Hydrogen's role in sustainable urban transformation

00:05

Davion Ford

Welcome to Better Cities by Design, a podcast brought to you by Arcadis, where we talk to changemakers, who are working to make our cities better places for people to live, work and to play. I'm your host, Davion Ford. In this episode, we're going to delve into the world of hydrogen technology and explore its potential to enhance the sustainability of cities around the world. To do this, we have convened a panel of distinguished guests to unpack the challenges and opportunities of integrating hydrogen into our urban landscapes. We'll be joined by Artiom Loginov from Cummins Inc., Brett Ryan from Hydrogen UK and Paul Aspinall from Arcadis.

00:53

Davion Ford

As cities grapple with pressing environmental challenges, the need for sustainable solutions has never been more urgent. Hydrogen technology has emerged as a potential key player in transforming cities for a more sustainable future. Its applications are as broad and diverse as those of fossil fuels, whether in transportation, energy generation or industrial processes. But hydrogen can significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions and contribute to improvements in urban air quality, its versatility makes it a potentially attractive option for cities transitioning to cleaner and more sustainable energy sources. The impact of hydrogen technology on urban planning is also significant. Integrating hydrogen infrastructure into city planning could pave the way for more sustainable transportation systems and energy networks. Hydrogen Fuel Cell busses, for instance, offer zero-emission public transportation solutions while reducing noise and air pollution in urban areas. Furthermore, hydrogen technology enables the concept of energy sharing in cities where excess renewable energy can be converted into hydrogen and stored for later use. This stored energy can be used during peak demand periods or when renewable energy generation is low. By creating more flexible and resilient energy systems, cities can become less dependent on traditional power grids and move towards a more sustainable and self-sufficient energy model. To learn more about all of this, we've assembled a group of thought leaders who know a great deal about hydrogen and its potential to sustainably power our cities. Artiom Loginov is the business development and sales manager for Canada at Cummins Inc., a Global Power Solutions leader. Accelera by Cummins is a clean energy technology brand and a business segment of Cummins dedicated to accelerating the transition to zero emissions by providing tailored solutions to various industri es. Brett Ryan serves as the head of policy and analysis at Hydrogen UK, the leading trade association advancing hydrogen technologies as a key player in advocating for the development and implementation of hydrogen solutions. Hydrogen UK works to showcase, promote and raise awareness about hydrogen’s role in achieving net zero goals. And Paul Aspinall is the global hydrogen lead at Arcadis, where he oversees a comprehensive suite of services supporting our focus sectors such as energy networks, new mobility and industrial decarbonization to facilitate the integration of hydrogen technologies with minimal carbon impact.

03:40

Davion Ford

Welcome to Better Cities by Design. You've all joined this discussion because you're experts on this topic. I'm curious why you're so passionate about hydrogen, but I'd like to give each one of you an opportunity to introduce yourself first.

03:54

Artiom Loginov

Thank you, Davion. My name is Artiom Loginov. I work for Accelera by Cummins. Accelera is a new brand of Cummins. Cummins is widely known as company producing gensets and diesel engines. But for the past few years, Cummins has been very actively involved in new technologies, green technologies. We've been buying companies who produce zero emissions technologies, and we put them together in a fifth business unit and call that Accelera. So accelerate comes from two words, accelerate, the era of zero emissions era. So I work for the electrolyzer team within Accelera, and I'm Business development and Sales Manager. This is an exciting time to be in this field, because the market is growing. The demand is obviously there, and hydrogen is one of the technologies which will allow us to transition to green energy.

04:43

Brett Ryan

Hi, Davion, thanks for having me on. My name is Brett Ryan. I am a chemical engineer by background, and for nearly the last three years, been working as the head of policy and analysis at Hydrogen UK. For those who don't know, Hydrogen UK is the lead Trade Association representing the vast majority of companies looking to commercialize hydrogen here in the UK, in what has often been referred to as the leading hydrogen market in the world. Our 115-plus members include the industry's largest range of organizations that operate and innovate across the sector. And we're pleased to say that both Arcadis and Accelera by Cummins are members and we love working with them. What drives me is the fact that we're on an incredibly difficult, but frankly existential mission to reach net zero by 2050 to limit the effects of global warming, to safeguard the future of the planet for our kids and the ecosystems that live here and in every major piece of analysis shows that there will be no net zero without hydrogen. And that's really what drives me in the day to day running of Hydrogen UK.

05:52

Paul Aspinall

Thanks, Davion, it's Paul Aspinall, Global Hydrogen Lead at Arcadis. At Arcadis, we're passionate about creating planet-positive futures for our clients, and hydrogen, really, as Brett's just already mentioned, is key to net zero future, and being able to support our clients with providing that simultaneous deployment of supply and demand for hydrogen solutions across all sectors, is fantastic to be able to do so. Very delighted to be here and talk about this.

06:28

Artiom Loginov

Davion, this is a great question, so let me pause here a bit. We are Accelera by Cummins. We are an OEM company, meaning that we produce equipment which is supposed to produce hydrogen. We are part of that big infrastructure and cities for us and for the hydrogen economy in general, is just one piece of the supply chain of this. And one piece of this transition. And definitely in cities, we see a lot of consumers located there. But as OEM, we not necessarily are focused on the cities. Just to give you a flavor of what we do, and who are our consumers, we see a lot of chemical companies, oil and gas companies, who are thinking to transition to zero emission technologies. And they are not necessarily located in the cities, but however, there is a lot of applications related to cities directly. And this is obviously mobility, so transitioning truck deliveries, cars and other sort of mobility is a big chunk for us. And we see it's coming. We see a lot of interest in different Canadian provinces. I work for Canada, and I can speak about my country. We see that it's coming, and as supplier of electrolyzers, we are happy to jump there and provide the equipment to produce hydrogen. And they will be consuming hydrogen, and hence helping us to transition to zero emissions and reduce emissions in the cities. The second application, which is important for the cities, is related to energy consumption, and we have some good examples, I hope to jump on that question later while we develop the conversation. For example, one of the applications would be to mix hydrogen with gas. This also helps us to reduce emissions, and you would use gas for heating, for energy production, etc. And this is related to the cities in the first place.

08:28

Brett Ryan

To follow on from Artiom there at Hydrogen UK, we can see there are certainly a number of challenges that are unique to each of the potential end-use applications for hydrogen in cities, but obviously also some cross-cutting ones. If we start looking at the individual challenges for the likes of power, one of the key aspects is the availability of technology for hydrogen firing power generation equipment, depending on your sources, some of those major bits of kit that are going to be able to deliver grid-scale, power generation capacity are not likely to come online till 2030, or maybe hopefully late 2020s. That's a significant barrier at the moment. But on top of that, they will be huge consumers of hydrogen as a fuel itself. So having access to significant levels of hydrogen and the storage required upstream of that to be able to generate power at short notice is key. Artiom has already pointed to some of the transport issues, but transport, we're talking about multi-modal application. You've got everything from HGV, so heavy goods vehicles serving freight through busses, coaches like commercial vehicles, and let's not write off hydrogen for passenger vehicles as well. Things that come up are, you know, the upfront cost of those vehicles, while we're still at low deployment levels, the access to the refueling infrastructure. And again, another common one is the fuel cost and availability. And if we talk about industry, again, industry is not a homogenous off-taker. You've got incredibly diverse range of use cases and even locations, especially here in the if we look at the UK, nearly 50% of industrial emissions actually take place outside of industrial clusters. So it's that having the access to the infrastructure to link supply and demand is another key aspect. And some of those wider aspects, Artiom mentioned, jobs and skills, having access to the right skills at the right time, in the right location, and those supply chain elements to be able to deploy are absolutely fundamental.

10:36

Paul Aspinall

There are unique challenges across each of these sectors that we're talking about here. And if we take each section of the hydrogen value chain, we've got challenges in each of them, and one of the challenges is synchronizing both supply and demand. So if we look at the suppliers the guys have already mentioned in terms of having enough hydrogen in the first place, then we've got to distribute it. How do we distribute it, particularly in this early emerging section of the sector, before we have all the pipelines in place, or the European hydrogen backbone infrastructure that's to be developed over the coming years. How do we store all the hydrogen? Because clearly we can't produce and use it simultaneously. That's a whole purpose of hydrogen being an energy vector. And then, of course, we've got to deploy them in NG solutions. So the technology, as the guys have mentioned, are all being developed and at a different pace for each so we have the challenges in mobility, we have challenges in industrial use applications, and we have written challenges in resilience and across the energy networks that need to be deployed, but they're all being worked on at all different places in all different countries at the same time. So it's fantastic challenges and fantastic opportunities at the same time that we're able to embrace as part of our net zero future.

11:55

Davion Ford

Great. So Brett, hydrogen is not without its critics, and I'd like to discuss some two common criticisms that I've heard, the first being the claim that hydrogen is unsafe and it's dangerous, and the other, that it can't be scaled up in a way that it will significantly contribute to the energy transition. What's your reaction to those critiques?

12:17

Brett Ryan

Yeah thanks, Davion. These questions do come up very often, and we absolutely have to tackle them. The first claim around hydrogen being unsafe and dangerous, let's be honest, hydrogen is, of course, a flammable substance, but so are the majority of the energy sources that we currently use in the energy mix around the world at the moment. Hydrogen has been used safely in industry for over a century. Famously, it's been used as part of the NASA program for decades, and what we're now talking about is potentially using hydrogen in new areas of society where it hasn't been used before. And so of course, we need to be focusing on safety as a priority to make sure that we are decarbonizing our economy in a safe and sustainable way. Now, someone put it to me recently, did the sinking of the Titanic cause the demise of the shipping or the cruise liner in industry when we hear about the Hindenburg? Of course it didn't, but there is an onus on industry to learn the lessons and share them as widely and as quickly as possible. And here in the UK, where we have a really enviable safety regime that requires thorough and robust risk assessment and management, and that's delivered incredible improvement in the level of safety across all industrial activities. On the second point around the challenge around, can hydrogen scale? Absolutely it can. Now the UK was probably the first mover in the world to deploy the industrial cluster model that's really going to show that low carbon hydrogen can be deployed at scale and at pace, and also, again, focusing here in the UK, we've got significant targets for the deployment of renewable electricity generation assets, especially out in the out in the North Sea. And with that, brings incredible opportunities to bring electrolytic hydrogen into the energy system, but underpinning all of this is access to transport and storage infrastructure, and we'll talk more about that. I'm sure.

14:32

Paul Aspinall

Absolutely, the emerging hydrogen industry must be, the safety record must be absolutely paramount, and we must be 100% rigorously holding this to account, to make sure that everything we do is safe. And there are programs, there are international programs, like the HySafe Program in action now to undertake exactly this, to make sure that everything that we do is equally safe, if not safer, than the current fossil fuel solutions that we've got. So we take the High Tunnel Program, any mobility vehicle that is to go through tunnels, the whole premise is that that is undertaken equally as safe as any fossil fuel vehicle that is taken through a tunnel confined space, in the same way that it's going to be more safe to undertake a hydrogen vehicle to do so. So these programs are in place to achieve just that and make sure that the industry is rolled out in a safe manner. And if we, if we take the properties of hydrogen as well, because it's such a light molecule, it actually disperses upwards. So arguably, in a number of cases, if you look at the use of that, the hydrogen and its location of its use, it can arguably be safer in its deployment. So I think you're going to look at the specific use case of each field, not just hydrogen, any fuel, any energy source. You take electricity, you take any energy source at all. It needs to be deployed in its only unique scenario, in a safe manner. And that's across the board. I suppose, to the second point, can it be scaled up? As Brett says, absolutely it can. And you look at each individual use case on its merit, there are arguments to scale it up into various sectors ahead of others. And I think that'll also be determined by the actual industry uptake as well, in terms of the supply and demand for consumer uptake as well. So the consumer may well determine deployment of how we achieve net zero in certain industries, the aviation industries obviously starting to embrace that, and we've seen two hydrogen flights already. So will that be part of the equation? Absolutely will be. But there will be other fuels as well that are going to be central to that net zero future. So there are going to be in multiple ways that scaling of net zero, there's no one silver bullet, will have a number of energy vectors, and hydrogen will be scaled to support the necessary vector of that industry.

16:52

Artiom Loginov

Safety aligns at the core of our manufacturing. And again, as OEM on the electrolyzers, I can share a few details about what we really care while producing electrolyzers and how we produce them. Safety lies at the core of the design of the electrolysis. So our equipment is equipped with a lot of sensors, for example, the heat sensors, smoke sensors, oxygen sensors and hydrogen sensors. It allows us to prevent the leakage in the wrong way, for example, mixing of hydrogen and oxygen, which makes it extremely inflammable. Whenever the mix is above some threshold, our equipment will automatically shut down. And while deploying our equipment, while commissioning, we have very strict safety procedures. We have HAZOPs in place. We assess, we test, factory test acceptance, site test acceptance. So we really are very careful about safety. And I guess that hydrogen is at least as safe as fossil fuels in terms of production hydrogen, when we speak about hydrogen scale up, this is currently a challenge, and energy transition is always a challenge, especially it's a big scale we're speaking about worldwide. So is it possible? Definitely it's possible. I don't think the question is whether it's possible. Another question is when and how it will become possible, how we will transition there. So from our perspective, what we see to produce hydrogen, what you need, you need water and you need power, electricity if we speak about hydrogen produced via electrolysis. Some countries have more resources in water, in power, some not. So it will require, definitely a little bit of a shift in terms of transportation of hydrogen, and this is what we see, for example in Canada. Canada is abundant in water. We have, we can produce electricity. And you see a lot of projects emerging on the eastern part of Canada, where hydrogen will be produced because of the abundance of those resources. And it will be exported. It will be exported to Europe, to Germany, elsewhere, in form of ammonia, in other forms. So this probably will be the biggest challenge for us, how to create a special infrastructure, how to produce weather on site, how to transport hydrogen. But a lot of efforts is taking in this way, and we look very positively on the on the prospects of this endeavor.

19:26

Davion Ford

So Paul, infrastructure is one of the major obstacles standing in the way of widespread adoption of hydrogen. Our cities, for instance, have really been built to be powered by fossil fuels. So what needs to happen to change this? And is it even feasible?

19:41

Paul Aspinall

It's absolutely feasible, and it's already underway. We're blessed, particularly in the UK and across Europe, with an existing below-ground gas infrastructure that can be fully repurposed. And that project in the UK school project union, and we're repurposing a lot of the gas pipework across Europe for European hydrogen backbone. So it's absolutely ideal to utilize that existing assets and repurpose that pipeline to initially blend 20% hydrogen into the network, and in time, 100% networks are being deployed in certain areas, such as HyNet in the northwest, to directly to industrial facilities. So it's less of an obstacle, it's an absolute opportunity and a way we can achieve that.

20:25

Brett Ryan

Yeah, Paul's absolutely right. The UK is actually doing incredibly well in this space in terms of looking at the innovation that's needed to either repurpose large sections of the of the gas grid or deploy new build infrastructure. And so we've got other projects that we can talk about, future grid, the LTS Futures, H100, they're looking at various aspects of the safety and reliability of that of hydrogen gas grid. And let's be honest, when we look at the reliability of the gas grid in the UK, the statistics are incredible in terms of its reliability. So if we can do that for hydrogen in the future, that would be an amazing achievement.

21:05

Davion Ford

So Brett, what strategies can cities implement to scale up hydrogen production and distribution for various applications, and in what ways do the private and public sectors need to collaborate in order to realize this?

21:18

Brett Ryan

So what are the key strategies that cities need to or cities should be looking to do, is aggregating demand, especially in these early days of the of the hydrogen economy. Yes, it is expensive at the moment, and especially so done at small scale. So looking at those opportunities to bring demand together across the different end-use cases is fundamental for helping the economies and also for proving the use and improving the public perception for the use of hydrogen. We know that the government has a key role in the early days in terms of providing subsidies, exactly as it did in the early days of wind and solar, but the private sector in industry is where the real innovation will come from. So there'll be innovation in not just technology, but also the market frameworks, contract arrangements, financing, all those sorts of things that are needed to help accelerate the deployment of hydrogen, other aspects of things like matchmaking supply and demand and even public procurement policies. Governments and local authorities are huge, or significantly huge, buyers of low-carbon hydrogen products, and they can help to de-risk a lot of these projects in the early days, and show investor confidence, or help deliver investor confidence in low carbon and hydrogen products of the future.

22:43

Paul Aspinall

We at Arcadis, we're already doing this. We're already helping support our clients, councils, local government, to scale up hydrogen solutions, basically through their supply and obtain that hydrogen, and certainly from an end-use and deploying hydrogen transport. So it's absolutely something that's already underway. Yes, it needs to scale further, but obviously, in this emerging market, there's more to be done. And then there's also the technology angle. Technology is constantly improving, and here's accelerated at the moment. And there's other technologies that are coming to market, such as energy from waste, technologies that will support and reduce that carbon intensity for hydrogen and alternative fuels to help that scalability.

23:25

Davion Ford

Paul, we talked a little bit earlier about safety, and it seems to me that part of the safety concerns that the public is going to have about hydrogen is really a lack of familiarity. I mean, at the end of the day, as was mentioned earlier, most fuel sources have a kind of inherent danger to them if they are mishandled. So what needs to happen in terms of stakeholder engagement and education to decrease concerns about the safe use of hydrogen?

23:53

Paul Aspinall

Yeah, stakeholder engagement and education is absolutely paramount to all this, and it's all a part about the upskilling and transitional skills of the sectors as a gas, hydrogen is just another gas in the predominant use of what hydrogen will be used for. There are other forms, of course, like liquid hydrogen, but that familiarity piece is so important. But we use gas, and those transitional skill sets of utilizing existing skills and bringing those trained personnel into this industry is going to be key, and then the more the general public sees the safe use of hydrogen being used in everyday applications that will become more normalized. And that's going to be part of the challenge for the sector.

24:33

Artiom Loginov

I think, to it to what Paul just said, time is important, because with time, you see how technology is safe, you understand the issues which arise, and you can correct that. And I think we have been quite lucky because since 2021 we have our PEM electrolyzer running in Bécancour, which makes it the largest PEM electrolyzer in the world, and which has accumulated the highest number of operational hours. 2022 is not that far away in the past, but we need to be very mindful that PEM technology, PEM stands for proton exchange membrane technology and we are pioneers in this field, and that technology is very, very recent. So having something run since 2021 makes it really big impact on the whole industry of PEM electrolysis.

25:18

Brett Ryan

Yeah, absolutely. Just to pick up my fellow panelists, seeing is believing is the best thing in this space, the public want to know that hydrogen is safe, and the best way to do that is to see it. We've got some incredible demonstrations happening here in the UK, including demonstrations in a home setting, but industrial settings are going to be key as well. And there are lessons that we can learn from the nuclear industry, where the public were originally in opposition to nuclear deployment, but after an education campaign so that they could actually understand the risks and the benefits, the public acceptance went up.

25:55

Davion Ford

Artiom, in your opinion, what are some of the most successful hydrogen projects that have positively impacted urban energy systems and also sustainability?

26:03

Artiom Loginov

Davion, this is a great question. I can cite our project in Enbridge in Markham, which is Canada, Ontario. So it used to be a joint venture between Enbridge, an energy company, and Cummins. We installed there our fuel cells and our electrolyzers. So basically, under the project, the facility could generate and consume hydrogen at the same time. Currently, what Enbridge does, they generate hydrogen and blend it into the natural gas infrastructure for the heating purposes, so it goes to the residential areas and already contributes to the decrease of CO2 emissions.

26:38

Davion Ford

So Paul, what's one thing that you see happening in the hydrogen industry that you believe needs to be replicated everywhere, and what's another thing that you think absolutely needs to stop now?

26:49

Paul Aspinall

Yes, it's a really good question. And clearly I don't think there's just one thing. I think there's going to, obviously be, have to be multiple things, from a hydrogen perspective, we clearly need and there's no point having generated hydrogen if we haven't got a solution to use it so, and that's across the hydrogen value chain, multiple things will need to happen in terms of, and I'll let Brett obviously talk about policy in more detail. But policy, I think is, and support from government is going to be key in terms of that one thing that helps make sure those multiple things can happen. One thing that would be good to stop and change the narrative is that obviously hydrogen has its detractors, which is fine, and that's when just the hydrogen industry to prove its worth as a safe and suitable energy vector to assist with achieving our net zero goals. However, whether detractors push the agenda as electrification versus hydrogen-type scenarios. This isn't the right message or behaviors to exhibit to reach net zero. We're going to need all those tools available to reach Net Zero, with hydrogen being one of those tools where we can electrify we absolutely should and where we can't, we're going to need alternative solutions, and we need to use the right decarbonization technology for the right application. And hydrogen is one of those tools to help replace fossil fuels and complement electrification, not compete with it.

28:05

Brett Ryan

Paul's absolutely right. Getting the right policy and subsidy framework is critical for getting the hydrogen sector to where we need it to be. In the UK, we have the industrial cluster model that's already starting to be replicated around the world, and our electrolytic hydrogen allocation round is following suit. If I look for something that's happening overseas that we should try and replicate here in the UK and other regions, is strategic investment in the infrastructure we mentioned earlier, the mature gas grids of the UK and Europe. It allows for the production of hydrogen at the lowest cost, at the place where it makes the most sense, and transporting it at the lowest cost to where it will be used. And that is not just an enabler, but a precursor for success for the hydrogen economy. And Paul's absolutely right. We've got to stop the electrification versus hydrogen debate. We need all of the tools available to us to reach Net Zero.