Of all of the green energy climate-scold schemes ever pushed, hydrogen - at least with current technology - may be one of the biggest boondoggles. Like many "green energy" schemes, it's wasteful, and it doesn't make good sense economically or scientifically.
When the proponents of hydrogen place their stakes in the use of unreliable, low-energy-density sources of energy for producing hydrogen, sources like solar and wind power, the whole thing starts looking even more wasteful. Where it has been tried, it has survived only with subsidies.
Places like Scotland. As it turns out, the biggest argument against hydrogen is economic. The excellent climate website ClimateRealism has a guest piece by Vijay Jayaraj that lays the whole thing out.
Fanciful dreams of green hydrogen powering the future have met reality. The cost of producing this much-hyped fuel will remain prohibitively high for decades to come, crushing hopes of its rapid adoption across industries.
Green hydrogen start-ups are shuttering operations, major projects are being shelved, and investors are retreating from what was once seen as the next frontier in “renewable” energy. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone whose attention to fundamentals has not been diverted by the extravagant claims of promoters.
I spent a year in Aberdeen, Scotland, a city that operates one of the world’s first hydrogen-powered double-decker bus fleets. The cost of a one-way ticket is among the highest in the country. It doesn’t take an economist to connect the exorbitant fares to the eye-popping energy costs of producing hydrogen, which priced out ordinary commuters. An Aberdeen family of four could travel cheaper in a cab than on the bus.
Welcome to the insane world of hydrogen.
Projects like this, we might note, are, in too many cases, driven not by science or economics but by ideology. Climate scolds demand government subsidies for "green" energy schemes, which rarely pan out the way the advocates claim they will. And when you compound them by using one low-quality source to produce yet another source, things rapidly go downhill.
Electrolysis remains an energy-intensive process. In some cases, producing hydrogen from wind and solar electricity and then using the gas to generate electricity for consumers results in a loss of 50% to 80% of the energy value. Add to this the energy required for compression, storage and transportation, and you have a fuel requiring massive amounts of expensive electricity to process.
Groups like the Sierra Club, who tout hydrogen as a green fuel, note that only "green" hydrogen meets their desires; that is, hydrogen produced by hydrolysis, using renewable energy - wind and solar.
Currently, more than 99 percent of the United States’s annual supply of hydrogen, about 10 million metric tons, comes almost entirely from fossil fuels through “steam methane reforming” (SMR), an energy-intensive process in which methane gas is broken down into hydrogen andcarbon dioxide. Hydrogen produced through SMR is a high-emissions product given the name “gray hydrogen.” In contrast, “green” hydrogen is produced by splitting water into its constituent hydrogen and oxygen components through electrolysis, which is powered by renewable energy. While industry touts hydrogen as a “clean” solution, globally only 0.02 percent of current hydrogen production is green.
The math just doesn't add up.
The very idea of using surplus renewable energy to generate hydrogen will turn out to be, on the whole, a mirage. It might make sense for an island grid, but not when it comes to a highly connected, continent-scale energy system. Here, the only thing that matters is to produce the cheapest green hydrogen possible, or you will be outcompeted by producers using the lowest-cost renewable electricity at high capacity factors, delivering via pipeline.
At present, around a fifth of (subsidized) European hydrogen projects are going under.
See Related: Hydrogen: Climate Cure-All or Just Another Boondoggle?
Gov't Research Lab Claims Practical Fusion Power by 2040 - How Will Climate Scolds React?
So what might change all this?
Hydrogen, as a tiny molecule - two atoms of hydrogen, each of which consists of one proton and one electron, the smallest molecule, and the smallest element - presents problems in storage and distribution, aside from the problems of production. These are technological challenges that, if you assign them to a team of competent engineers, you should be able to expect some kind of answer within a few months.
The economic problems are stickier. But in answer, the one thing that might - just might - make all this economically viable, we must go back to the same old well: Nuclear power.
Hydrogen produced using sources like wind and solar is not economically viable at the moment, and unless there is some major technological breakthrough in solar panels - or unless we cover much of the American Great Plains with windmills - it won't be viable any time soon. Hydrogen is produced already for a variety of industrial applications, but it is mostly produced as a by-product of fossil fuel refining, usually from methane. Nuclear power, on the other hand, as a high-energy-density source, may make hydrolyzation - the production of "green" hydrogen - more cost-efficient.
In these conditions, hydrogen may actually be a viable fuel for niche applications, like city buses. But as it stands, hydrogen generally requires subsidization - and if it can't survive in the open market, it shouldn't survive at all.
