Hydrogen Production

Mr PATTERSON (Morphett) (15:15): The Premier's flagship hydrogen power generation plan has been deferred, but for how long? South Australians are still in the dark. It might be a number of years before the next naive politician proposes green hydrogen as the solution to cheap electricity, but it is essential that we understand some of the scientific laws and hurdles that this project faced and that no amount of political spin could overcome. This will serve as a cautionary tale for South Australia with its relatively low tax base so that it does not ever again waste hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars with nothing to show for it.

I graduated from the University of Adelaide with a degree in physics and also a degree in electrical and electronic engineering, so I understand the laws of thermodynamics and conservation of energy, and they act as a detonator that ignites this green hydrogen electricity scheme into a hydrogen bomb.

Mr Brown interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Member for Florey, can you leave the chamber please? See you in 20 minutes.

The honourable member for Florey having withdrawn from the chamber:

Mr PATTERSON: In its most basic form, the Premier's so-called Hydrogen Jobs Plan involved converting electricity to hydrogen and then back to electricity. The hydrogen was to be produced by electrolysing water using a 250 megawatt bank of alkaline electrolysers. This technology currently has an efficiency of around 66 per cent, so that means two-thirds of the electrical energy that is then put into the hydrogen is retained, and another third of that energy is lost. Approximately five tonnes of hydrogen are generated hourly by the 250 megawatt electrolysers and were to be stored in a custom-built 100-tonne hydrogen storage facility so that hydrogen could later be used to power the turbines and generate electricity.

The state government raced off and ordered 200 megawatts of GE LM6000VELOX turbines, which are effectively jet engines. These turbines are energy-hungry, requiring 15 tonnes of hydrogen per hour to produce the 200 megawatts of electricity, but they only transfer 40 per cent of the energy stored in the hydrogen back to electricity, with the remaining energy lost to mostly noise and heat. Therefore, the overall efficiency of converting electricity to hydrogen and then back to electricity is about 26 per cent, because 66 per cent of the initial energy going into the hydrogen and, of that, only 40 per cent of the hydrogen energy then is used to convert back to electricity. In other words, it takes four units of electricity to create one unit of green hydrogen electricity.

The time to generate the vast quantities of hydrogen is another barrier because these 250 megawatt electrolysers require three hours, totalling 750 megawatts, to produce the 15 tonnes of hydrogen needed for the LM6000 turbines to generate that 200 megawatts of electricity in an hour, again reinforcing that energy efficiency of 26 per cent. There are other parts of the process that also require electricity such as purification and desalination of water. They also reduce the efficiency further and, staggeringly, the original plan by the Premier was for storage of the hydrogen to be liquid, which means it is stored at negative 240°C in Whyalla. That would have made an inefficient system drastically worse.

Another major issue with the government's plan was the insufficient amount of hydrogen storage of 100 tonnes. The LM6000 gobbles up 15 tonnes of hydrogen per hour when generating at 200 megawatts, so in a wind and solar drought there would only be enough hydrogen to fuel the turbines for 6½ hours before they ran out. This process is very inefficient to produce electricity at an industrial scale. The more inefficient an electricity system is, the costlier it is to supply energy for households and businesses.

These scientific and technical barriers are why major private companies are walking away from using green hydrogen to generate commercial electricity. Over the last three years, we have seen power bills skyrocket in South Australia while Premier Malinauskas has been concentrating on his hydrogen fantasy. In fact, household bills have jumped by 45 per cent under Premier Malinauskas and are now the highest on record—and now the government has shelved the only energy-related policy they took to the election.

So, in future, when a career politician such as Premier Malinauskas comes re-promising a rebranded green hydrogen hoax, South Australians would be well advised to ask him: does his plan comply with the laws of thermodynamics?