Hydrogen: Why the hype?

Hydrogen has been called a “Swiss army knife” in the realm of alternative energy development, one that can be applied in many different industries and for many varied uses to reduce or eliminate carbon emissions. It’s a relatively clean fuel that could be used in hard-to-decarbonize sectors, particularly long-haul trucking, shipping and aviation, or in heavy industrial processes that require immense heat or electricity that today generally comes from fossil fuels like natural gas.

It can also be used to power up turbines in electric generating facilities as a replacement to fossil fuels, which supporters see as critical to offset the intermittency of solar, wind and batteries. Hydrogen can be stored for use when needed, allowing utilities to fire up a hydrogen-fueled power plant on demand for when the sun doesn’t shine, the wind doesn’t blow, and battery-storage systems are exhausted.

But the devil is in the details.

First, reducing or eliminating carbon emissions depends largely on how the hydrogen is produced. Electrolysis technology — which pulls hydrogen molecules out of water — can entirely eliminate CO2 from its production, assuming the electricity used to run the electrolyzer conversion process is powered by renewable resources like solar or wind.

But that’s still an expensive technology. Costs are declining and could fall a lot more as new innovation creates greater efficiencies, and as deployment expands and economies of scale kick in.

A lot more renewable energy, however, must also be built to power up electrolysis-based hydrogen production, adding significant challenges.

Today, nearly all hydrogen is produced with natural gas through a chemical process known as steam methane reform, or SMR, which pulls hydrogen molecules from methane. But that process emits substantial amounts of carbon, undercutting the gains from using the produced hydrogen in other industrial sectors.

To contain those emissions, producers plan to apply carbon capture and sequestration, or CCS, technology to trap the CO2 emitted and then transport it to deep underground facilities for long-term storage.

Many environmental groups, however, oppose that for various reasons. For one, CCS technology must still be proven effective in large-scale commercial projects for capturing most, if not all, of the carbon emitted in the facilities where it’s deployed. To date, no commercial CCS project has come even close to reaching the 95% capture rate that its promoters say they can achieve.

In addition, mining, compressing and transporting natural gas to hydrogen production facilities increases the overall greenhouse gas emissions in the hydrogen production process, given the excessive methane leakage that today plagues natural gas basins.

And then there’s the immense cost of pipeline construction to transport captured carbon to long-term storage facilities, plus public concern about potential environmental impacts on local communities from sequestering millions, if not billions, of tons of carbon for hundreds of years in underground geological formations.

Hydrogen and CCS supporters say those concerns are basically “engineering problems” that can by solved as those technologies are deployed.

And, assuming non-carbon emitting electrolysis is used — or industry does manage to contain virtually all emissions with CCS — the clean hydrogen that’s produced could immensely boost national and international efforts to achieve net-zero emissions by mid-century by applying that fuel in hard-to-decarbonize industries.