By Steve Goreham
Originally published in Washington Examiner.
World leaders promote hydrogen as a possible low-emissions fuel for transportation and industry. Nations have announced hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies to support development and supply of hydrogen. But will governments be able to create a new green hydrogen fuel industry?
When hydrogen burns, the only combustion product is water vapor. Net Zero advocates, such as the International Energy Agency (IEA), propose that green hydrogen be used as fuel in place of natural gas and coal in industry and transportation. But the problems with existing hydrogen technology are many.
For all practical purposes, a hydrogen fuel industry does not exist today. Ninety-five million tons of hydrogen are produced annually by steam methane reforming using natural gas or by coal gasification methods. But the vast majority of hydrogen is not used as fuel. It is used on-site as feedstock for industrial processes.
Chemical and refining industries, for example, use hydrogen to generate ammonia or methanol. The steel industry uses hydrogen as a reducing agent to produce direct reduced iron. Hydrogen feedstock made from natural gas or coal is inexpensive, with a cost as low as $1 per kilogram.
Instead of using natural gas or coal, hydrogen advocates propose to use wind and solar electricity to produce “green” hydrogen by electrolysis of water. They also propose to create a new hydrogen fuel industry and to ship hydrogen around the world through pipelines or ships. But hydrogen from electrolysis is very expensive to produce and very difficult to transport.
To produce a kilogram of hydrogen by electrolysis, electricity alone costs $3 to $6 per kilogram, resulting in a total cost of at least $5 per kilogram. This makes hydrogen from electrolysis more than five times as expensive as hydrogen made from natural gas or coal.
Nevertheless, nations are rushing to try to establish a leadership position in a new green hydrogen fuel industry. The Biden administration has awarded grants to firms to establish seven regional hubs to produce green hydrogen. Germany, India, and Japan have announced national strategies to produce and export hydrogen. Forty-one countries now have a green hydrogen strategy in place.
More than 280 billion in government subsidies have been announced to try to create a green hydrogen industry that, according to the IEA, totaled only a miniscule $1.4 billion in 2022. Advocates propose to use hydrogen fuel in heavy industry, transportation, and even homes.
Cement, chemicals, plastics, and steel industries are urged to use hydrogen fuel in furnaces and other energy-intensive processes. To date, these efforts have been experimental. Little green hydrogen exists to fuel these industries. In addition, the amount of electricity needed from wind and solar systems to drive electrolyzers to produce green hydrogen for heavy industry is huge.
It has been estimated that the incremental renewable electricity needed to produce hydrogen fuel just for the steel industry is larger than the world’s total current output of renewable electricity. The amount of renewable electricity needed to drive electrolyzers to produce hydrogen for the chemical industry is three times as large as what is needed for steel.
Hydrogen vehicle fleets remain tiny. In 2022, only 70,000 hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles operated across the world, compared to more than 30 million electric vehicles and about 1.5 billion gasoline or diesel light vehicles. Hydrogen fuel use is small but growing in niche markets, such buses, trains, and factory forklifts. But the performance of hydrogen vehicles is spotty.
California has a network of 65 hydrogen fueling stations, the only such network in the US. But after tens of millions of dollars in state subsidies, only about 12,000 hydrogen cars drive on California roads, less than one of every 1,000 vehicles. An ongoing hydrogen fuel shortage in southern California makes it hard to refuel vehicles. Hydrogen vehicle fuel remains more expensive than gasoline and hard to find.
Not only is green hydrogen expensive to produce, but hydrogen is difficult to transport. Hydrogen must be supercooled to -253degrees Celsius to liquify it, or it must be super-pressurized to 700 atmospheres, about 300 times the air pressure in your car tire. Even at 700 atmospheres of pressure, hydrogen at a filling station requires storage tanks with seven times the volume of gasoline to store the same energy.
Hydrogen pipeline networks do not exist and transporting hydrogen by ship is also very expensive. For the world to use hydrogen fuel, production, pipeline, and ship transport industries would all need to be established. This is unlikely to happen in most people’s lifetimes.
Some have even advocated the use of hydrogen for home heating. But hydrogen is nature’s smallest molecule, is prone to leaks, and will ignite with low levels of energy such as static electricity. Some years ago, lighting stuck our house, damaging appliances and causing a leak in our natural gas line. We soon smelled gas and were able to repair the leak without further damage. Had that been a hydrogen line, the leak would likely have exploded or burst into flame, destroying our house. Hydrogen lines to homes and gas stations involve dangerous safety risks.
Today, hydrogen is used on-site, but governments now want to create a new hydrogen fuel industry using market intervention, mandates, and massive subsidies. But physics and economics strongly oppose the development of a green hydrogen fuel industry. Get ready for a spectacular failure of these government-sponsored efforts.
Steve Goreham is a speaker on energy, the environment, and public policy and the author of the new bestselling book Green Breakdown: The Coming Renewable Energy Failure.
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For those who are interested, myManhattan Institute report on Green Hydrogen was published on Feb 1. Here is the link: https://manhattan.institute/article/green-hydrogen-a-multibillion-dollar-energy-boondoggle
From the Conclusion section of your paper: “……. Given these facts, the ineluctable conclusion is that all hydrogen-related subsidies are best abandoned. Instead, the focus should be on streamlining the process for licensing new nuclear plants—especially, small, modular ones—and investing in research and development efforts to reduce the cost of those nuclear plants. These plants will be scalable, will not require costly backup and storage, and can be sited near load centers, thus avoiding costly transmission system upgrades. Finally, in addition to producing emissions-free electricity, nuclear plants have the highest EROI values of any existing energy resource, a critical factor if the world’s increasing demand for energy is to be met cost-effectively.”
At the time the UAMPS Carbon Free Power Project (CFPP) was cancelled in November 2023, the NuScale SMR design was the furthest along the difficult pathway towards design, licensing, and factory production for the very first SMR to be installed in the US.
The utilities in the Utah-Idaho-Wyoming area served by UAMPS are under legislated dictates to substantially reduce their carbon footprints by 2045. The NuScale SMR design was intended to become a key enabler of the CFPP in that it would supply electricity 24/7/365 without being tied to the vagaries of the weather.
Three conditions had to be met for the CFPP to move forward. (1) The Department of Energy needed to maintain its support for the project; (2) NuScale and its contractor Fluor had to supply a reliable and accurate cost estimate for completion of the project; and (3) the project required 80% participation of the UAMPS member utilities.
The first and second requirements were met. But the UAMPS project was cancelled when 80% participation could not be obtained. Sharply rising capital cost was the problem, resulting in severe sticker shock among the utilities which were considering their participation.
The UAMPS member utilitiies are still under legislated dictate to greatly reduce their carbon emissions by 2045.
When asked by the Deseret News how they plan to go about achieving the necessary emission reductions, some of the utilities responded informally that it would be done with a combination of wind and solar backed by dispatchable power from gas plants burning green hydrogen.
The UAMPS member utilities haven’t got a clue how they are going to do this. But that’s their story and they are sticking to it.
1973 The Scientific American “The Hydrogen Economy” https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-hydrogen-economy/ We’ve come a long way! LOL
“When hydrogen burns, the only combustion product is water vapor.”
Isn’t water vapour the reason why Planet Earth is toasty warm? And isn’t it allegedly increased water vapour caused by CO2 ‘warming’ that is the magic ingredient for the global warming ‘tipping point’ to runaway planetary boiling?
So, how would removing one (alleged) cause of increased water vapour and replacing it with another solve the ‘problem’. Perhaps it different non-warming water vapour, like CO2 from biomass is different non-warming CO2.
It’s not easy to keep track.
When you burn fossil fuels you also generate H2O vapor. Methane aka natural gas generates 4 molecules of H2O vapor for every one of CO2. This is ignored Do they assume it condenses?
The Earth is quite cold outside of the tropics as far as life goes and still is in a 2.56 million-year ice age named the Quaternary Glaciation. Over 20 percent of the land is frozen either as permafrost or underneath glaciers. The ice age won’t end until all the natural ice melts.
According to the IEA, as of December 2023 annual production of hydrogen in announced projects could reach 38Mt by 2030 although 17Mt of this is at early stages of development and only 4% of this potential production has reached a final investment decision (FID)
Demand remains concentrated in industry and refining with less than 0.1% coming from new applications in heavy industry, transport and power generation. They expect the “vast majority” of hydrogen use in transport will remain in the road sector, but note that rail hydrogen trains are being trialled as are fuel cell ferries.They fail to mention that the hydrogen trains introduced to much fanfare in the state of Saxony in Germany in August 2022 were by August 2023 to be replaced by electric battery trains which “are cheaper to operate”
IEA ‘Global Hydrogen Review 2023’ (Revised version Dec 2023)
Speaking of cars that will never see mass production
https://www.foxnews.com/tech/sci-fi-solar-ev-never-needs-to-plug-in-for-recharge
A three wheeled, 2 seater with minimal luggage space.
Allegedly the car can go 1000 miles on a charge, and the built in solar panels are capable of gathering enough energy to drive the car 40 miles per day.
The article does not say if unicorn’s are included with each purchase.
“The article does not say if unicorn’s are included with each purchase.”
My unicorn breeding program is well on the way 😉
My one horned cow and my horse (well more like a pony, but whatever) spent all yesterday in the barn together. ! 😉
Just never park it in shade.
From the gassy bowels of the U.S. government:
“U.S. natural gas proved reserves have increased nearly every year since 2000.”
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/natural-gas/how-much-gas-is-left.php
Hydrogen already fuels every source of energy we use – it’s nature’s recipe. Put enough hydrogen in one place and gravity does the rest – compression, heating then fusion and soon you have a giant sustainable source of heat light and larger molecular elements. Conveniently much of that light striking the third planet out was eventually converted into living biomass which, over time became compressed sediments and eventually fossil fuels we can now dig up and use as needed. Seems an insult to nature to suggest we go back to the beginning and start over, not to mention a massive waste of time and resources.
A great dose of realism.
More wishful thinking from the same folks who hopped on the EV, solar and wind bandwagon. The fantasy is fizzling out and falling apart.