Plan Excludes Nuclear Power-based Hydrogen Production
The Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy announced on Sept. 30 that its hydrogen economy plan to be announced in November does not include nuclear power-based hydrogen production, that is, zero-carbon green hydrogen production based on water electrolysis.
The plan is likely to be based on LNG reforming and grey hydrogen resulting from petrochemical processing. This is an irony in that the future energy is to be derived from a fossil fuel and the price of LNG has surged since the outbreak of COVID-19.
According to experts, South Korea’s hydrogen economy ecosystem cannot be established without nuclear power, which is 70 percent cheaper than LNG and can be generated around the clock unlike renewable energy. These days, the United States, the United Kingdom and many others are expanding nuclear power-based green hydrogen production. South Korea, meanwhile, is going backwards for its obsession with nuclear power phase-out.
The plan is likely to revolve around imported hydrogen as well as grey hydrogen and LNG. Although it is said that green hydrogen can be produced using energy storage systems, the systems are extremely expensive and their energy conversion ratio is currently less than 10 percent.
“The cost of nuclear power-based hydrogen production is less than 50 percent of that of renewable energy-based hydrogen production and water electrolysis using ultra-high-temperature gas furnaces is also economically advantageous,” said professor Joo Han-kyu at the Department of Nuclear Engineering of Seoul National University, adding, “On the other hand, renewable energy-based hydrogen production leads to a considerable increase in production cost.” For the past three years, South Korea’s green hydrogen production was zero for this very reason. The country produced 1,978,632 tons of hydrogen last year and it is fossil fuel-based by-product hydrogen or extracted hydrogen.
In the meantime, South Korea’s LNG imports fluctuated for the past five years along with its nuclear power plant utilization, showing that green energy cannot be an alternative to nuclear power generation yet. Specifically, the imports almost doubled from US$12,169.98 million to US$23,188.91 million from 2016 to 2018, when the utilization dropped from 79.7 percent to 65.9 percent. In 2019, the imports fell to approximately US$20 billion with the utilization rebounding to 70.6 percent. Last year, the imports fell to about US$15.7 billion with the utilization rising to 75.3 percent.