The Department of Energy (DOE) is working on a policy that will underpin investments as well as the development of hydrogen technology for application across multiple industries in the country – primarily the need for retrofit of some power generating facilities as well as energy storage systems.

“Prospective uses of hydrogen in the energy sector shall be divided into power generation and electricity storage applications and non-power applications,” a draft Circular of the department has stated.

On the sphere of power applications, the DOE emphasized that “power generation and electricity
storage shall include use of  electricity produced from hydrogen energy supplied to the grid or as backup and off-grid power supply, industrial scale energy storage, co-firing with hydrogen derivatives in existing fossil fuel power plants, and its derivatives  cogeneration systems.”

For the power sector, in particular, there are already industry players that have been lining up their generating assets for propounded retrofit or repurposing by using hydrogen as a co-firing fuel for the gas-fired plants.

In other markets, initial experiments with hydrogen had been strategically focused on more specific sectors – primarily in the petrochemicals industry and even with heavy transport systems as the cost of hydrogen production is still widely perceived to be very expensive.

Based on numbers being crunched by experts, the cost of hydrogen is still roughly five times higher compared to the gas fuel being used for electricity generation, hence, it is still not competitive to use it for full power applications.

As specified, the cost of the electrolyzer as the main technology being utilized for the production of hydrogen still needs to go down to a price point that will be affordable to consumers – and that is the main development being awaited before commercial rollout of hydrogen could be pursued across industries.

In the renewable energy sector of the Philippines, in particular, there is a plan to line up hydrogen as an energy storage coupling to offshore wind farm capacities once these blueprinted projects in the country’s renewable energy sector would already reach commercial operations phase.

As initially propounded by the DOE, that particular technology application shall be classified as “hydrogen energy storage system” or HESS; and it will be designed as “a technology that utilizes hydrogen gas to store energy for later use in power generation.”

And given that hydrogen is still at its very exploratory stage when it comes to technology utilization in the country’s energy sector, the initial step being advanced by the DOE is the creation of a Hydrogen Energy Industry Committee (HEIC) that will then serve as the lead body to “develop capacity building and research plan for hydrogen development in the energy sector.”

The mandate to the DOE-manned committee, is for it to pursue collaboration with international counterparts as well as work with other relevant government agencies, research institutions, private sector experts and the academe on the crafting of a hydrogen development roadmap for the Philippines.