Peter Malinauskas’ flagship hydrogen power generation plan has now been “deferred” - but for how long that may be, South Australians are still in the dark.
While it might be many years until the next naive politician proposes green hydrogen as the solution to cheap electricity, it is essential to understand the scientific laws and hurdles this project faced and that no amount of political spin could overcome.
This must serve as a cautionary warning so South Australia, with its relatively small tax base, doesn’t again spend hundreds of millions of dollars with nothing to show for it.
I graduated from the University of Adelaide with a degree in physics and also a degree in electrical and electronic engineering, so I understand the laws of thermodynamics and conservation of energy act as the detonator, igniting the Government’s green hydrogen electricity scheme into a hydrogen bomb.
In its most basic form, Peter Malinuaskas’ so-called “Hydrogen Jobs Plan” relied on converting electricity to hydrogen and then back to electricity.
Hydrogen was to be produced by electrolysing water using a 250MWe bank of alkaline electrolysers, an energy-intensive method with a current efficiency of about 66%. This means that only two-thirds of the electrical energy used is stored in the hydrogen, resulting in a one-third energy loss during the process.
Approximately 5 tonnes of hydrogen are generated hourly by the 250MWe electrolysers and would be stored in a custom-built 100-tonne storage facility, later used to power a turbine for electricity production.
The State Government has ordered 200MW of GE LM6000VELOX turbines – effectively jet engines.
These turbines are energy hungry, requiring 15 tonnes of hydrogen per hour to produce the 200MW of electricity, only transferring 40% of the energy stored in the hydrogen back to electricity, with the remaining energy lost to mostly heat and noise.
Therefore, the overall efficiency of converting electricity to hydrogen and then back to electricity is about 26%, as 66% of the initial electrical energy is stored in hydrogen, and only 40% of this hydrogen energy is converted back to electricity.
In other words, it takes close to 4 units of electricity to create one unit of green hydrogen electricity. Compare this to batteries that have an efficiency of 90%.
The time to generate the vast quantities of hydrogen is another barrier, as the 250MW electrolysers require three hours, totalling 750MW, to produce the 15 tonnes of hydrogen needed for the LM6000 turbine to generate 200MW of electricity in one hour, reinforcing the energy efficiency of 26%.
There are other parts of the process such as desalination and purification of the water that also consume electricity and consequently reduce the efficiency further.
Staggeringly, the original plan by Peter Malinauskas was for the storage to be liquid hydrogen – refrigerated to at least -240 degrees Celsius in Whyalla! - that would have made an inefficient system drastically worse.
Another major issue with the Government’s plan was an insufficient amount of hydrogen storage of 100 tonnes. The LM6000VELOX gobbles up 15 tonnes of hydrogen per hour when running at a full capacity of 200MW.
In a wind and solar drought there would only be enough hydrogen to fuel the turbines for 6 ½ hours before they ran out. The turbines would then have to run on natural gas, which was never mentioned in the original policy, or have to stop completely.
This process is a very inefficient way to produce electricity at industrial scale, and the more inefficient an electricity system is, the costlier it is to supply energy to households and business.
These scientific and technical barriers are why major private companies are walking away and no longer seriously looking to use green hydrogen to generate commercial electricity.
No wonder Peter Malinauskas started changing the narrative that their hydrogen plan was about green steel. Even though this was never a core focus of their plan when it was first announced, rating only one mention in their 20-page policy document.
As recently as March 2024 it was still about electricity generation with Peter Malinauskas stating, “We've got our own customer for the hydrogen we produce and that will be the power plant itself". But now we have the Government using the very major crisis at the Whyalla Steelworks to back away from their hydrogen promise.
In the future when a career politician such as Peter Malinauskas or Anthony Albanese come promising a rebrand of this green hydrogen hoax, South Australians would be well advised to ask them how their plan stacks up against the laws of thermodynamics.
