As concern and even panic builds about global heating among hoi polloi, fossil fuel companies are inventing new ways to bamboozle the public. Subsidies for coal, but called instead "capacity payments"; touchy-feely advertising to distract from what they're actually still doing, i.e., ramping up production of oil, gas and coal; and glitzy new initiatives which sound green as, but are really just extensions to their business model, and will allow/encourage emissions decades into the future.
One of these is the fabled "hydrogen economy" which starts out by being about green hydrogen (hydrogen made by the electrolysis of water using electricity from renewables) but morphs into "grey hydrogen" which is about hydrogen made from natural gas, with the CO2 produced being released into the atmosphere, because "grey hydrogen" is much cheaper than green hydrogen. To make this more palatable, the fossil fuel companies have concocted the idea of "blue hydrogen", which is grey hydrogen with the CO2 being pumped into underground storage. Of course, this ignores the cost (and energy cost!) of compressing the CO2 and then transporting it to where it is to be buried.
One Ozzie fossil fuel company shamefacedly admitted that their hydrogen breakthrough is really about grey hydrogen, which they call blue hydrogen because at some unspecified point in the future they'll start carbon capture and storage (CCS).
The video below, from Just Have A Think, shreds the case for grey and blue hydrogen.
A carbon tax would put paid to all these subterfuges, which is why, of course, fossil fuel companies are so adamantly opposed to it.
The other carbon boondoggle is the ammonia euphoria. I'll talk about that in another piece.
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