The Clear Hydrogen Future Coalition web site calls it an “Vitality Famous person,” and the Worldwide Vitality Company (IEA) calculated that demand for hydrogen has greater than tripled since 1975.
“There may be large pleasure across the globe,” stated Paula Gant, senior vp for technique and innovation at GTI, a company aiming to unlock the potential of pure gasoline and different vitality assets. “The second has arrived for hydrogen.”
However some urge warning, noting that the majority the hydrogen at present produced is derived from fossil fuels, particularly pure gasoline. And a research printed final yr discovered that, if these embodied emissions are thought-about, purportedly “clear,” hydrogen can even have a higher local weather influence than pure gasoline or oil.
“The environmental advantages of hydrogen are hotly debated proper now,” Johanna Neumann, the director of the Marketing campaign for 100% Renewable Vitality at Setting America, stated. “The satan is within the particulars.”
Listed here are some solutions to questions on hydrogen gas.
Table of Contents
What’s hydrogen and the way can it’s used?
Hydrogen infamously burst into the general public consciousness on Could 6, 1937, when the Hindenburg airship exploded. The ill-fated blimp was docking in New Jersey after a multiday journey from Germany. The explosion, captured on movie, killed 35 individuals.
Whereas inflatable airships are actually largely an antiquity, the flammable, mild gasoline has extra just lately been used as an vitality supply. That occurs in two major methods: Hydrogen might be burned, or combusted, much like pure gasoline or oil. It can be utilized in “gas cells,” the place hydrogen and oxygen combine in a response that creates electrical energy. And there’s a litany of each realized and proposed makes use of for hydrogen, from heating properties to powering airplanes.
What are the other ways to supply hydrogen?
In line with the IEA, hydrogen manufacturing depends “virtually solely” on fossil fuels, notably pure gasoline. The preferred manufacturing technique is called “steam methane reforming,” the place methane — which is the first element of pure gasoline — reacts with high-pressure steam to supply hydrogen, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide.
Hydrogen is often referred to on a coloration spectrum, and when produced from pure gasoline it’s often called “grey” hydrogen. There may be additionally “blue” hydrogen, which additionally makes use of pure gasoline, however the carbon dioxide that’s launched throughout the course of is, to various levels, captured as an alternative of emitted.
It’s additionally doable to make use of electrical energy to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen — ideally utilizing electrical energy from renewable sources. “On the colour spectrum, that’s inexperienced hydrogen,” Frank Wolak, president of the Gasoline Cell and Hydrogen Vitality Affiliation, defined.
There are a variety of different stops on the colour wheel as properly, similar to “brown” hydrogen, which comes from coal gasification, and “pink” hydrogen, which is produced when the electrical energy comes from nuclear energy. However, regardless of the nomenclature, the ensuing hydrogen is molecularly the identical.
Is hydrogen gas cost-effective?
The price of hydrogen in comparison with different vitality sources ranges significantly by location, Daryl Wilson, the chief director of the Hydrogen Council, stated. Whereas it could be approaching parity in some locations, in others it could nonetheless be far costlier than extra conventional alternate options. At pumps in California, as an illustration, the analyst firm S&P International Platts discovered that as of December 2021, hydrogen costs have been about twice that of diesel.
Inexperienced hydrogen additionally stays far costlier than hydrogen constituted of pure gasoline, stated Wilson, explaining that inexperienced hydrogen prices round $5 per kilogram, whereas blue hydrogen might be lower than $2 per kilogram. Whereas he sees that altering over time, he predicted that within the close to time period “there will likely be a big uptake in blue hydrogen.”
How climate-friendly and environment friendly is hydrogen?
The potential emissions financial savings from hydrogen is broadly a perform of the way it’s produced, the way it’s used and what vitality supply it’s changing.
With a hydrogen gas cell, the one emissions are water vapor. Greenhouse gasoline emissions are additionally comparatively low when hydrogen is burned, however there are different air pollution launched similar to nitrogen oxides, that are precursors to smog, Mark Jacobson, a professor of environmental engineering at Stanford College, stated.
As for manufacturing, inexperienced hydrogen usually ends in fewer planet-warming emissions than hydrogen produced from fossil fuels. However even that course of might be very vitality intensive, defined Neumann, with Setting America — far more so than utilizing renewable electrical energy immediately. “We might get extra decarbonization bang for the buck within the brief run through the use of renewables for different functions than to create hydrogen,” she stated.
Regardless of the embedded emissions, many international locations — together with the US — contemplate blue hydrogen to be a “clear” gas as properly, although manufacturing stays very restricted, and it’s unclear how efficient carbon seize expertise might be.
“I’d like to have carbon seize, however we don’t have the expertise as a result of we actually haven’t gotten to that time,” Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) instructed E&E Information final fall in regards to the expertise broadly. “And it’s so darn costly that it makes it virtually unimaginable.”
There may be additionally an effort to maneuver away from the colour scheme for classifying hydrogen towards extra particular measures of emissions. “The carbon depth is extremely variable, even throughout the similar expertise,” stated Zane McDonald, govt director of the just lately launched Open Hydrogen Initiative, a collaboration amongst GTI, the Vitality Division’s Nationwide Vitality Expertise Laboratory and S&P International Platts. Coverage choices, McDonald argued, require extra granular data, and the aim is to reach at a extra simple metric similar to kilograms of carbon dioxide per kilogram of hydrogen.
“Because the dialog round hydrogen matures,” he stated, “we see a necessity for a higher degree of transparency.”
Jacobson, nevertheless, hopes that initiative isn’t merely “a approach to justify using fossil fuels as a supply of hydrogen.” He’s the co-author of the research that discovered that when the complete manufacturing course of is taken under consideration, the “greenhouse gasoline footprint of blue hydrogen is greater than 20 p.c higher than burning pure gasoline or coal for warmth and a few 60 p.c higher than burning diesel oil for warmth.” That’s partially as a result of the carbon seize gear itself takes vitality to function.
Jacobson is amongst those that argue for a comparatively restricted use of hydrogen, similar to in sure industrial processes and long-distance heavy-duty automobiles or plane, that are all cussed areas to decarbonize in different methods.
Whereas hydrogen is one approach to retailer and transport renewable vitality, Thomas Longden, an environmental economist at Australian Nationwide College who has researched hydrogen emissions, stated that effectivity enhancements and electrification ought to be a better precedence than switching to hydrogen.
“If you should use electrical energy, there’s much less vitality loss,” stated Longden, additionally emphasizing that hydrogen ought to be reserved “for these tough to abate functions.” As Wolak put it, “you want hydrogen to decarbonize sectors that electrical energy can not attain.”
Who helps hydrogen fuels? Who’s in opposition to it?
The bipartisan infrastructure invoice that Congress handed final fall included $9.5 billion for the event of hydrogen. The majority of that cash — $8 billion — is aimed toward creating 4 regional manufacturing hubs throughout the nation for clear hydrogen.
The laws requires that one hub be positioned in Appalachia, and West Virginia has already shaped a working group to compete for that slot. “Clear hydrogen is a game-changing gas that we will produce proper right here at dwelling from our ample assets,” stated Manchin at a latest Senate Vitality and Pure Sources Committee listening to. That included pure gasoline, he stated. And, regardless of earlier reservations about carbon seize expertise, he added that it might be a part of the trail to making sure that “hydrogen is produced from all of those home sources within the cleanest manner doable.”
The Clear Hydrogen Future Coalition was “extraordinarily supportive” of the congressional funding. The group’s board consists of corporations similar to Shell, BP and Chevron, in addition to the American Fuel Affiliation commerce affiliation, amongst others. The coalition’s president, Shannon Angielski, is a principal at authorities relations agency Van Ness Feldman; the group spent at the least $100,000 in hydrogen-related lobbying in 2021, in keeping with disclosure types.
But others, together with members of Congress, see widespread use of hydrogen as a possible local weather risk.
“We should be attentive to the fact that not all hydrogen is clear and reject efforts to additional subsidize soiled hydrogen,” wrote 19 liberal members of Congress in a letter to Democratic management in October. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) tweeted: “Blue hydrogen has worse emissions than coal, locks in additional highly effective local weather destruction than what we’re doing now.”
Environmental advocacy organizations such because the Sierra Membership and the NRDC have additionally careworn a measured method to hydrogen. So have some scientists.
“Blue hydrogen is principally a smokescreen for extra air air pollution, mining [and] fossil gas use with hardly any carbon dioxide advantages,” Jacobson stated. “We must always solely use inexperienced hydrogen, and it ought to solely be used for sure functions.”