It is widely accepted by countries that climate change is a major unmet problem. More and more countries are making plans for greenhouse gas abatement and drawing a road map for decarbonation to drive energy system transformation.
By developing a combination of renewable energy technologies, energy storage technologies, and smart grid technologies, a large number of terminal applications will be achieved in the next few decades through decarbonisation. As more countries advance the strategy of deep decarbonization, the green technology of electrolytic water production is expected to become the core of energy change and an important loop in the clean energy landscape. The International Renewable Energy Agency (Irena) states that to achieve the climate goal of controlling the magnitude of global warming to within 1.5 degrees C, the share of hydrogen energy in energy consumption should reach 12% by 2050.
In this context, the growing green hydrogen demand can be met only by vigorously promoting hydrogen production from electrolyzed water. The production of green hydrogen requires the use of renewable energy. By 2030, the global hydrogen production capacity for electrolyzed water should increase from the current value of about 0.5 to 350 GIW. To this end, the scale-up of hydrogen production plants for electrolyzed water needs to be substantially expanded to allow electrolyzed water production to play a key role in national economic decarbonization efforts. Currently, several countries have identified targets for the deployment of electrolytic water production plants in the hydrogen energy development strategy.
So called electrolytic water hydrogen production technology, is the production of hydrogen from water and electricity as raw materials, a set of chemical processes that have been well known by the industry. To promote hydrogen production from electrolyzed water on a large scale, it is crucial to reduce the cost of hydrogen production, and the reduction of cost needs to be achieved by constantly innovative technologies.
Irena notes that initiatives such as improvement of electrolysis units, improvement of economies of scale, replacement of scarce materials with common metals, and improvement of operational efficiency and flexibility are expected to reduce the cost of hydrogen production from electrolyzed water by 40% in the short term and by 80% in the long term. The problem of rapid decay is commonly encountered with electrolytic devices, therefore, related development efforts should focus on enhancing process efficiency and extending the life cycle of the technology as much as possible.