Just when you thought the hydrogen economy zombie was dead and gone, it rises again, this time in color.
Yes, hydrogen comes in many colors these days: green, blue, gray and now white. No, these are not literal colors, but rather marketing tools designed to convince investors, policymakers (think: public subsidies), and the public (think: support of public subsidies) that the hydrogen economy is right around the corner and will be a key to addressing climate change. When burned, of course, hydrogen combines with oxygen to produce water. When manufactured, however, the process can produce a little or a lot of carbon dioxide depending how the manufacturing is done and whether fossil fuels are used as feedstocks.
Periodically, hydrogen advocates create a boomlet in media coverage to announce the coming of the hydrogen economy that never seems to arrive.
White hydrogen is the newest hydrogen media boomlet. It denotes hydrogen occurring naturally in reservoirs in the Earth’s crust as a free gas not combined with other elements. Its presence has been known for a long time. But no one believed the reservoirs were numerous enough or large enough to bother extracting. That thinking has changed, and there are now companies actively prospecting for underground hydrogen reservoirs.
The trouble is that even if white hydrogen turns out to be plentiful (which is a big if), it will be energy-intensive to extract, store and transport. In reservoirs hydrogen is often mixed with other gases from which it must be separated. And, it is also sometimes found dissolved in liquid and so must be extracted from the liquid after that liquid is pumped to the surface. What will the cost of getting at the pure hydrogen gas be? No one knows for sure because reservoir extraction has never been done on a large scale. Separating hydrogen from other gases would likely be done by liquefying the gases at very low temperatures and then distilling off each one. This is extremely energy-intensive.
Then there is the problem of storage and transport. As one analysis points out, it would take 14 tanker trucks of compressed or liquefied hydrogen to equal the energy content of one tanker of gasoline. And since hydrogen is the smallest molecule in the universe, it leaks from practically anything it is stored in.
There is little understanding of how much hydrogen would leak in a pipeline or tanker truck environment. Two scientists interviewed by Reuters suggested that leak rates of 10 percent over the life cycle of hydrogen (extraction, storage, transport and use) would negate any climate benefit because hydrogen gas “reduces the concentration of molecules that destroy the greenhouse gases already there [in the atmosphere], potentially contributing to global warming.” In short, the further a hydrogen reservoir is from the ultimate users of hydrogen, the greater the potential for leakage and therefore 1) the less likely its use would be a plus for climate stability and 2) the greater its energy requirement would be for compression and/or liquefaction.
For all these reasons, most of the hydrogen in use today is made on the site where it is used, mostly in the oil, chemical and fertilizer industries. And, the vast majority, 98 percent, is made from fossil fuels. This is so-called gray hydrogen. (The most common process for obtaining hydrogen from fossil fuels is called steam-methane reforming. For the uninitiated, the formula for the methane molecule is CH4. Methane is the major component of natural gas and thus is readily obtained and, at least for now, a relatively low-cost feedstock.)
So-called green hydrogen (currently under 1 percent of total supply) is generated using electricity from renewable energy sources to separate hydrogen from oxygen in water molecules through a process called electrolysis. Green hydrogen actually takes more energy to produce than is released when the hydrogen is burned. That makes green hydrogen an energy carrier, not an energy source.
Blue hydrogen must be placed right alongside “clean coal.” Like “clean coal” it involves a promise to sequester underground the carbon emissions from hydrogen made from fossil fuels. The carbon sequestration ploy is what an environmental writer I know calls the “delay and fail strategy.” The industry promises to perfect carbon sequestration over time. And, on the way to failing the industry builds a very profitable infrastructure spewing enormous carbon emissions into the air. When the jig is finally up, the industry can claim it tried. But investment that could have gone into cleaner alternatives has been squandered to enrich the fossil fuel industry and further entrench its hold on society.
Some sources are touting white hydrogen supplies as “virtually unlimited.” Whatever the supply may ultimately be, white hydrogen will be like every other underground resource, limited. There will be easy-to-get resources and these will come to be known as the “sweet spots.” And, there will be hard-to-get resources, generally too expensive to bother with. And the hard-to-get hydrogen will constitute the vast majority of resources identified.
What the hydrogen enthusiasts are counting on is the ignorance of the public and policymakers about the limits that will dictate hydrogen’s role in the energy economy. For now the enthusiasts seem to have the upper hand.
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There is no need to transport white hydrogen. That removes the only reasonable objection the author cites. Use that hydrogen where it is found.
First, use the energy in it to capture CO2 from the atmosphere. This would be a completely clean process. It removes the main objection to conventional CCS, that it requires a huge amount of energy, usually dirty, which mostly cancels the benefit of the operation. Or if the energy is clean, usally from the wind and sun, that the cost of getting that energy would far outweigh the benefit of using to capture CO2
We should use that clean energy to replace fossil fuels, not clean up after them. That is a far more effective way to reduce carbon pollution.
Second, use the energy in the hydrogen to dissociate the captured CO2. That would produce carbon, oxygen and water. The carbon might serve as a soil amendment, like biochar. In any case, we could safely store it for as long as the Earth exists, right where it is produced. We need the oxygen and the water.
This removes the other objections to conventional CCS, that it is not safe to transport CO2 as a gas or liquid, that there is no safe place to store it in either form, and that we could never afford the cost of these operations. Turn that CO2 back into its elements which we can handle and use and store safely. Carbon mining in reverse.
There is no question that we must not only stop burning fossil fuels, we must also start removing the excess CO2 from the atmosphere. Along come the experts who tell us that there is enough white hydrogen for both jobs. Naturally, those who don’t know any better call them fools.
Only the fossil fuel industry has the expertise and the technology to find and extract white hydrogen. Make that industry do the job for free, to pay for its sins.
Are you out there with your dowsing stick witching that buried hydrogen that’s just for white people? When you find it run into Blackrock and sell it.
Sigh. Even if your claims are technically accurate, the final line is politically inaccurate. “Make the fossil fuel industry”? The fossil fuel industries dictate to governments, not the other way around. They will do nothing that isn’t profitable.
But I smell a rat here. If there is all this wonderful clean hydrogen underground, how come they’re just finding it now? It’s not like the fossil fuel industry hasn’t been busy exploring and digging and drilling and sniffing. Seems more likely to me that all the hype about blue and green hydrogen isn’t working–knowledgeable people are getting the word out about the realities. So they need a new ruse to keep having the taxpayers foot the bill for their expensive extraction projects, and tolerate their continuation even as the consequences get ever more visible. So now it’s white hydrogen. They’ve already used black, grey, green, blue and pink. I guess we can still look forward to purple and red hydrogen, before they exhaust the color spectrum.
“If there is all this wonderful clean hydrogen underground, how come they’re just finding it now? It’s not like the fossil fuel industry hasn’t been busy exploring and digging and drilling and sniffing.”
In terms of area covered, their dominant form of exploration is by seismic/acoustic surveys, where they use thumpers and geophones to map out the substructures by their wave reflections. They don’t touch bit to dirt until they have high confidence the underlying geology is favorable. Typically, they’ll survey a large area and develop the most promising sites first, but however much they develop an area, even if not at all, they keep and scrupulously catalog all their maps–partly to keep track of where the second-grade sites are after they deplete the primaries, partly for extrapolation into areas they haven’t surveyed yet, partly just so they don’t waste money surveying areas they already did before, partly because these maps have value to other companies too, and partly, on the off-chance we will discover there is something worthwhile in all that data that we didn’t know to look for before. But because they have gotten very good at figuring out which few specific formations have the highest production potential, that means hardly any drilling goes on elsewhere. And some of the few hydrogen pockets we’ve stumbled upon were associated with formations that oil and gas companies definitely would have skipped, but they are also formations which are fairly common. That doesn’t mean that every such formation will have hydrogen, but it could easily be the case that there are huge reserves out there that we never found before because we were so good at selectively excluding those sites.
“So they need a new ruse to keep having the taxpayers foot the bill for their expensive extraction projects, and tolerate their continuation even as the consequences get ever more visible.”
A few of the oil/gas majors, Oxy in particular, are looking to get into direct air CO2 capture in a big way. Some that is to displace the CO2 pockets they currently mine for enhanced oil recovery, and some is so they can produce carbon credits to sell to others, but they are also interested in using captured CO2 as a feedstock for hydrocarbon synthetic fuels. But the other big feedstock they’d need for that is hydrogen, so the cheaper they can get the hydrogen, the better their chances of being able to make competitive synfuels.
This is how geologists have concluded it as well. We have gotten so good at finding fossil fuel sites that we end up missing a lot of otherwise areas that are candidates for hydrogen wells. Especially considering the current census is that h2 wells are found in a different rock formation from where fossil fuels typically would be found.
In fact, the biggest well discovered to date was discovered accidentally since they were looking for water. It was in Mali Africa and the purity is pretty high at 98% which isn’t energy intensive to separate as the writer suggests. I don’t also know why the writer is also too cynical on it being renewable when there’s been recent findings on the well in Africa actually increasing in flow rate, not decreasing, despite being exploited for more than a decade now to fully power and generate clean water for a nearby village. It isn’t reserves like fossil fuels as it’s always created when underground water (be it from the sea or springs) interacts with minerals like olivine, or through radiolysis or thermolysis. If I recall, there’s new discoveries in France as well just recently along with some in Japan and the US too, though the purity isn’t as high as the one in Africa they estimate that it can reach as high in deeper depths.
As for transport one can convert it to amonia so transportation isn’t an issue. Then convert it back on demand on sites that use them. It has a conversion penalty but it isn’t as big as one might think if you use a fuel cell generator on site for converting it since extraction isn’t really that expensive if you get to around 60% purity based on research on Africa’s wells.
An isolated neutron decays into a hydrogen atom with a half-life of 10.3 minutes.
There are heaps of neutrons around. We’ll never run out. Problem solved!
The magic wand owner gets all the royalties.