Green Hydrogen Transportation: Challenges & Alternatives

Looking into the main methods of transporting green hydrogen, and understanding the pros and cons of each method.

Here’s the blog posted by Mckinsey & Company which states how Hydrogen should be in the developing transportation technology and the challenges involved.

As per the blog, Hydrogen must be either in liquid form or transported into ammonia before it can be transported.

The challenges involved in transporting liquid hydrogen are:

1. It is costly, at least 10 times more than using ammonia
2. It needs to be cooled down to –252 degrees Celsius, which is the lowest boiling point of any element
3. Boil-off losses occur during transportation and storage
4. Specialized cryogenic storage and transportation infrastructure is required, which is still in early stages of development

Ammonia is a promising hydrogen carrier due to several key advantages:

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• It has a high hydrogen content by weight (17.65%) and can be liquefied at relatively mild conditions of 10 bar pressure or -33°C temperature
• It has an established global production, storage and transportation infrastructure already in place, with over 170 million tons produced annually
• Ammonia is cheaper to liquefy and transport than liquid hydrogen, with liquefaction requiring only 10-15% of the energy needed for hydrogen
• Existing ammonia pipelines, ships, and storage tanks can be used with minimal modifications

However, ammonia also has some drawbacks:

• It is toxic and corrosive, requiring special safety precautions and materials
• Additional steps are needed to extract pure hydrogen from ammonia at the destination
• The process of cracking ammonia to release hydrogen is still relatively new and energy-intensive

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