Europe's ludicrous hydrogen bet

Europe's betting big on hydrogen – despite a lot of drawbacks. Is the continent's hydrogen strategy overblown? And if so…why?

#planeta #hydrogen #europeanunion

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Credits:  
Reporter: Malte Rohwer-Kahlmann
Video Editor: Frederik Willmann
Supervising Editor: Michael Trobridge, Kiyo Dörrer
Factcheck: Alexander Paquet
Thumbnail: Em Chabridon

Special thanks to: Belén Balanyá, Thierry Bros and Robert Rozansky for insightful background interviews.

Read more: 
Hydrogen infrastructure buildout:

Clean Hydrogen Monitor 2023:

EU hydrogen strategy (2020):

Hydrogen lobby:

Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:56 EU's hydrogen plans
03:16 Reality check
04:25 It isn't the best solution
06:19 It isn't so easy
08:40 It isn't available (yet)
10:30 Lobbying galore
12:33 Conclusion

[DWPlanetA]

Do you think it's the right move to focus on hydrogen big time?

[creedreaming]

Wait what?! A CDU-lead European Commission is prone to lobbying?! Never thought that was possible :o /s

[tommclean]

I like the champagne metaphor: expensive and only for special occasions. Michael Liebreich also has a good description: H2 is like a Swiss army knife but you only use a Swiss army knife when the tool you actually need is not available. His hydrogen ladder is handy too.

[LouisChen-whfi]

I am not European. I am actually an Australian. I also see a lot of parallels in this video. Fossil companies have a big say in energy strategy and often just end up serving its own interest. What a pity that bureaucrats just get pulled along for the ride.

[capoeirastronaut]

You miss the biggest factors: steel production, & cement. Together 7% of emissions. And they need hydrogen to decarbonise.

[zapfanzapfan]

Hydrogen is important for fertilizer and explosives (today the ammonia used is made with natural gas), steel is another use (replacing coke made from coal). Using it for cars or home heating is just a waste of time. EVs, home batteries, heat pumps and thermal storage is much more efficient.

[philiptaylor]

This is a well presented and objective review of this subject. I like the quote about hydrogen being the “champagne” of renewables, great but not for every day.

[richdobbs]

The realistic use of green hydrogen is for cases where it is directly useful - ammonia fertilizer production, desulfurization in oil refining, and non-coal based steel production. If you can't do it there, no point in considering it for transportation and heating usage.

[donnairn]

Hydrogen production uses too much electricity to be used as an energy source.
Fertiliser or steel production may be sensible

[kierank]

Hydrogen is the last piece of the puzzle
We need to max out the electricity infrastructure, and create electric hydrogen only on demand, where current fossil hydrogen is manufactured/used

Hydrogen transportation is one of the most ridiculous idea ever

[Menelvagorothar]

So, Hydrogen is hugely important, but there are a lot of false dilemmas in the debates. With a grid full of renewables, we will need seasonal and long-duration energy storage within our electric grids. Battery systems are turning out to be very good for leveling out the day-to-day fluctuations, however the winter-summer cycle has to be solved too in order to fully decarbonize. Most energy storage technology reviews I found cite just two possible technologies to achieve this: hydrogen and compressed air energy storage systems. The problem with hydrogen is its long duration storage, which is currently a topic of scientific reaserch, salt rock caverns and lined rock caverns being the main proposed solutions - both would allow to store hydrogen for long periods efficiently. The curent cryogenic refrigeration methods require just too much energy and make the whole process highy inefficient. Plus research is being led for the increase of efficicency of electrolisers, plus gas turbines soley used for hydrogen are being developed. Hydrogen is of course very inefficent for having a very widespread use (like for cars or heating), but is essential in order to achieve long-duration energy storage. Without that, Europe will have to continue to burn natural gas in the winters and full decarbonization will not be achieved. Also, hydrogen could be used to replace fossil fuels in some energy intensive industries that require very high temperatures, such that heat pumps just cannot provide - that's mostly concrete and steel manufacturing. All those resons are very good arguments to pour huge financial resources into hydrogen research, especially in order to achieve its efficient long duration storage in massive underground tanks or caverns, and to advance the efficency of electrolysers, fuel cells and hydrogen turbines.

[enriquellopisegea]

I feel like doesn't represent the whole picture of Hydrogen vs electricity, first and foremost because it is not Hydrogen vs electricity; it is Hydrogen AND electricity:

Electricity is easily transported but very inefficiently stored. Hydrogen is easily stored (relatively, pressurizing it is still a pain) but not very efficiently transported.

Things that are fixed to the ground or can have a connective line are better off using electricity (heaters, trains, industry, etc.)

Things that cannot be connected to ground and need to store energy on themselves are better off using hydrogen (cars, trucks and planes).

This last statement is solely dependent on how easy it is to produce and recycle batteries. If we consider the entire lifecycle (manufacturing, usage and recycling of it) of an EV against a regular combustion car it is probably a match, since a ton more energy has to be put into the manufacturing and the recycling of it. A hydrogen car would have the advantage of same manufacturing and recycling cost of a regular combustion car with no emissions during its useful lifespan.

Hopefully in a couple years time we'll achieve the solid state battery with non-hazardous, easily recyclable metals. That could make electric transportation on a mass scale possible. Up until then I won't support the EV transition.

[philipperapaccioli]

If only 0, 2% of hydrogen currently being consumed in Europe is green hydrogen, that is because it is far more expensive to produce than grey hydrogen.

Large industrial and energy groups and the EU are hiding behind green hydrogen so that no efforts are made to transition away from cheap fossil fuels.

No one will use green hydrogen unless they are forced to. We currently do not tax kerosene for commercial aviation even for domestic or European flights. We do not tax heavy oil used in international commercial shipping. We have always favored the cheapest energy source (Russian gas, coal for electrical production) regardless of the environmental impact.

Airlines are telling us, keep flying, tomorrow we'll be green, we will be flying on green hydrogen. Yet Boeing is not even studying the possibility of building a hydrogen plane and Airbus is only pretending to. The energy density of highly compressed, liquid cooled hydrogen is simply too low. According to IATA, ''Liquid hydrogen fuel has a lower volumetric density than kerosene. It is estimated that to complete a given mission, despite the aircraft requiring a lower mass of fuel, the space that this fuel would occupy would be around 4 times larger than that of kerosene''. Hydrogen also requires heavy pressurized tanks, and needs to be cooled to -280 degrees. Aviation was borne with kerosene, and will disappear when oil runs out.

Car companies are telling us to keep buying combustion engines promising that soon enough they will be burning clean e-fuels, when these are very expensive to manufacture, so will only be used in Formula 1.


So in 2030, we are to believe that our nice multi-national companies will have transitioned to expensive green hydrogen, but in the meantime, they'll keep using plenty of cheap fossil fuels if you don't mind. But it's a promise, at some point they will definitely transition to expensive green hydrogen, because capitalists care more about the environment than they care about their profits....

[kelzuya]

Hydrogen works great for things on fixed routes like trains, busses and cargo ships/ferries as once the destinations are piped it works fine. For cars that travel in ad-hoc directions to rural places etc. it is not great as getting the H there without pipes is inefficient.

[unconventionalideas]

Here in the US, it looks like hydrogen is largely being ignored in most parts. It seems like people are open to the idea, but that they are skeptical that it will work quickly enough. It seems like most people are looking at other things first.

[jaymacpherson]

Thanks DW for pointing out the limited applications of hydrogen.

[---ntmb]

What I fail to understand is why our politicians fall so easily prey to lobbying from industry? When I heard about 2 years ago that certain European countries were planning to pump hydrogen through old gas pipelines, that triggered a lot of questions in my small head. I googled and found a lot of information that seem to indicate that this wasn’t a very clever idea. So what do politicians do with their questions… possible answers A: they decide they are not intelligent enough to ask such questions, so they let it slide, B. they go down the corridor to the nearest big oil lobbyist and they tell them they are overthinking it, not to worry and the politician goes away happy, C. They ask them all the right questions, realise the lobbyists are playing loose and fast with the truth, the lobbyist realising they are on to them, offer to take them out for a very nice meal or some such and hey presto their worries about hydrogen melt away with a nice glass of wine and a steak….. obviously I am being flippant here. However we have wonderful educational institutions all over Europe, why don’t our politicians pay grants to these institutions (so they remain neutral) to research these topics and advise them, rather than always listening to very biased lobbyists. I don’t understand why we keep repeating the same mistakes, lobbying certainly in its current form is not compatible with democracy and seems to corrupt it. Would love if DW would do an investigation into why exactly our politicians fall so easily prey to lobbyists, what tactics they are using and why our politicians seem so unable to resist the stories they are being told.

[apollo]

We need a propper hydrogen infrastructure for ships and plains. Though there shouldnt be big hopes on implementing it in cars or home heating. Great Video

[erikottema]

In the Netherlands, we already have converted most of our gas grid to support hydrogen transport by applying coatings in the pipes

[JHawkins-jfbs]

If hydrogen gas escapes it has a GWP which is 80 times greater than CO2 due to reactions with methane in the upper atmosphere. Professor Steven Chu, who was previously a U.S. Secretary of Energy to Barack Obama, in a recent lecture to the Royal Academy of Engineering in the UK stated that it was best to carry out H2 electrolysis very near to the point of use, with electricity taken from the national grid. No leaks should be tolerated?