50 years of green hydrogen failure

 From Michael Liebreich.

It is over fifty years since Japan's "Sunshine Project" started governments pouring money into green hydrogen as a replacement for fossil fuels. How is it going? TLDR: not well.  That’s why it’s called the #HydrogenSoufflé.

I don’t even need to write a commentary - I’ll just leave you with five charts:

• We’re not producing green hydrogen (despite the investment
• We’re not buying hydrogen vehicles (despite the hype)
• We’re not buying hydrogen fork lift trucks (despite the rumours)
• We’re not buying hydrogen trucks (despite the hopes)
• We’re not buying hydrogen boilers (despite the grift)

Hydrogen is hard to store, because its small molecules can escape through metal and plastic molecules of its container.  It makes pipes brittle.  It needs to be chilled and compressed for storage, so there are energy costs/losses.  And in most cases, alternative technologies are cheaper and more effective.  For example, the round-trip efficiency of lithium-ion batteries for storage is much higher than electrolysing water and then using the hydrogen in a fuel cell.  For aircraft, the hydrogen has to be kept at  -253 C as a liquid or at 5,000 to 10,000 pounds/per square inch (350 - 700 bar, 1 bar equals one atmosphere).  Tricky.  It can be used to smelt steel, but that works best if the hydrolyser is close to the steel mill.  And as I've mentioned often before, if it is converted to methane by the Sabatier process, it can be used for long-duration storage for balancing the grid.

In my opinion, and obviously also Liebreich's, green hydrogen is mostly hype.  Green methane, maybe.  And as the first chart shows,  only 0.1% of hydrogen produced is in fact green.