Hydrogen Brings New Hope to an Old Industry Titan

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Hydrogen Brings New Hope to an Old Industry Titan

Thyssenkrupp planning minority IPO of electrolyzer business that can be repurposed to serve production of potential wonder fuel

By Rochelle Toplensky
https://twitter.com/rtoplensky
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Jan. 13, 2022 1:11 pm ET

Spinning trendy green assets out of venerable industrial companies at high valuations is a strategy that often sounds better in theory than in practice. But Thyssenkrupp ’s promising hydrogen business could be an exception.

On Thursday, the German company best known for steel production gave investors a closer look at a 66%-owned joint venture long buried within its conglomerate structure: Uhde Chlorine Engineers, now rebranded as Thyssenkrupp Nucera. The unit has long been making chlorine electrolyzers, which generate hydrogen as a byproduct. A product redesign means its existing facilities can now crank out one gigawatt annually of green-hydrogen electrolyzers at competitive costs to be installed and serviced by its existing network.

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1. What on Earth is "One Gigawatt Annually?"

A gigawatt is a unit of power. Do the authors mean Gigawatt-year?

One gigawatt-year is 31.55 petajoules.

In 2020 world energy production fell - for the first time ever - from 613.0 exajoules to 589.1 exajoules, almost certainly attributed to Covid lockdowns. The IEA anticipates that world energy production will rise to 671 exajoules by 2030.

If the authors mean Gigawatt-year by this curious locution, this amounts to 53 millionths of the world energy supply. Further since hydrogen hype is about storing and thus losing energy, this isn't a good thing, especially in a country dependent on coal energy for electricity, which is what Germany is right now.

Captive hydrogen can be and in fact is useful but there is nothing, absolutely nothing, about hydrogen that makes it a "wonder fuel." Rather it has remained, for better than half a century, an exercise in fantasy hyped by weak thinkers of the Amory Lovins class of fools.

As a side product of electrolysis to produce chlorine and caustic soda, this has remained what it always has been, a minor source of hydrogen as a side product. There's nothing new about it. Almost all of the world's hydrogen, for all the hype and fantasy connected with so called "renewable energy" to which we've been forced to listen for half a century, is made by the reformation of dangerous natural gas and somewhat more rarely, by the reformation of coal.