy system optimization this is what we call a hiso model so the hiso model has different modules and as you can see it's divided as a little radial radial uh picture where you have nuclear hydrogen solar uh different forms of um energy energy supply this model also have a greenhouse gas emissions life cycle carbon taxes um as well as ramp up rates and it does on grid of grid a analysis and includes carbon capture and storage and what is key here is is the hourly time step you can model this sort of very complex systems on an hourly basis that allows you to give a little more granularity than on a monthly or a weekly basis where a lot of the transients are lost so without further ado i'd like to spend a little bit of time on this slide this is this is super busy but let me see what i can do um let's start on the on the y-axis on the left-hand side we have two two um uh two scales but i want to draw your attention to co2 emissions in kiloton on the on the y-axis and on the x-axis we have different models of producing electricity whether it's d cell this around solar this nanowind diesel and smrs etc so to read this graph you have to look at the co2 emission reductions in kilo dome by looking at the gray behind behind the graph and as to be expected when you have diesel generated electricity that amount of co2 emissions is high conversely as you remove the amount of diesel use that number of emission it reduces dramatically okay still staying on the graph on the left hand side there is a levelized cost in dollars per megawatt electrical and thermal so what what this means is what is the cost of electricity and what is the cost of heat in a levelized fashion in the most optimal way for a particular uh situation where is diesel and as you can see that level less cost of electricity could be as high as 433 uh dollars per megawatt hour which translates into like 50 50 a little bit less than 50 cents and that's a a good deal for some of the some of the communities up in the north obviously is not a very good deal for some of the areas in the in the populated uh cities but as you can see uh it gives you a flavor of as you change the different generations uh the levelized cost of electricity and the lost cost of thermal changes with the with the different the different situations but what is important here is to see how for example when you have renewables such as wind and solar you still need to have a large amount of diesel generation to uh take care of all those really um high surges of of demand now this is exactly why uh hydrogen has a huge potential because you can almost imagine replacing the purple by a hydrogen storage battery which will definitely uh reduce the emissions but it will still maintain a competitive levelized cost of electricity and heat as you go to the right hand side on the on the slide you go to the center you see when you start putting the small mobile reactors you have a really good um a value when it comes down to base load but you still need to find ways to to deal with these surges now your alternative is to have a larger reactor or have a larger uh or a lot following system but the problem there is now you're playing a lot of topics for that and then obviously what we want to be is on the far right where we have no fossil fuels and you have a combination of nuclear winds all are all integrated in a in a hub um going to the to the final slide and to keep in in time i just wanted to draw some of the open literature where this hiso model has been applied and i will i will give you that i will leave it at that to uh to help with the with the time thank you very much for your attention and uh thanks francesco all right uh thank you jan and i appreciate you staying on time um thank you for the informative presentations so our second speaker today is yuchiro yuaza who is a colleague here um at the iaea he is a nuclear economic analyst in the planning and economic studies section is called pes and your children responsible for the analysis of hydrogen production using electricity from existing nuclear power plants and also for conducting research on the cost of nuclear power plants including construction operation maintenance decommissioning and nuclear fuel cycle please uchiro turn on your camera and the floor is yours thank you for the introduction hello everyone my name is eutro yuasa i'm working in iaea sorry today i would like to talk about the current situation of hydrogen production project with existing nuclear power plants focusing on the economic perspective i have divided my presentation into five parts first some background about hydrogen production from nuclear power secondly the method of hydrogen production thirdly the scope and objective of our activity then the key findings from the utilities demonstration project and finally a summary key findings are further divided into several parts and i will talk about this later in this presentation i'd like to start by talking about nuclear hydrology as an energy carrier we believe there are two main reasons for using nuclear power to produce hydrogen one is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to prevent global warming electrification and the carbonization of the power sectors are essential to reduce ghg emission but they are not enough factors that are difficult to electrify such as steel and long distance transport can be recognized using hydrology hydrogen produce a production from nuclear power is not only green but also it is expected to be competitive because it can produce large amount of hydrogen in a stable and efficient way using electricity and heat another reason is another reason is that existing nuclear power plants currently face the challenge of operating with fluctuating renewable energy systems and hydrogen could be one solution hydrogen production by utilizing surplus electricity is expected to be used as a backup power source in addition hydrogen per produced for external fare could be a very variable alternative in living streams thus hydrogen is an essential energy carrier for the government types society and nuclear power can contribute to hydrogen production next now i'd like to count to the primary hydrogen production methods as you already know at the top the fossil fuel reforming is the most common but emission of a large amount of co2 is challenged and ccs is being considered on the other hand low carbon hydrogen production methods using nuclear power includes electrolysis in the middle figure some chemical water splitting at the bottom figure some chemical water splitting is expected to efficiently produce hydrogen by utilizing the high temperature heat from advanced reactors but it is still in the research stage therefore we are focusing on the combination of nuclear power and three dispatch nuclear power and electrolysis as a method to produce low carbon hydrogen in the near future next please please the next thing i want to speak about the scope and objectives of our activity as i mentioned earlier we set our scope to the hydrogen production using existing nuclear power plants so hydrogen production by advanced reactor is not the main subject of this survey and our objectives are compared currently underway demonstration project of nuclear hydrogen project production by utilities to be identified the necessary factors for its deployment currently several existing nuclear hydrogen projects have started in north america and europe but little progress has been made in asia at this time so we collecting the latest information from nine utilities in north america and europe as shown in the figure b and below it should be noted that these projects are still in the early stage and many things may change as the project progress next right please next key findings from the utilities demonstration projects are divided into three parts utility strategy for climate targets minimizing cost to maximize revenue and demonstrate demand and market next slide please first i will introduce some motivation of utility utilities to produce hybrid several utilities have set their own decaponization targets and they are using it as motivation to move forward with their projects for example external energy in usa aims to deliver 100 percent carbon free registration by 2015 with an aggressive interim goal to cut carbon emissions by 80 percent before 2013. the figure bureau shows the publication status of national hydrogen strategies and roadmaps it indicates that many countries have issued hydrogen strategies and roadmaps canada and uk include producing hydrogen from existing nuclear power plants in their national hydrogen strategies and they are positioning nuclear power as one of the leading methods of hydrogen production the elaboration of ex explicit policies by governments are major encouragement for utilities like birth power in canada and relief in uk to move forward with their projects next slide please secondly i'm going to talk about what the utds are doing for minimizing cost to maximize the value the bar chart below shows the cost breakdown for each hydrogen production method in china as you can see from the left to path which are hydrogen production using electricity the cost of electricity accounts for a very large percentage therefore two methods are being considered to reduce the electricity costs one is to utilize cheap surplus electricity this is being considered by almost all utilities the other is to use nuclear heat to increase the electricity efficiency of production and reduce electricity consumption this means the use of high temperature electrolyzer this method is being considered by external energy and edf slide b regarding the first method the use of surplus electricity we must pay attention to the the x risers capacity factor the left figure below shows the relationship between the capacity factor and high hydrogen cost it indicated that the total hydrogen cost could be higher if the capacity factor is lower by insisting on the use of surplus electricity in securing as much surprise electricity as possible it is not necessary to rely solely on nuclear electricity the high figure the light pl below shows the daily electricity demand and supply curve it indicates that it may be possible to secure the electricity exercises operating hour by combining the nighttime surplus electricity from nuclear power with the daytime surplus electricity from solar power let's try please it is also important to determine the appropriate capacity of the electricity and hydrogen production volume in order to reduce the hydrogen cost the figure below shows that increasing the electrolyzer's modular size can lead to benefit in economies of almost all of nuclear hydrogen projects start out as small as one megawatt so in the future increasing the electricity size will reduce the hydrogen cost next slide please other ways to reduce the hydrogen cost into include government support and risk allocation in the u.s and the uk financial support is being provided for nuclear hydrogen projects
canada has adopted carbon pricing which will also help hydrogen production with nuclear power to be competitive in the market regarding risk allocation one method is to cooperate with other organizations cooperation with laboratories actually the manufacturing company and hydrogen consumption company is a way to allocate the risk and at the same time reduce the risk by bringing together each expertise and the other is a milestone approach some projects are being carried out in several places for example one project decides not to proceed from the feasible phase to the demonstration phase due to economic issues next library of the last of the key findings i will introduce the current situation and further outlook of the hydrogen demand and the way to develop the hydrogen market as you can see the figure below in the future large hydrogen demands such as shipping and steel is expected but currently demand is limited to the defining and chemical industry sector and it is not so large for a nuclear hydrogen project to be successful sufficient hydrogen demand must be found or created however since the amount of the hydrogen production is very small in the demonstration phase it is expected to be used for cooling generator in their own nuclear problems would be mixed with hydrogen in their own gas fire problems next likely the location of electrolyzer is another point related to hydrogen demand utilities utilities that intend to use hydrogen hydrogen at nuclear power plants tends to install it near nuclear power plants while those harbors certain demands tend to install it near end users the location of electricity is a difficult challenge because each location has advantage and disadvantage in increasing production in the future it will be necessary to consider the optimal location taking into account hydrogen transport costs great costs nuclear regulation and other factors next slide please in addition hydrogen plasters are attracting attention as a way to stimulate hydrogen demand a way to create demands through the hydrogen cluster such as port cluster and steel cluster is being considered by bringing together hydrogen demand and supply in one place and promoting development at the same time it is expected to be solved the chicken and egg issue some nuclear power plants locate close to the potential location of hydrogen hydrogen plasma so hydrogen clusters with nuclear power plants of the hub such as freeport east in uk and arctic cluster in russia are planned next straightly finally i will summarize the key point points discovered from the survey of this demonstration projects for hydrogen produced from nuclear power to be deployed on a broad road scale it is important to make use of demonstration projects and their results to inform other projects for example it is necessary to be examined whether the similarities such as governments support the use of surplus electricity and cooperation with other organizations should be sharing among other projects it is also necessary to determine whether the differences such as the type and the location of electricity and the way of creating the hydrogen demand and unique goal and digital consideration of the demonstration project in in question let's try please also it should be noted that as i mentioned at the beginning these nuclear hydrogen projects are in the early stage although it is hardly mentioned today's presentation various challenges remain such as scaling up the electricity meeting nuclear regulation requirements transporting and stretch hydrogen encouraging further development of hydrogen demand serving the water supply and ensuring public access accessibility therefore it is necessary to continue to follow up on this project in order to explore the factors for deploying the hydrogen business using nuclear power next slide please well this brings me to the end of my presentation thank you for the attention all right and thank you you shiro uh for the very informative presentation and for also keeping us on time so so far we are doing pretty well so our next speakers is richard bormann who i've been knowing for the past uh probably 12 years or something like that and he oversees the idaho national laboratory clean energy platform for integrated energy system development and richard is also responsible for the coordination for this effort of theory laboratories governments university regional stakeholders and industry and his expertise is pretty vast includes combustion gasification synthetic fuel process development gas cleanup and atmospheric environmental chemistry now over to you richard the floor is yours please turn on your camera thank you very much francesco uh i think i have my camera on and can you also hear me yes yes okay great thank you for that confirmation okay it is a great pleasure to be with you today and and of course my counterpart dr uh shannon bragg sitting presented yesterday and mentioned that i would go somewhat deeper into our nuclear hydrogen program here and as the title of my presentation or talk today is on our progress in nuclear hydrogen production i will be presenting the larger larger content from the department of energy's hydrogen and fuel cell technology office i am a laboratory relationship manager to that office and as was mentioned yesterday as the lead lab for nuclear energy one of our principal roles then is to work with the development of high temperature electrolysis which can be matched with nuclear reactors and achieve higher thermodynamic efficiencies so i also have another responsibility and that is to be a pathway lead in what is called the light water reactor sustainability program which reports to the program of nuclear energy so these two programs are work jointly towards this goal of being able to use the clean energy produced by nuclear reactors to produce large amounts of hydrogen and i'm going to address that here but first let me let's see i guess i'm looking to advance my screens there so that is not happening let me try that again it says i have uh control um thank you it just happened now and so this has been rolled out here by the us department of energy on june 7th an announcement was made about this hydrogen shot much like the moonshot which was uh many decades ago we now have earthshot which is meant to try to obviously save the planet and and help control the climate and stabilize that so the goal here is that within one decade we would be able to produce one kilogram of hydrogen at a cost of one u.s dollar so that's one dollar per kilogram of hydrogen within one decade this is a very ambitious goal and within this presentation i'd like to show one possible route to do that with our existing nuclear reactor fleet i'll also talk about advanced reactors and their potential role as well okay if we go to the next slide thank you so in conjunction with that many of you are probably aware of a bipartisan infrastructure law that was passed by our senate and our house of representatives so that's our us congress and it appropriates this 9.5 billion dollars for the development and demonstration of clean hydrogen meant to incent industries and utilities to begin doing large demonstrations of hydrogen production and utilization of that hydrogen in our energy systems one billion dollars is allocated for continuing and accelerating the development of electrolysis both low temperature and high temperature we'll get to that in a moment 500 million is to set up a process for manufacturing and recycling those units and then there is eight billion dollars for at least four regional clean hydrogen hubs of which at least one of those will be tied to a nuclear power source so this of course aligns with our our earth shot goal of getting to one dollar a kilogram of hydrogen but as an intermediate step we have the goal by the hygiene and fuel cell technology office of getting to two dollars per kilogram by 2026 so we're looking out here by the end of 2026 that's five years but roughly in four years let's talk about how that may be possible in in this presentation today i want to first off though call your attention to a couple of seminal reports that were released here that were supported by the hydrogen and fuel cell technology office and which were released here about a year year and a half ago you see the the dates on these of october 2020. one report is an effort led by argonne national laboratory here showing the report jacket on the left this is available for public access and it is about the assessment on the potential future demands for hydrogen in the united states that gives us a projection of what the total demand could be by our industries and different energy systems and including the use of hydrogen for energy storage and power production the report on the right which was led by nrel mark ruth and his colleagues there at the national renewable energy laboratory gets into the deeper level of what is going to be the cost and helps help to enhance helps develop those cost supply curves by which we can see what in a market reality might be the amount we would produce based on the demand given certain price points these two reports then work very well to give us a a good vision of the markets and the opportunities in the united states and so it's from that that we can begin to understand how these clean regional hydrogen hubs might be put together so that let's go to the next slide there we go so this is a a couple of figures out of those reports and so i just will go draw your attention to some of these numbers even though this is in a very fine print hope you can see that when we talk about what's the total demand we would refer to that as the serviceable consumption potential you see this column on the left uh showing the different applications from refineries ammonia biofuels and very similar to what we've seen uh presented in the presentations that have just preceded this one today but for the u.s then that total serviceable consumption could exceed 100 million metric tons per year that's roughly 10 times more than what our 2015 consumption was so that's a total serviceal serviceable amount of hygiene that could be produced and the map on the right would show you where those where that demand is by uh the intensity of these blue colors so you can see that there's a a really high potential in the midwest and that of course borders with ontario canada and so we'd assume those markets are very much in common with uh canada in the in that particular region and also around the uh in the michigan area and the great lakes then you can also see the demand along the gulf shores which of course we we understand is where our our petroleum petrochemical industry is concentrated so on the next slide this is again more information coming from these reports by argonne national lab in rail and what i'm showing here though is to draw your attention to how we see the role for nuclear uh power in producing some of that hydrogen so they set up and and looked at five cases the reference case of course is business as usual and uh where the hydrogen markets might grow given a given a drive towards more hydrogen so that's the on the right you see the supply side how much hydrogen would be produced to match those demands shown by the left-hand bars well of course steam methane reforming of natural gas is the the conventional method for producing hydrogen and so it is the least cost at the present time and including with carbon capture sequestration it can still be very competitive versus electrolysis technologies however uh with the high temperature electrolysis we see that in the second case which was up with an advances in and plus infrastructure advances in electrolysis and applications there's a projection there that that would be upwards of you can see the the box four million metric tons of hydrogen being produced by our nuclear reactors now just to give you a feel for that uh a one gigawatt reactor which is this about the average size of one nuclear reactor a one giga watt reactor in high temperature electrolysis mode can produce approximately 625 metric tons per day or just a little over 200 000 metric tons per year so you could do the math that would be 4 million divided by 200 000 metric tons would would equate to 20 reactors that could be converted we have a we currently have about 100 just a couple of less than 100 reactors still operating in the united states so this would suggest 20 of them could be repurposed for producing hydrogen but as you see in the case where there might be a low supply of natural gas meaning that the natural gas is not in excess supply as it currently is if there's greater competition and the price of that natural gas should rise which it incidentally has then the demand for that nuclear hydrogen could reach as much as 14 million metric tons and so that would be up to as you can see my two bullets on the in the lower right hand side as many as any anywhere from 66 to 87 depending upon the choice of using either high temperature electrolysis which is slightly more efficient than low temperature electrolysis then of course we have some other cases here that you'll see renewable energies solar and wind be coming into the into the picture under these different scenarios that have been evaluated and this is where aggressive r d and electrolysis development and prices coming down would incent the use of low temperature electrolysis paired with wind and solar we certainly expect that we're on a trajectory to do that so in the end i guess i would conclude that we would we would expect to see a blend of uh clean hydrogen being made from steam methane reform and with carbon capture and sequestration with nuclear reactors and with renewable energy and thus the bill of that uh eight billion dollars to do these hubs helps just put us put us as a country on a trajectory for all of those energy sources to be uh stood up and to show the the feasibility of doing that both technically and economically okay look there we go to this next slide so i wanted to then focus here now on the nuclear part of that in our progress here working with the two program offices that i mentioned the department of energy's nuclear energy office and the office's energy efficiency and renewable energy so with the hydrogen and the fuel cell technology office their investments in research and development including with the billion dollars which is now in in the bill for electrolysis development that allows us to bring down uh help help industry i should correctly mention bring down the cost of their manufacturing of the electrolysis components and modules and to to build up the factories and to proceed to high volume manufacturing that is ultimately necessary to bring down those costs and that was shown in one of the previous graphs we saw this morning so we have plotted here a couple of different lines there's a you see a green diagonal line and you see a blue diagonal line you also see some cost of hydrogen production for natural gas methane reforming and this is with purification so that the hydrogen produced is on a common basis of being highly pure uh hydrogen suitable for production of ammonia so let's put it on an equal basis here and see how the costs compare uh and with the continuation of investments by industry and the doe we hopefully come down more to the blue diagonal line which puts us on a cost reduction because of uh advances in manufacturing durability performance and of course uh high volume manufacturing so let's uh take your attention there to the blue line as it comes down diagonally you see where it begins to cross over with these different assumptions for the price of natural gas the reference case is the dashed line toward beginning at about 1.55 again that's for pure hydrogen after steam methane reforming so we see the blue diagonal line process that when the price of electricity is roughly around 26 to 27 a megawatt hour okay and and so that this is with again the high temperature electrolysis now on the left hand side i show some bar graphs here which is comparing the different uh types of electrolysis and simply the amount of energy that is used the blue the blue shading on those bars is for the electrical power that is used uh whereas the low temperature electrolysis is based all on electricity and then when we get into high temperature electrolysis we take advantage of a percentage of the heat which can be generated by nuclear reactors so you can see both light water reactors and high temperature reactors which can provide a higher quality of heat there are some advantages to that however what i really want to to remark on here is that many plants operating in the united states now can produce electricity for under thirty dollars a megawatt hour this is to say then that uh if we can achieve the high volume manufacturing of electrolysis units then we find ourselves in a very good position to compete immediately with making hydrogen at existing nuclear plant sites moving to the next slide we show here then a potential roadmap or a plan which was put together by my pathway under the light water reactor sustainability program setting here a vision and a goal for us to begin doing demonstrations with the low temperature electrolysis followed by the high temperature electrolysis which lags of course technology readiness at a commercial level it lags the low temperature pan and certainly alkaline electrolysis but as you can see here this is a vision which we've created to help in scent getting to where full plants or at least a large portion of nutrient plants are converted over to hydrogen production either dedicated to that or in working when to produce hygiene when they during periods of when excess electricity is available on the grid and in conjunction with the build buildup of renewables anyway as you see here our aim is to work towards getting uh be mindful of getting towards uh having anywhere from 10 to 12 reactors converted to or or equivalent of 10 to 12 reactors converted to hydrogen production by the end of the decade or beginning into the the start of the next decade moving to the next slide here this now is a reference to the projects which have already been uh set up that are public and private investments costs shared by the utilities that are sponsoring these projects you've seen and heard about these projects no doubt in prior conferences but just to review those there is one at uh that's being done by constellation with the formerly exxon exelon and that's in upstate new york the nine-mile uh point plant there is a project being conducted at the davis-bessie nuclear power plant near toledo ohio by energy harbor and then there is a project that has been awarded has been made to arizona public services you see this down in the bottom right hand corner and they're now working towards uh setting that contract in place to move forward with that project we also then have are moving forward with a project by excel energy in and around the minnesota reactors of either prairie island or monticello as they are working towards choosing one of those plant sites and studying up there their demonstration project then we also have a project that we're conducting at the idaho national laboratory which was cost shared by department of energy and fuel cell energy and this is to demonstrate a a fully integrated commercial module that would provide a basis for scaling up and doing uh uh scala scaling up those modules into full commercial production but i might also remark that we also have other than testing other stacks from other companies and industries and other systems uh most notably we have a integrated system that was built by bloom energy that is situated now at the idaho national lab and is being currently operated in fact we just passed this past week completed a full uh commission and testing of that particular uh 100 kilowatt module so we're very pleased as a national lab and as the department of energy to be working with the industries in the us working with these utilities uh and now working with hopefully industries to set up these uh proposals for hubs that can be built and uh and then to demonstrate hydrogen production at even larger scales then you see what we'll learn from the experiences of these four or five projects and so things are are actually pulling together well and being coordinated between the government and private industries very effectively here in the united states moving on here i wanted to now just uh dive down a little deeper into some of the technical details of how we see this as feasible feasible even for a light water either pressurized water or a boiling water reactor so there has been a myth that uh high temperature electrolysis because the electrolysis units run up at around 800 degrees celsius that it would never work effectively with a light water reactor that of course produces steam in and around 300 degrees celsius or slightly above that well the reality is that engineering allows us to recuperate the heat from the hot hydrogen and hot oxygen that is produced so we simply need to get a source of heat that allows us to convert deionized water into a a form of steam even around as low as 150 to 200 degrees celsius we can pick up that steam and then superheat it with the hot hydrogen and the oxygen leaving the leaving the production plant with very little topping heat and that tends to be the major difference is is that the we need somewhat more topping heat when we tied to a pressurized water reactor as opposed to a an advanced reactor like a molten salt reactor high temperature gas reactor now our intent is to be able to demonstrate that these systems together can also supply electricity to the grid in times of reserve capacity requirements so our aim is to show that the electrolyzers including the high temperature electrolyzers can be ramped down and wrapped up in a matter of five to ten minutes thus allowing that all that electricity to flow back onto the grid when it needs to be dispatched to the grid to help balance the grid so this has been one of the aims of our our project and this has been demonstrated very effectively for low temperature electrolysis and we're now beginning to show that that can also be done with the high temperature electrolysis units so therefore we have to work out all the operating concepts for to be able to do that moving to my next slide is a a slide which is uh uh similar to one that i think shannon dr bragg sitting showed yesterday and this is uh indicative of work what we've been doing using some um capacity expansion models to help us project the cost of electricity for the next 20 to 30 years then we develop synthetic time histories for that cost of electricity and this allows us to better understand how those nuclear power plants may dispatch between hydrogen production and electricity on the grid so we're just showing you here some graphs that show for a a particular 72-hour time frame how the electricity might go between the electrolysis unit and the grid and how the hydrogen is that is produced can also be stored so that when we supply hydrogen to an industrial customer that can be at a steady rate according to their the industry demands so these are some of the tools we have developed and are using now to understand the market which was referred to in the previous presentation the uh a couple of presentations as the technical and economic assessments as to how this would be done and as part of this work we understand and realize then in this next slide that energy storage using hydrogen on a large scale can be competitive versus lithium batteries when they're used at a at a commercial scale this is a graph out of one of our studies that is also available in a public report which shows that once we get to a point of about 3 000 megawatt hours that's just three hours of storage of a gigawatt nuclear plant that the um cost benefits of producing hydrogen which can be stored in geological or other other storage media that can be recovered and turned around and produced back into electricity as we see that becomes more economical than lithium-ion batteries so this work is important in helping us to understand and helping utilities to understand when it might be feasible and most practical to use hydrogen storage on a large scale and then this of course incense the the need to demonstrate uh geological storage of hydrogen and there are some projects in the united states uh moving forward with that to that particular option so moving ahead now i want to now just draw some attention to the work we're doing under the light water reactor sustainability program so this includes us trying to understand the operating concepts which allow those reactor operators to be able to dispatch the thermal and the electrical power be between the grid and the hydrogen production plant so have developed uh simulators for those operations they're built upon dynamic codes that capture the physics of the hydrogen plant the physics of thermal energy transport to the hydrogen plant as it's connected to the nuclear plant you see here in the picture on the right a test in which we brought in a few formerly licensed nuclear reactor operators on the screen is are the operating panels and representation of the nuclear plant and in this particular exercise these reactor operators are dispatching the thermal and the electrical power to the hydrogen plant to show they can how they can do that and to help us understand how to develop the human factors and to properly arrange them on the screens and to to optimize the manner in which the operators are able to uh just again dispatch the energy so we've learned a lot from our first uh test uh we had as you can see people observing this this test in in progress and and a report was written on that now i'd like to draw some attention to uh what was uh mentioned here in an earlier slide at by the canadian national laboratory where they have been looking at hydrogen flames and basicall
2022-04-30 08:12
