Kyoto In the search for the energy of the future, Japan set an early sign: In 2017, the country was the first industrial nation to present a national hydrogen strategy. It was a step that is now paying off. Green factories, fuel cell cars, hydrogen ocean freighters, small private generators for the home – five years later, many technologies have been developed and are ready for the market.
Germany is now learning from the pioneer, as Frank-Walter Steinmeier signaled on Thursday. The Federal President’s five-day trip through South Korea and Japan, he leaves no doubt about that, can also be seen as a “hydrogen mission”. With the help of cooperation with Japanese technology leaders, the energy transition should gain momentum. Experts see the radical move away from fossil fuels as mankind’s last chance to limit further global warming.
This Thursday, Steinmeier is visiting the world’s first production facility to be supplied with electricity from green hydrogen. The Japanese technology group Panasonic has equipped its fuel cell factory in Kyoto with a powerful solar system. Capacity: 570 kilowatts (kW). Next to it is a tank filled with 78,000 liters of deep-frozen hydrogen.
The green factory is an example of many large-scale products that Japanese companies are pushing into the world market. “At the moment we are approaching international companies,” says Panasonic manager Norihiko Kawamura. In the medium term, the group is pinning its hopes on Europe: “In the future, Europe will be a larger market than Japan.”
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But in Japan it is not only about the energy supply of large industrial plants. Toyota, for example, is already selling its second-generation Mirai fuel cell car and delivering buses with the same technology. Clean trucks, which years ago were dismissed as utopian, are in development. And Toyota Industries makes fuel cell forklifts, while shipyards are developing hydrogen-powered cargo ships.
>> Read also: German company starts fourth largest hydrogen project in the world
Panasonic is one of the technology leaders when it comes to the green energy transition. In 2009, the company launched a fuel cell for domestic use in Japan. The so-called Ene-Farm produces hydrogen from city gas and uses it to produce electricity and hot water for your home. In Germany, the group sells its technology through the boiler manufacturer Viessmann, with whom the Japanese have developed a fuel cell heating system for the German market.
The Japanese car manufacturer is already bringing the second generation of the fuel cell vehicle onto the market.
(Photo: Bloomberg via Getty Images)
In addition, Panasonic has developed a fuel cell for industrial applications that works with pure hydrogen. The current product has an output of five kW and can be scaled as required, 20 percent of the electricity requirement is covered by the sun.
From an entrepreneurial point of view, the system does not yet pay off given the high hydrogen prices, says Panasonic manager Kawamura. Nevertheless, the technology has great market opportunities. It is now a matter of installing the new technologies in order to gain experience with them in the coming years. “If you want to have factories that are powered by 100 percent renewable energy by 2030, you have to start the practical phase now.”
How Japan wants to implement hydrogen in shipping
Another company that is betting on hydrogen is the shipbuilder Tsuneishi. Together with the major Belgian shipping company CMB, the shipyard has developed the hydrogen ferry HydroBingo, which is currently transporting school groups in Tokyo Bay. The bow wave splashes as the captain accelerates the white catamaran to 23 knots while an engineer explains the technique in the passenger compartment.
It is an advanced diesel engine that can be mixed with hydrogen as a fuel. In extreme cases, almost only hydrogen is filled into the cylinder and then small amounts of diesel are injected to accelerate ignition. The on-board computer calculates the composition of the fuel mixture.
The Japanese freighter “Suiso Frontier L” is the world’s first ship specializing in the transport of liquid hydrogen. However, the country is currently also developing ships that are powered by hydrogen.
(Photo: imago images/Kyodo News)
This is a transition technique to the difficult decarbonisation of shipping. There are already purely electric ships, explains Yu Aonuma, Japan boss of the shipping company CMB and boss of JapanHydro, the operating company of the ferry. However, they only reached a speed of five to eight knots. This means that they are not suitable for sea areas with strong currents or ferry traffic, he says. “If your taxi only drove 20 km/h, they would be frustrated too.”
And so the two companies came together to combine CMB’s hydrogen technology and Tsuneishi’s experience in electric propulsion and shipbuilding. Hydrogen competes with ammonia for powering larger ships. Ammonia can be burned instead of diesel and requires smaller tanks than hydrogen.
Jun Kambara, head of the shipyard subsidiary Tsuneishi Facilities & Craft, explains which propulsion technology is best suited for which purpose: “Hydrogen is suitable for local transport, while ammonia, on the other hand, is too toxic to be used in passenger transport.” The chemical is therefore valid as a favorite for sea freight with ocean liners.
Competition with South Korea and China
Tsuneishi is developing both hydrogen and ammonia vessels to compete with shipyards in South Korea and China. These had pushed Japan’s shipbuilders out of world market leadership in the past few decades. “From now on we have to rely on high-tech to catch up again,” says Kambara.
But there are still unanswered questions: It is difficult enough to find enough hydrogen for the small ferry HydroBingo. It consumes 100 kilograms of the volatile gas per day, more than 20 times as much as a fuel cell car. But larger ships are already being planned at JapanHydro. “Our next goal is to develop a model eight times larger by 2026,” says CEO Aonuma. And he reveals that the company already has a prototype ship engine that runs solely on hydrogen.
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