Short Term Trading Week Starting: 5 November 2018, page-29

Hydrogen has been slow to get traction up until the last few years in terms of transportation or energy transfer. It is however a very well established industrial gas which is used in fertiliser production, methanol production, petroleum refining and many other industrial applications. This existing market of $150 billion is expected to grow to $2.5 trillion by 2050. Billions are now being spent on its development worldwide by govts and multinationals as an energy carrier of the future.

The problem with hydrogen however is that 95% of it is produced today from a process called steam methane reformation (SMR). For every ton of hydrogen produced via this method you get several tons of carbon dioxide. The current alternative is to produce it via electrolysis however this costs several times more than SMR so the economics don’t really stack up against other energy forms.

Hazer have stated that their goal is to halve the cost of producing hydrogen and their process has the potential to go carbon negative. The carbon byproduct being graphite means that would be emissions are captured as solid carbon in a valuable form.