How It Works and Why We Need It? *Green Hydrogen, Ammonia and Steel* Certification Explained

How can you tell a green hydrogen molecule from a grey one? Or green steel, ammonia or any other green version of normally dirty commodities? If we're going to pay more for the green option, we need to be able to trust it's green.

Dr Jemma Green, Cofounder & Chairman, Powerledger, tells us how they use blockchain technology to ensure trust in these emerging commodity markets.

Bookmarks :
00:00 Intro
00:44 Green commodities' importance in the energy transition
02:02 Renewable energy certificates
02:49 Powerledger
03:24 What is the blockchain?
05:04 How can we trust green commodities are what they say?
06:43 How does the green certification scheme work?
09:44 Energy use from the blockchain
11:11 Proof of work vs proof of stake
12:52 Why hasn't Bitcoin gone green?

Thanks for watching the video Green Certification for Hydrogen Steel and Ammonia

[cadekachelmeier]

It seems like a carbon tax would be a lot simpler than a tracking system. It would tip the scales to green tech without having to keep the "green" things in separate bins.

[mrhickman]

Would definitely like to know more about "proof of stake" and "proof of authority".

[NetZeroTech]

7:40 "Trust is very important". I'd be excited to see the industry adopt certificates for green hydrogen. I'm just wondering if carbon prices (CO2 equivalent trading) would cover green hydrogen as well, so that a separate trading system for green hydrogen wouldn't be necessary. Great video. Thank you!

[paddyboy]

There have been international certification and certificate trading on so many things. The problems and challenges are pretty well understood.
And I don't see Blockchain replacing any of the mechanisms to validate that a commodity really is "green" to start with.
And how is Blockchain efficient and compared to what?

[ThatLEGGuy]

barely 6 min after publish and there is a dislike, bit rude,

[timmurphy]

People talk about blockchain a lot but it's not easy to understand how it delivers and what precisely it offers. I think it's rather a black box which we don't question a lot because it's "cool". At some point human effort is required - all the cryptography does is ensure that records aren't changed and that they were created by known people. It doesn't prove that those people are honest.

[dasautogt]

Yes! Green cryptocurrency episode would be great. 👍

[powerledger]

It was great to discuss green commodity markets and blockchain, thank you, Rosie!

[jonomacd]

Few questions I don't understand. While records on the ledger will be public and immutable how are those records added? If I create some green steel, how do I add my steel to the ledger and how is this addition protected from abuse?

Second, for electricity generation, the retirement of certificates is vital. Once that energy is sold, How is that retirement enforced?

[yuryalaverdyan]

Hi Rosie.
Thank you for ever interesting topics and really good level of penetration. I am really appreciative of your efforts. I do believe that the demand for green cryptocurrency is inevitable and actually imminent. Would you be able to dive into that anytime soon? Many thanks!

[justanotherguy]

Electrolysis can be used to enrich deuterium. Therefore I could imagine green hydrogen from water electrolysis and grey hydrogen from steam reforming using fossil gas may have different concentration of deuterium.
Also steel made using coal and steel made using hydrogen likely will have tiny differences in chemical composition or microscopic structure. Maybe some of these differences could be used to identify the origin steel.

[anwyl]

I don't think I understand how this system is trustless. How do you know that the only people getting the certificates are ones generating green energy? How do you tie the consumption to the certificate?

[DjChronokun]

in principle it seems like green certification for these commodities should be more robust than for electricity as the fungibility is greater

electricity is only fungible at a particular moment in time, yet sometimes green electricity is fraudulently 'funged' across different moments in time, selling fossil generated electricity as green even when the wind wasn't blowing and the sun wasn't shining, no hydro plants or geothermal or nuclear were online, etc. and no storage was discharging watts onto the grid

it would be nice if the energy storage potential of green hydrogen was utilized to guarantee that green electricity is actually being provided by green sources at all times by running fuel cells or gas turbines when necessary, and they aren't just selling lies (eg. NS in the Netherlands claiming their trains all run on wind power even though that's obviously bs)

[fishyerik]

As hydrogen is extremely demanding to store and transport it is very unlikely that green hydrogen becomes a competitive way to store and/or distribute energy except for niche cases. Green hydrogen is very unlikely to become a widely traded commodity. Unless you actually know it originates from some greenwash/PR-stunt you can just assume the hydrogen is "gray", now, and in the foreseeable future.

As process input, that's another story. Ore and iron, and ammonia is way easier to store than hydrogen, if production of things like iron and ammonia can be adapted to run based on the situation on the grid, green hydrogen might be able to become competitive. But even in those cases it's premature to build certification systems for the products, we're years and years from getting past demonstration scale production of iron and ammonia with hydrogen. The minute market share that production will have, probably the rest of this decade, can have specific dedicated use, the producers can list the up to a handful of products that the "green" iron or ammonia goes in to.

Also, it's not very "green" if the power used essentially is replaced by fossil fuel power, which is the case at least to some degree if you pull power from a grid that has fossil power generation.

Oh, but you can have off grid dedicated renewable power generation! Well, you can, but the cost of that has to be added to the overall production cost, and you'd have the issue of intermittency. As long as there's a substantial amount of fossil power generation in a grid, the most efficient way to reduce emissions is to connect more fossil free power generation to that grid, and when there's an excess of fossil free power generation start to replace fossil fuels in cases where it is more difficult to switch.

[tomstruct]

Powr the token is holding up very well during a mini crash in BTC this evening. Coinbase listing too. These are the types of tokens that should succeed.

[davidwilkie]

I'd like to see Andrew Forrest do some Research into Green Steel Production on the Minesite, before giving up the Assets he manages.

[mikeclarke]

Blockchain and green should never be used in the same sentence. This really needs to be explained more IMHO.

[richardmiller]

Generating hydrogen, distributing it, compressing and storing it in sufficient quantity is highly inefficient and energy intensive. Hydrogen would be used primarily at the ironmaking stage in the steelmaking process. Approximately 70% of embedded energy occurs at the ironmaking stage. Much better to remove the ironmaking process and concentrate on electrical based steelmaking i.e. scrap. It is more efficient to use "green" electricity to melt scrap than face the losses in a hydrogen based steel process. Australia exports around 3 million tonnes per year of scrap. That is where the answer lies, for Australia at least. I also question how we can operate at night and on low sunlight days.

[bknesheim]

I do not have the needed trust as long as the certificate generators are in it for the money. The cost of getting many of these green certificates are ridicules (food, clothes, etc)

[barryhamm]

Sadly when an extra dollar is to be made honesty frequently to get short changed.