The Dirty Secret Behind the Green Hydrogen Push

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Green hydrogen is increasingly touted as the silver bullet for global warming.

Billions have been invested into building infrastructure to eventually transition away from fossil fuels. But a recent hydrogen push has revealed that the effort may have a dirty secret.

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This piece has the right idea but completely misses the point of why green hydrogen is a terrible fuel. If you are building solar farms to make hydrogen, then liquefying and shipping it, then regasifying it and transporting it and then burning it, you've lost 80-90% of the energy you've started with. And whatever solar panels you've installed aren't actually displacing fossil fuels, they're just fueling this hydrogen waste machine. If instead you used the electricity from the solar panel, you're actually reducing emissions because that big coal power plant doesn't need to burn that incremental bit of coal.

The second and probably most important flaw is transporting the hydrogen. There is currently no demonstrated way of transporting hydrogen long distances. By the time a ship gets from the US to Japan with a liquefied hydrogen shipment, you've lost 50% of your extremely expensive cargo from boil-off. You could convert it to ammonia then reconvert it later, but that's also adding even more costs. And the cost of this isn't cheap - it's about 8 times as expensive as natural gas on an energy basis, so imagine your electricity bill going up by the same factor if your utility switched over.

Panzercow

Hydrogen has uses for making fertilizer, steel, explosives... but using it for home heating or driving a car is a waste, just use the green electricity directly.

zapfanzapfan

In 2022, the top five countries for crude oil production were:
United States: 14.7%
Saudi Arabia: 13.2%
Russia: 12.7%
Canada: 5.6%
Iraq: 5.5%

We see where this lobby is coming from.

bitthalsarangi

Green hydrogen has lots of use cases (fertilisers, manufacturing and etc.). But it is definetley not a solution for heating.

seldenkovs

"Same infrastructure" is a simple lie. If it's more than 15% hydrogen, you can't put it through an oil, water, or LNG pipe.
Hydrogen is a very special, very tricky, litle atom, and it needs very specialized piping.
Everywhere. All through your system.

TheDavidlloydjones

Sorry the problem in Redcar was heating homes using existing pipe and valves would probably resulted in many leaks and also large statistical chance of a major explosion, while showing the thermal value of hydrogen is about 1/6 that of methane.

johndinsdale

The effort oil, gas and coal puts in to not doing nuclear power is astonishing.

PaperAirplaneFactory

Cmon now Bloomy. The title is pretty misleading. "The dirty secrete behind blue hydrogen" is more like it.

cyrussummerlin

"green hydrogen" is in essence the same as "plastic recycling"

Killdozer

Dear Bloomberg Originals can you please interview french local authorities there are at least 10 of them) who encouraged by the government started to operate hydrogen fuelled busses. Now so more then 3 years later the have stopped using them for two reason price of H2 and the very high maintenance costs of their H2 storage units.

RAHellemans

No you don't burn hydrogen, use as fuel cell.

kongwee

They Stop selling cars new cars in California because there's no infrastructure for the hydrogen cars back to the drawing board

stevenvalvana

Green Hydrogen will never be a solution.

lloydsingline

Anyone smart enough to work on a project like this is also smart enough to know it’s a terrible idea. So why are they doing it? I think they are trying to create a consumable trap for drivers but we are smarter than that.

frankcoffey