Aug 2, 2023
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The push to sell “blue hydrogen” as a clean energy fuel — which experts have called a misleading rebrand of fossil fuels — hit another setback this month. Climate provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 are bringing new economic headwinds to the gas-derived hydrogen fuel’s prospects. However, many companies invested in the continued […]
Excerpt from this story from DeSmog Blog:
The push to sell “blue hydrogen” as a clean energy fuel — which experts have called a misleading rebrand of fossil fuels — hit another setback this month.
Climate provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 are bringing new economic headwinds to the gas-derived hydrogen fuel’s prospects. However, many companies invested in the continued existence of the natural gas industry are not giving up on the effort, presumably because blue hydrogen promises to extend the life of natural gas producers.
DeSmog has mapped for the first time the major U.S. players in the blue hydrogen sphere — and natural gas is a common denominator.
Blue hydrogen is the industry name for hydrogen, an energy carrier, that is created from natural gas but would theoretically employ carbon capture technology to prevent the resulting carbon dioxide emissions from entering the atmosphere. However, as DeSmog has previously reported, carbon capture has failed to work in blue hydrogen production facilities at rates that would qualify the hydrogen as “clean.”
Blue hydrogen’s supporters have argued that the world needs the gas-dependent fuel until it could scale up affordable clean hydrogen (known as “green hydrogen,” which uses renewable energy and does not produce any carbon dioxide or methane emissions).
It was a compelling financial argument, and in January 2021, when DeSmog first reported on efforts to establish a hydrogen economy in the United States, energy analysts were estimating that green hydrogen might take until 2040 to become economically competitive with gas-derived hydrogen.
That same month, Shell wrote on its website: “Whilst green hydrogen is the ideal aspiration for a low-carbon energy future, that technology has a number of years to go before it is of a competitive price range.”
Since then, those expectations have been completely upended by a combination of factors, including the rapidly falling cost of renewable electricity — which makes green hydrogen cheaper — and the sizable increase in the price of natural gas — which makes blue hydrogen costlier.
When the push for blue hydrogen began in 2020, the price of natural gas in the United States averaged $2.05 per million British thermal units (MMBtu). Now, it’s more than $9/MMBtu — a quadrupling in price. It’s clear now that not only is blue hydrogen not truly clean, but the economics don’t work. Even Shell has changed its tune: Earlier this month, the renewable energy publication Recharge reported that the oil company’s CEO said soaring gas prices mean blue hydrogen will not be able to compete economically with green hydrogen “for some while.”
The EU has ambitious plans for green hydrogen production and is going to support the increase in gigawatts of clean H2. A leaked draft of the European Commission’s eight-page hydrogen strategy document says it aims to make green hydrogen (the clean kind made using renewable energy) cost-competitive with grey hydrogen...
Excerpt from this story from DeSmog Blog:
New research predicts that green hydrogen — a clean fuel produced from water using renewables — will be comparable in cost and likely cheaper than blue hydrogen by 2030. This is much sooner than what the blue hydrogen industry is estimating when advocating for the natural gas-based fuel to be widely adopted — essentially eliminating the only viable argument to invest in blue hydrogen.
“The True Cost of Solar Hydrogen,” the report from a European research team led by the European Technology and Innovation Platform for Photovoltaics, was published September 7 in the journal Solar RRL and concludes that “during this decade, solar hydrogen will be globally a less expensive fuel compared with hydrogen produced from natural gas with CCS [blue hydrogen].” (CCS is carbon capture and storage.)
This is a much different scenario than the argument being made by supporters of blue hydrogen, such as the gas industry and others who are claiming that within a decade green hydrogen will still be at least double the cost of blue hydrogen.
While there is some question about how dirty blue hydrogen is and will be — due to its reliance on gas, a fossil fuel, and carbon capture technology to reduce emissions from its production — no one is arguing that it will ever be cleaner than green hydrogen. Green hydrogen is clean now, whereas blue hydrogen advocates promise that this fuel may be less dirty at some point in the future, but even then, will never have zero emissions.
HyNet Blue or Earth Green?
It made you wonder what reason they were choosing blue hydrogen for? Were they simply shifting the gained profits of a fuelling economy from one company to another? Their current choices certainly weren't prioritising the health of the planet or the sentient lives living on it. Blue hydrogen used natural gas and methane from these extractions was 80x more potent than CO2. Blue hydrogen leaked lots of methane and carbon capture was not nearly as efficient as their companies said. This spelt disaster for the good health of living organisms. HyNet’s blue hydrogen contract was simply bad for business. Only a green hydrogen supply reduced real-world climate impact to a necessary low level. He read a further excerpt from the report.
Blue hydrogen is only cleaner than oil if methane leakage is extremely well controlled and carbon capture works near-perfectly — conditions that are not typical today. In most real-world cases, blue hydrogen is only marginally cleaner than oil, and sometimes not cleaner at all.
If our goal is to be genuinely oil‑free, low‑carbon travel or infrastructure, green hydrogen is the only reliable hydrogen pathway.
A press report read:
The general public were not being given the full picture. They were being white washed. Marketing department literature was poisoning public perception in the same way oil industry executives had done before.
It was a green hydrogen supply or nothing. All other options were off the table.
Blue Hydrogen Market to Reach US$52 Billion in 2036
Read "Blue Hydrogen Market to Reach US$52 Billion in 2036" at: https://www.energycentral.com/energy-biz/post/blue-hydrogen-market-to-reach-us-52-billion-in-2036-rCcTFK6Zfb4EWPE
The Great Gas Con
The Great Gas Con: How Australia’s Fossil Fuel Giants Are Sabotaging Our Future Clean energy, they reckon. Transition fuel. Essential for our energy security. Bollocks. Call it what it actually is: the biggest corporate three-card trick in Australian history. And we keep falling for it like mugs at the Melbourne Cup. While the rest of the world races toward genuine emissions reduction,…
this is your ????? ly reminder that Hydrogen Fuel Cells are a scam made up by big oil
have a pawesome day