As the world decarbonises, hydrogen may have a big role to play as a way of turning renewable electricity into energy that can be sent abroad. Australia wants a stake. But the hydrogen on the Suiso won’t come from the sun – it will come from brown coal. Making it releases greenhouse gases. Most of the hydrogen Australia plans to produce in the near future will come from fossil-fuel sources. Tesla's Elon Musk - no fan of hydrogen Credit:AP Hydrogen is being promoted as a clean super fuel. But critics argue we have not actually proven we can make it cleanly or cheaply. Tesla’s Elon Musk calls it “bullshit”.

And there are questions about whether the demand from Seoul and Tokyo is real – or just another hydrogen bubble. The science, and the promise The Earth has a lot of hydrogen – oceans of it. With enough electricity, you can split that H2O into oxygen and hydrogen. Do that using renewable power, and there are no emissions. You have stored clean energy. Add oxygen back in and you get energy and water.

Scientists worked out how to do that a long time ago, and ever since have been dreaming of a hydrogen-fueled economy. General Motors built the first hydrogen car - the Electrovan - in 1966. By 2003, George Bush was announcing US$1.2 billion in funding to ensure America led the world in developing hydrogen cars. The Toyota Mirai - one of the hydrogen cars currently on the market, in Japan at least. That never happened. Technologies to compress the gas to make it economical failed. At the same time, lithium-ion battery technology dramatically improved – allowing Tesla to launch in 2003. You still cannot buy a road-legal hydrogen car in Australia. “It’s not price competitive at the moment. It’s expensive to do it,” says Dr Jessica Allen, an energy researcher at the University of Newcastle.

Dr Allen did her PhD in hydrogen a decade ago, just before the hydrogen bubble burst the first time. "When I finished, I was told ‘no one cares about hydrogen – so move on’,” she says. But now interest in the field is once again expanding. The technology has now matured, experts say, although it still costs too much. The hope now is widespread takeup of hydrogen will rapidly drive down prices – just as they have done for solar panels. And it’s easy to see why governments and scientists have remained excited. Toyota's Project Portal hydrogen fuel cell truck is now in trials. Credit:Dewhurst Photography (for Toyota)

Pound for pound, hydrogen is one of the best stores of energy we have. This makes it ideal for large vehicles that need to go long distances, like trucks, or trains, or replacing the crude marine diesel supertankers burn. Compared to batteries, hydrogen fuel cells can be large, powerful and lightweight. In the future, as the world starts to generate more and more renewable electricity, we will need ways of storing it and moving it around. “We will probably never be able to produce enough batteries to store that level of energy,” says Associate Professor Zhenguo Huang, lead hydrogen researcher at UTS in Sydney. “Think about the basic elements – we just don’t have that much manganese in the world.” Australia’s huge landscapes and beating-hot sun mean we’re ideally placed to build huge solar and wind farms needed to generate the electricity for hydrogen. A small, mountainous country like Japan is unlikely to ever be able to build the huge solar plants it would need to become fully powered by renewables. Australia's Chief Scientist Alan Finkel led the development of our national hydrogen strategy. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

“The ability to produce hydrogen in Australia at scale is probably unique,” says Dr Patrick Hartley, co-lead author of the CSIRO’s National Hydrogen Roadmap. Driving much of the hydrogen-hype are plans released by Japan in 2017 and South Korea in 2019 to rapidly ramp up hydrogen use. Australia wants to supply that hydrogen. Last year the federal government released Australia’s National Hydrogen Strategy, which sets out our path to becoming a hydrogen superpower. The Morrison government says it has invested $100 million in hydrogen projects so far. The strategy forecasts global demand of between 20 million and 230 million tonnes of hydrogen by 2050. Get things right, and hydrogen could contribute $11 billion a year to our GDP by then and generate about 7600 new jobs.

But there are questions about whether the big demand forecast from Japan and South Korea actually exists. Japan’s published hydrogen strategy only calls for 300,000 tonnes of hydrogen by 2030, with a future target of just 5 to 10 million tonnes – a long way short of the forecasts in Australia’s hydrogen strategy. If we were to capture 20 per cent of the 2030 market, the export value of our hydrogen would be about the same as the amount of cheese we export to the country every year, the Australia Institute claims. Shipping sunshine – or shipping coal? And most of that hydrogen won’t come from renewable energy. It will come from coal and gas.

At this stage, Australia simply does not have enough surplus renewable energy to make hydrogen on a large scale, says the CSIRO's Dr Hartley. “The amount of renewable energy you’re going to need to produce hydrogen at an industrial export scale is very, very large. The fossil fuel pathway (with carbon-capture) is probably nearer-term, so you can probably get there faster.” Hence a key part of the government’s strategy: a pilot project in the Latrobe Valley to turn coal into hydrogen. Could Victoria's brown coal spawn a hydrogen export industry? Credit:Justin McManus Three tonnes of hydrogen will be extracted from 160 tonnes of brown coal in the Latrobe Valley and then shipped to Japan aboard the Suiso Frontier.

If you mix coal with steam and oxygen, you can produce hydrogen – and greenhouse gases. As long as you capture the greenhouse gases, your project is carbon neutral. But several experts told The Age they were deeply sceptical carbon capture could be made to work economically. “Carbon capture has been one of the most unsuccessful investments the Australian government has ever made,” says Richie Merzian, director of the climate and energy program at progressive think tank the Australia Institute. A giant dredging machine at work in the brown coal mine at Loy Yang in the Latrobe Valley. Credit:John Woudstra “We have spent over $1.3 billion investing in it... with no commercial capture facility for coal, and one for gas – and that one has been riddled with issues.”