Tokyo. In the midst of a global campaign to save the environment and resources, Japan is exploring the prospects of Blue Hydrogen. in Japan, coal is now used to generate electricity. The Japanese government has agreed to construct 22 new coal-fired power plants using inexpensive Australian coal. It may be a financially sound decision, but it is unsuitable from an environmental one. Japan is presently under enormous pressure to abandon coal use. By 2010, nuclear power provided nearly a third of Japan’s electricity, with plans to increase production, Then followed the tsunami of 2011, which shut down all of Japan’s nuclear power plants. Even after ten years, the majority of them have closed, and there is strong opposition to reopening them.
Japan’s gas-powered power plants are under a lot of pressure instead of nuclear power plants. Instead of closing old coal plants and switching to renewable energy, Japan wants to shift to burning hydrogen or ammonia to meet its electricity needs
“Investments by power companies in coal-fired power plants will be meaningless without the value of their financial sheets,” said Tomas Kaberger, an energy policy researcher at Chalmers University in Sweden. It will also put the electricity companies in financial difficulty, followed by banks and pension funds. This is a difficult task for Japan.
What is the mechanism behind this procedure?
These plants may simply be changed to burn hydrogen or ammonia instead of carbon dioxide, which produces no CO2. As a result, it appears to be a viable option. However, the Japanese government’s aspirations are much broader. It aspires to be the first ‘hydrogen economy’ in the world.
However, where can hydrogen be found to meet the needs of Japan’s Zero Carbon Society in order to achieve this goal? Blue hydrogen is thought to be the solution. ‘Green Hydrogen’ can be made by extracting hydrogen from water using renewable energy, however it is quite expensive. Today, most hydrogen is produced from natural gas or even coal. It is inexpensive, yet it emits a significant amount of greenhouse gases. Controlling greenhouse gases and burying them in the ground, on the other hand, is known as ‘blue hydrogen.’ Japan is considering doing something similar.
In the state of Victoria, Japan and Australia initiated a collaborative effort to convert brown coal into hydrogen earlier this year. Hydrogen is liquefied to minus 253 degrees Celsius in this process. It is transported to Japan on a specially constructed ship. In this case, the question of what happens to the greenhouse gases released at the site also emerges.
Currently, they are discharged straight into the atmosphere, but Japan and Australia have stated that they will begin to trap and dump greenhouse gas emitted at the Latrobe Valley plant into the ocean floor off the coast in the future. This strategy has terrified many working on climate change. He claims that the technology for capturing and storing greenhouse gases is still in the early stages of development.
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