Hydrogen has been touted as the cure for many of the claimed ills of the climate scolds. It's clean; burning hydrogen as a fuel produces, primarily, water vapor. But there are problems, as is always the case with "green" energy schemes; it takes a lot of energy input to produce hydrogen, and it's notoriously difficult to package, transport, and dispense at the point of use. It can also be dangerous; I would refer you to the survivors of the Hindenberg if there were any.
As it turns out, there are other problems with hydrogen as a fuel - and those problems have to do with, yes, the very greenhouse gases that advocates for hydrogen claim to be avoiding.
One new study points out the "non-negligible" impact of hydrogen as a fuel.
Leaks from Hydrogen storage and pipelines will apparently slow down the destruction of atmospheric methane.
New climate chemistry model finds ‘non-negligible’ impacts of potential hydrogen fuel leakage
by Nancy W. Stauffer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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But while burning hydrogen won’t emit GHGs, any hydrogen that’s leaked from pipelines or storage or fueling facilities can indirectly cause climate change by affecting other compounds that are GHGs, including tropospheric ozone and methane, with methane impacts being the dominant effect. A much-cited 2022 modeling study analyzing hydrogen’s effects on chemical compounds in the atmosphere concluded that these climate impacts could be considerable.
Methane, we should note, is a greenhouse gas that has a much greater impact than CO2, and lacks the added benefit of being good for plants. Methane is naturally broken down in the upper atmosphere, but the mass adoption of hydrogen as a fuel could slow that process - and wouldn't that result in the very warming that climate scolds claim to be worried about?
Regardless of the process used to make the hydrogen, the fuel itself can threaten the climate. For widespread use, hydrogen will need to be transported, distributed, and stored—in short, there will be many opportunities for leakage.
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Here’s how that feedback works: As the hydrogen decreases the concentration of OH, the cleanup of methane slows down, so the methane concentration increases. However, that methane undergoes chemical reactions that can produce new OH radicals.
You may view the entire MIT study here.
See Related: Hydrogen: A Real Alternative to Gasoline or Electric for Cars and Trucks?
Is a Civil War Over Hydrocarbons Brewing Among the Climate Alarmists?
The danger, of course, isn't from hydrogen's much-touted clean exhaust, although we should note that water vapor is also a greenhouse gas. No, the trouble here lies in leakage, during production and transport, of gaseous hydrogen.
Good luck stopping hydrogen leaks. Hydrogen is literally the most leak prone substance on Earth, hydrogen molecules are so small they slip through cracks nothing else can escape. You can’t even reliably add odourants to hydrogen to make leaks more obvious – the smelly chemicals which are added to most gasses to provide early warning of leaks get trapped by in the pipe, the larger odourant molecules can’t pass through holes in pipes which freely pass hydrogen.
And of course, hydrogen leaks are a major safety hazard. When hydrogen leaks in quantity it almost instantly catches fire. Though utterly lethal, such fires are almost invisible, because hydrogen in free air burns so hot much of the energy is radiated as pale blue, purple and ultraviolet light.
There is a reason in industry you need a special license to handle industrial hydrogen – handling bulk hydrogen is crazy dangerous.
Handling "crazy dangerous" bulk hydrogen would be precisely what is required to implement its use as a fuel on any scale.
The only way hydrogen would have been practical in any case would be if it was produced using high-energy-density generation, like nuclear power, to run the process. Green energy advocates like to talk about producing hydrogen by the hydrolysis of water, but the truth is that most hydrogen is produced from, you guessed it, fossil fuels. In fact, over 95 percent of industrial hydrogen used today is extracted from gas and coal.
There's not really a good argument for converting much of the world's private auto and commercial vehicle fleets to hydrogen. Hydrogen, the evidence shows, is not only unsafe and impractical but also dangerous - bear in mind we haven't even speculated what might happen to a hydrogen fuel cell in a car during a major wreck. If it is "green" fleets of vehicles the climate scolds want, the only practical way to go about it at this point is electric vehicles, which aren't practical everywhere and for everybody, and nuclear power. That means building reactors, and plenty of them.
But hydrogen? The more we read about it, the more it seems like a cure that's worse than the disease.
