Delivering on the Hydrogen Challenge
Equilibrion is an ambitious consultancy and project development company set up to deliver projects that utilise nuclear energy to decarbonise heating, transport and industry. Nuclear energy can deliver mass scale low carbon hydrogen to current and future markets, our business enables projects that turn this vision into reality.
We deliver projects that enable our customers to understand the integration of nuclear energy to support decarbonisation challenges at national, regional, local and individual business levels including strategic, technical, economic, regulatory, socioeconomic and commercial aspects. This includes how nuclear can provide efficient hydrogen production, high-temperature heat, firm and flexible electricity and cost-effective low-grade heat for a wide range of applications crucial to mitigating climate change.
The Climate Change Committee’s (CCC) Sixth Carbon Budget Balanced Pathway forecasts demand for 225TWh of low-carbon hydrogen in 2050, that’s a massive amount of energy, enough hydrogen to heat approximately 19 million homes across the UK each year. Delivering this from renewables-based hydrogen would require approximately 75 GW of renewable generating capacity by 2050, equivalent to the capacity of the UK’s entire current electricity grid. Yet there is an opportunity to go further by utilising nuclear heat and electricity to generate hydrogen at greater capacity and efficiency.
Current analysis for most Net Zero scenario modelling fails to fully consider the range of technologies that can generate low carbon hydrogen, in particular skipping over the opportunity afforded by nuclear power to generate low carbon hydrogen at scale. Nuclear-enabled hydrogen is unique as it is able to deliver electrolytic hydrogen more efficiently than renewables as a result of heat integration for solid oxide electrolysis and has a capacity factor two to three times that of a typical renewable project. These factors are game-changing on both the performance of the plant but also the economics, ensuring assets are utilised to their fullest extent.
Today many people assume nuclear is slow to market and just there to provide baseload electricity. Developing and deploying nuclear energy to deliver into these markets would be a step change from that perception. It can help create the demand that spurs the cost reductions promised by the nuclear sector that many have written off as hot air. These reductions need a pipeline of multiple reactors to deliver on their promise, and as we’ve already seen the scale of demand could be a game changer, with multiple Hinkley Point C’s required to service even a proportion of the CCC estimates.
Next-generation reactors are set to go further and faster to deliver on this opportunity. Utilising factory manufacturing techniques, Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) and Advanced Modular Reactors (AMRs) operate at a scale that increases the range of deployment sites and reduces time to first energy generation. At Equilibrion, we believe that the marriage of hydrogen with nuclear will be critical to creating the future market for SMRs, whilst ultimately reducing the cost to the consumer of clean energy compared to other technologies.
But that isn’t the limit of the opportunity, nuclear energy has an incredibly small footprint compared to renewable technologies, requiring a vastly smaller amount of land to generate the same amount of energy. This means that when building nuclear, less habitat needs to be disturbed to deliver large-scale energy generation, both protecting our environment and delivering reliable energy at the same time.
The impact of these factors is profound. A 2022 Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) study outlines how the cost of hydrogen from nuclear energy with today’s technologies is competitive with renewable hydrogen generation. When considering the application of heat-assisted hydrogen production, this cost drops below that of renewables, dropping to as low as $2/kg H2 before realising cost reductions that can be achieved from factory manufacturing. Some estimates demonstrate a path to reducing this figure further to less than $1/kg H2.
For the UK, this is a golden opportunity. Current government policy puts us in a global leading position to be able to capitalise on the nuclear-enabled hydrogen opportunity, recognising fully the role that nuclear energy can play in decarbonising a wide range of sectors, with specific nuclear technologies already identified in the UK Hydrogen Strategy.
So if you want to understand more about how nuclear energy and large-scale low-carbon energy generation can make a difference to Net Zero, do get in touch. Everyone here at Equilibrion will be delighted to work with you to understand and realise this unique opportunity.
Allan Simpson, Chief Technologist, Equilibrion