On February 4, 1923, J.B.S. Haldane gave a talk to a club called the Heretics Society at Cambridge University.
Haldane was a first-class intellectual provocateur. He had a bad-boy reputation he very much seemed to enjoy.
A biologist and geneticist by training, Haldane came up with the idea of growing babies in artificial wombs, ‘ectogenesis’. That, of course, was famously taken up by his contemporary Aldous Huxley in Brave New World.
Haldane gave us the word ‘cloning’. He put forward the ‘primordial soup theory’ of the chemical origin of life — not quite the first scientist to do so, but close. Haldane invented a unit of evolutionary change, the ‘darwin’, still used in paleontology. He correctly speculated that sickle-cell anemia can confer some immunity to malaria.
In his talk to the Heretics, Haldane picturing England 400 years out. “The country,” Haldane fantasized, “will be covered with rows of metallic windmills.”
“During windy weather,” he continued, “the surplus power will be used for the electrolytic decomposition of water into oxygen and hydrogen.”
The resulting hydrogen will power “industry, transportation, heating and lighting, as desired.”
And, when the wind stops, “The gasses will be recombined in explosion motors working dynamos which produce electrical energy once more.”
Hydrogen Island
In September 2021, the Danish government announced plans that, if carried out, would make Haldane’s fantasy a reality by 2030. Denmark wants to build two man-made 'Hydrogen Islands’ in the North Sea, where:
Wind energy will be harvested on a large scale out at sea, tied together by energy islands, converted into green hydrogen, and transported across borders via offshore hydrogen infrastructure.
Here is the Danish Energy Agency’s rendition of Hydrogen Island:
The planned location is just south of a natural island, Bornholm:
As I write in August 2023, Hydrogen Island is on pause. The Island’s promoters initially promised to built it without subsidies. After the project got approved, they changed their minds and asked the Danish Government for US$7 billion. It’s a negotiation.
Spoiler alert: chemistry 101
Physics and chemistry have a way of ruining hydrogen fantasies.
The superficial attraction of hydrogen is comic-book simple. When you burn hydrogen, it makes heat and water. Nothing else — no CO₂, no particulates.
That’s about all the good news.
While hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, it is extraordinarily reactive. It always found combined with something else. Even what we call ‘pure’ hydrogen is two hydrogen atoms clinging to each other, H₂ or dihydrogen.
To produce H₂ a very strong chemical bond must be broken, which takes energy. To produce H₂ from water (H₂O), electricity can be used, a process called electrolysis.
Electrolysis is not particularly efficient. Currently, it’s used only to produce laboratory-quality hydrogen.
Nearly all other commercial hydrogen is produced from methane (CH₄) by a process called steam reforming. As ‘steam’ implies, the energy used to break the chemical bond is heat.
Most manufactured hydrogen today goes into the production of fertilizer. Hydrogenation of nitrogen (N₂) produces ammonia (NH₃). Hydrogen is also used in oil refining to ‘sweeten’ sour crudes by removing sulfur.
The economic conundrum of manufacturing hydrogen for energy is that, as an output, it competes with its own inputs. Rather than make hydrogen from methane, why not just burn the methane? Rather than make hydrogen by electrolysis, why not use the electricity to charge a battery?
Manufactured hydrogen of any color is too valuable to burn, unless you have a NASA-scale budget. About 1% of hydrogen production goes to rocket fuel.
The rainbow of eco-purity
To anti-fossil-fuel purists, of course, anything to do with methane is an anathema.
This has led to the wearisome color-coding of hydrogen as ‘gray’ (produced from methane with the steam reforming process), ‘blue’ (ditto but with capture of the resulting CO₂), and ‘green’ (produced without CO₂, typically by electrolysis).
If you immerse yourself in the contemporary hydrogen hype, it’s easy to start thinking that ‘green hydrogen’ is a newly-discovered element.
Hydrogen is hydrogen. ‘Green’ hydrogen is a bureaucratic construct, a certificate of origin, not unlike those found on Fair Trade coffee or organic vegetables.
Hydrogen is the ‘H’ in hydrocarbon
Hydrogen gas has very poor volumetric energy density, the amount of energy it carries per unit volume. The unit of measurement is joules per liter. That’s H₂ down at the bottom right:
Carbon atoms work small miracles on hydrogen’s energy density. Each additional carbon atom packs hydrogen atoms together more closely. The ball-and-stick model of methane (CH₄) gives the idea:
Gasoline — octane, with 8 carbon atoms — has 7 times the volumetric energy density of the compressed H₂ put in the tanks of hydrogen cars.
Gasoline even has 3.5 times the volumetric energy density of liquid hydrogen. Gasoline, of course, has the considerable practical advantage of being a liquid at room temperature. Hydrogen only liquifies at -250°C.
Europe’s nouvelle vague of hydrogen hype
The current wave of hydrogen hype dates to 2019, just prior to Covid and well before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The European Clean Hydrogen Alliance was set up in July 2020.
The conventional narrative goes like this: European policy makers, somewhat belatedly, realized their Net Zero goals from Paris 2015 could not be met unless they ‘do something’ to eliminate fossil-fuel use in hard-to-electrify sectors, such as aviation, heavy transportation, home heating, and industrial processes that use heat, such as steel-making. Hydrogen was the ‘silver bullet’ that could do all of those things, to use the phrase of UK energy secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg.
Europe’s hydrogen fantasy was just gaining traction when Russia invaded the Ukraine in February 2022. In September 2022, the Nordstream pipeline got bombed, cutting off natural gas from Gazprom. Russian gas flows to Europe declined 49%.
With Russian natural gas cut off, the European hydrogen strategy got a kick in the pants. While no one would quite come out and say it, one idea was, “Who needs Russian gas? We’ll make green hydrogen.”
Verbally, European politicians went all-in on hydrogen. On September 13, 2022, in a perhaps unfortunate turn of phrase, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz told a group of German employers that hydrogen was the gas of the future, and that his government’s policies would einen großen Boom auslösen — “trigger a big boom.”
The elements of hydrogen fantasy
It’s worth taking time to unpack Haldane’s hydrogen fantasy, since it contains all the elements of the contemporary hydrogen confabulation.
The hydrogen fantasy first and foremost assumes free, or nearly free, electricity. Haldane’s line about using ‘surplus’ power from windmills is entirely au courant.
Haldane in 1923 made no claim for originality. As far back as 1865, William Stanley Jevons, considering substitutes for coal in The Coal Question; An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal Mines wrote:
À favourite notion is to employ wind water or tidal mills to turn magneto electric machines and by the stream of electricity produced to decompose water thus furnishing a continuous supply of artificial gaseous fuel.
Haldane, at least, had the good sense to set his fantasy 400 years into the future. That would give ‘peak coal’ ample time to actually take place in Britain.
Aside: The economic flaw of ‘peak anything’ theories, oil or coal, is that, barring government distortions of market prices, declining supply leads to higher prices, which in turn provide incentives for conservation and substitution. In an important variant of substitution, previously inferior forms of the ‘peak’ resource may become viable at the new, higher price.
In 2022, this played out visibly in coal itself when Germany reopened some lignite mines, controversially an open-pit one at Garzweiler. Lignite is the cheapest and dirtiest form coal.
The Martingale
In the Martingale casino betting strategy, if a gambler loses a bet, he or she makes the same bet again, but doubles the stakes.
The theory is that gambler will eventually win back everything, including the original bet.
Mathematically, there is nothing wrong with the Martingale strategy. Where is fails is in assuming the gambler has an unlimited bank account.
The Martingale offers an alternative narrative of the new wave of hydrogen hype. Europe has decided to double down on its previous losing bets on intermittent renewables, especially wind.
Wind woes
By 2019, it was clear that the European wind industry was in the doldrums, a sort of commercial dunkelflauten.
In May that year, Germany’s influential Der Spiegel magazine ran a cover story concluding: “The wind power boom is over.”
The woes of the Europe’s wind turbine makers have since become well known. In November 2022, Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy reported an annual loss of €940 million. It cut its work force by 11 percent. General Electric said its renewable energy unit was likely to record $2 billion in losses. Vestas Wind Systems, the world’s largest maker of turbines, reported losses. “Every time we sell a turbine, we lose 8 percent,” its chief executive said in an interview.
Developers of offshore wind farms have cancelled projects or are desperately attempting to renegotiate them.
In the UK, power-purchase agreements are actually one-sided options, not contracts. Wind-farm developers can opt not to build with few penalties. On July 20, 2023, Vattenfall, the state-owned Swedish company underwritten by Swedish electricity consumers, walked away from the 1.4GW Norfolk Boreas development off eastern England. Danish renewables giant Ørsted has made similar noises about the 2.8GW UK North Sea project Hornsea 3.
The 2019 Der Spiegel article went farther, warning that Germany’s entire Energiewende “is facing failure.”
Estimates of how much Germany has actually spent on the Energiewende vary, but are in the ballpark of €400 billion. Whatever the exact figure, Germany’s Federal Court of Auditors characterized the country’s investment as “in extreme disproportion to the results.”
In the third quarter of 2022, coal-fired power plants produced over a third (36.3%) of the electricity fed into the German power grid, compared to 16.8% for wind and 16% for solar. German carbon emissions rose 4.4% in 2022.
In 2020, Samuel Furfari, a Belgian researcher who worked on energy for 36 years at the European Commission, felt compelled to write a book called The Hydrogen Illusion.
Furfari believes the European Commission’s 2020 embrace of hydrogen was a copy-and-paste of a German-originated stratagem crafted to make good that country’s ill-considered investment in intermittent renewables.
For Europe’s wind industry, the new wave of hydrogen hype has came just in time — a welcome a breath of hot air.
SimCity
‘Green’ hydrogen barely exists: in 2021, green hydrogen accounted for less than 0.04% of hydrogen production.
Unfazed, EU bureaucrats will create a market for green hydrogen ex nihilo. They are busy building out a green hydrogen economy on paper, as if playing SimCity. There will be one hydrogen refueling station every 150km along the Trans-European Transport Network of trunk roads.
Given that there’s no demand for green hydrogen absent subsidies and mandates, there’s not exactly a market price.
In 2020, a Quebec-based company, H₂ V Energies, got a headline by announcing it was prepared to sell green hydrogen for US$2.67 per kilogram.
The fine print of H₂ V’s press release revealed that this price was for future delivery from a plant in Bécancour that had yet to be constructed.
BloombergNEF recently attempted to come up a price for green hydrogen. The best it could do was a range: from $2.38 per kilogram to $12 per kilogram. That’s quite a range.
The US EPA has used a figure of $0.50/kg for green hydrogen, which it apparently pulled out of thin air.
In May 2023, the European energy bourse EEX started publishing a weekly green hydrogen index — although where its data comes is anyone’s guess.
Even the production costs for ‘green’ hydrogen are something of a mystery.
The few companies who have actually made green H₂ in small batches have been secretive about costs, arguing that these are not representative of they will be when they start manufacturing at scale.
One does not have to be an Austrian economist to wonder whether the European officials building SimCity will have an information problem.
Market price, of course, means little when generous subsidies are available. According to the IEA, worldwide, $30 billion of government aid to green hydrogen has been announced.
In Europe, a land rush for green hydrogen subsidies is in full swing. Hydrogen already has its own lobbying organization, the Hydrogen Council, formed in 2017.
How many infant industries is enough?
The ‘infant industry’ argument, of course, has used to justify subsidies, mandates and other preferences given to renewables since the 1970s.
No one seems to have bothered asking European taxpayers or utility ratepayers if feel like underwriting yet another infant industry.
There are a few indications they don’t. In the UK this year, a proposed £200-per-year levy on home heating bills that would have gone to fund green hydrogen production and infrastructure was abandoned after it generated multi-color pushback, both Tory blue and Labour red.
In Germany, there is a persistent feeling that the governing ‘traffic light coalition’, which includes its Green Party, is tip-toeing on the edge of a populist volcano. German household electric rates are the highest in the EU by a sizable margin. New onshore wind farm projects and associated transmission lines invariably face intense local opposition. This summer, a law proposed by the Greens that would ban gas boilers and make heat pumps mandatory by next year triggered another storm of controversy.
Pure green
Without waiting for it to exist, the EU has already regulated green hydrogen production.
More precisely, the EU defined, in June, what it will take for hydrogen to be deemed ‘green’ and thus eligible for subsidies:
If a company want to make green hydrogen, they will have to install a ‘new renewable energy asset’ to do so. This rule appears to derive a 2020 back-of-the-envelope calculation by the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity and Gas (ENTSO-E and ENTSOG) that the wished-for production green hydrogen by electrolyzers would suck up every kilowatt of renewable electricity made in Europe today, and then some.
Importing cheap electricity — from, say, French or Swedish nuclear plants — to make green hydrogen is out. The ‘new renewable energy asset’ and the electrolyzer will have to be located in the same grid zone.
As in Haldane’s fantasy of using only ‘surplus’ wind power, renewable electricity used by electrolyzers to make ‘green’ hydrogen will have accounted for, on an hourly basis, by 2030.
The kicker in these rules is that they not only apply to green hydrogen made in the EU, but to what importers into the EU can label ‘green’ hydrogen.
Several firms who want make hydrogen elsewhere — for example, the Middle East, where methane is abundant — have complained that the EU’s green purity rules threaten to smother the infant industry in its cradle.
But no nukes
Electrolyzers are presently large, expensive pieces of capital equipment that are designed to run non-stop. There is also a chemical-physical inertia in the electrolysis process. Unless or until electrolyzers become dirt cheap, it makes little sense to run them part-time off intermittent renewables.
‘Firm’ electricity from nuclear would be a excellent way to run them. A study by France’s EDF estimated 93% utilization of an electrolyser located at a nuclear plant. In addition, the oxygen produced has uses in the nuclear cycle, further improving the economics.
The EU’s ‘additionally’ rule pretty much rules out making green hydrogen using nuclear-generated electricity, so-called ‘pink’ hydrogen. Building a new nuclear plant to make green hydrogen just to conform to the EU rules is no one’s idea of an enticing business proposition. EDF is studying green hydrogen production only at its UK nuclear reactors.
The US DOE is currently flirting with its own version of the EU rules.
In March 2023, Maryland-based Constellation Energy, with the help of a $5.8m demonstration project grant from the DOE, starting making 560 kilograms of hydrogen per day at one of its upstate New York reactors.
Constellation owns six nuclear power plants in Illinois, and would like to make hydrogen at them. It’s currently waiting for the DOE to decide exactly what green hydrogen is.
There’s money involved: under the US Inflation Reduction Act, green hydrogen is eligible for a production tax credit of $3 a kilogram.
Finding free electricity
Recall the essential element of Haldane’s fantasy: electricity too cheap to meter.
We can get a rough idea of what green hydrogen production by wind farms would look like by looking at data on curtailment.
Curtailment is when, for one reason or another, grid operators keep generated electricity off the public grid. Curtailment happens for a variety of reasons: excess renewable supply during low demand periods, local grid congestion, and sometimes voltage issues.
Curtailment means capacity is wasted. But for wind and solar farm operators, being kicked off the grid is preferable to ‘negative’ prices, paying the grid to take the power off you hands.
Curtailment and over-production are dirty words to the renewables lobby. If wind and solar are getting curtailed, it make no sense to build more.
Alternatively, curtailment is a argument to build more transmission lines to get the renewable power someplace it’s needed. The excluded cost of transmission infrastructure, the so-called ‘integration costs’, is the dirty little secret of assertions that electricity from wind is cheap.
Not to mention the cost of maintaining parallel back-up generation, just in case.
I suppose I did just mention that.
The wind lobby likes to cite a low (3%) figure for curtailment, based on a broad average.
The actual experience of grid operators is not that good. In 2022, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the grid manager for most of Texas, curtailed 5% of its total available wind generation and 9% of total available utility-scale solar generation.
California has both wind and solar on its grid, but a 2022 study of CAISO historical curtailment data shows that, in order to maintain the stability of the grid, potential solar or wind output was curtailed during 50% of the hours during 2021.
In the topsy-turvy world of the hydrogen fantasy, curtailment is an opportunity, not a problem: electrolyzers everywhere. There’s a big rush to sell electrolyzers into the subsidy boom, especially by German companies.
Smaller, cheaper, more efficient electrolyzers will undoubtedly come, but some of the ‘innovations’ touted for near-future models, such as load-following, are enhancements to cope with EU rules, not improve efficiency.
It’s an interesting exercise to look at the CAISO chart for curtailment and picture it as one for green hydrogen production. Notice the seasonality:
Feeling the heat
The eco-pure green hydrogen fantasy gives short shrift to the heat-based processes actually used to manufacture hydrogen today.
When hydrogen is broken out of a hydrocarbon such as methane, some ‘undesirable’ gases, such as carbon monoxide (CO), or CO₂, are byproducts.
Another green problem is source of the process heat itself.
Real-world hydrogen production, if it increases dramatically, is likely to get messy.
At least two start-ups, California-based Ways2H and Luxembourg-based Boson Energy, claim they are be able to produce hydrogen from municipal solid waste far cheaper than by electrolysis.
Last year, start-up Archaea, which built a business extracting methane from municipal landfills, was sold to BP for $4.1 billon. The hydrogen start-ups would love to duplicate that success.
The business case is relatively straightforward: the raw material free, and you are even paid to deal with it.
Extraction of any gas from municipal waste competes with stupid-and-simple incineration, where that is permissible.
According to European waste-to-energy trade association, ESWET, “low-emission” incinerators produce power, heat and industrial steam supplying 2.4% of the EU’s energy every year.
All have the same problem of dealing with plastics which, when burned, emit toxic fumes, and getting rid of the residual fly ash or gunk. On the plus side, landfills left unprocessed emit methane.
The Boson process uses electric-powered plasma torches capable of producing temperatures of 7,000° C. The end result of a multi-stage process is hydrogen, carbon dioxide and a molten slurry that solidifies into a blue/grey glassy rock.
Small nuclear reactors are increasingly being considered for process heat.
There is also a ‘green’ process for manufacturing hydrogen out of water by thermal decomposition, researched in the 1970s. The requisite temperatures are theoretically within reach of certain types of nuclear reactors.
A wildcard: geologic hydrogen
An interesting wildcard is ‘geologic’ or natural hydrogen.
In rare geologic situations, hydrogen-rich fluids or gasses are produced naturally in a process called serpentinisation. Subterranean olivine, a mineral containing iron and magnesium, reacts with underground water at elevated temperature and pressure, forming pockets of hydrogen gas.
No one knows how much geologic hydrogen exists, because until recently no one was looking for it. Its discovery was accidental and dates back to 1888, when Dmitri Mendeleev, father of the periodic table, reported hydrogen gas seeping from cracks in a coal mine in Ukraine.
A more recent and now famous discovery was near a village of Bourakébougou, Mali. This discovery was also accidental, and black-humor comic. In 1987, well diggers had been drilling for water, but gave up on one dry borehole at 108 meters. Oddly, a strange wind was coming out of the hole. One driller peered into the hole while smoking a cigarette.
The driller received burns, but was not killed. The Mali gas, which assayed at 98% hydrogen, 1% methane, and 1% nitrogen, was eventually hooked up to a modified internal combustion engine to generate electricity for the village.
Intriguingly, the flow from the Mali well has not diminished over the years, bringing up the possibility that geologic hydrogen renews itself. It is not, of course, a fossil fuel requiring eons to form.
Last year, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists formed a natural hydrogen committee. The USGS began an effort to identify promising hydrogen production zones in the United States. The most promising sites are along the in the Midcontinental Rift System, a 2,000km tectonic fault running through North America.
In July, Denver-based Koloma, a formerly secretive company with investment from Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy, had a coming-out in Forbes, hinting that it knows where to drill for hydrogen in the US Midwest. Australian explorer Hyterra is drilling in Nebraska, while Denver-based Natural Hydrogen Energy is looking in Kansas.
Koloma’s announcement, by the way, made it clear that hydrogen is not the only thing it will be mining. The company plans to apply for subsidies available under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
Geologic ‘hydrogen’ is likely to be a mixture of all sorts of stuff. Getting pure H₂ out of it will require processing, most likely involving heat, as in the steam reforming process used on methane. Its ‘green’ credentials will be up for debate, as will its eligibility for the US production tax credit.
The best hope for drillers may be that geologic H₂ turns out to be so cheap nobody cares.
Transporting hydrogen
However it’s made, hydrogen is a nuisance to transport.
In the contemporary hype, hydrogen has been rebranded a ‘vector’, a virtuous way to transport renewable energy from one place to another.
While this is true, it’s also true of batteries.
Using hydrogen as a ‘vector’ comes with a very large energy loss from two conversions. Haldane’s ‘round-trip’ — electricity to hydrogen back to electricity again — has a 72% energy loss.
In 1990, the European Commission proposed manufacturing hydrogen by electrolysis in Quebec, using that province’s abundant hydropower. The scheme was to ship it across the Atlantic stored in the chemical toluene. The net energy loss was estimated at 54%.
Hydrogen mixes with air readily and ignites with one-tenth as much energy as methane.
Being a small molecule, H₂ can pass through metal that has no visible cracks, and also embrittles it. Valves, pumps, pipes and tanks for hydrogen are made with expensive, higher grades of steel. Tanks for holding it under pressure have liners and extra-thick walls.
A lot of industrial hydrogen is used on the same site where it is made, and thus doesn’t need to be transported very far.
Which is a sensible thing, since moving large volumes of hydrogen around tends to be asking for trouble:
The 200,000 cubic meters of hydrogen carried by the Hindenburg completely burned — technically speaking, did not explode — in about 90 seconds.
Prior to the disaster on May 6, 1937, a total of twenty-six hydrogen airships were destroyed by fire.
In 2020, Neural Networks and Deep Learning used the image processing tools Gigapixel AI and DeOldify to colorize the historic newsreel footage:
Recent hydrogen explosions have been less spectacular than the Hindenburg.
These, however, should actually be more worrisome to advocates of a hydrogen economy, in that they were ‘normal accidents’ during routine operations.
On July 18, 2023, a $1.1m hydrogen fuel cell bus in Bakersfield, California was destroyed in the early hours of the morning when its hydrogen tanks exploded during refueling:
In February 2023 a pick-up truck towing a trailer with six large cylinders of hydrogen was involved in a traffic accident near Columbus, Ohio. All six cylinders cooked off, sending “balls of flames” 30 feet into the air. According to a witness, it was “explosion after explosion after explosion and it just didn’t stop.” The drivers had minor injuries from the crash and were not hurt by the hydrogen explosions.
Hydrogen pipelines…
The best way to move hydrogen economically and safely is as a gas, by pipeline. At present some 100 billion cubic meters of hydrogen are piped around annually with few, if any, reported incidents.
Since hydrogen is lighter than air, small leaks dissipate quickly, The usual problem for pipeline operators is detecting leaks in the first place, given that hydrogen is both transparent and odorless. There is some recent concern that ‘fugitive’ hydrogen gas escaping into the atmosphere could be a ‘green house gas enabler’.
To the chagrin of the anti-fossil-fuel purists, the companies with real-world experience transporting hydrogen are the oil majors. There are existing networks of hydrogen pipelines near oil refining centers, notably along the Texas and Louisiana coast:
A star-shaped hydrogen pipeline network in Europe is roughly centered on Rotterdam, and a north-south network in Germany.
Hydrogen pipelines are generally put underground and well-marked, primarily to protect them from stupid humans.
…and hubs
The green hydrogen fantasy still has the problem of transporting energy from where it is made to where it is needed.
Hydrogen Island will have its own electrolyser. Presumably, the gas will be picked up there by ship.
Other schemes, such as one from Shell in the Netherlands, put the electrolyser on the coast. These landing spots will be hydrogen 'hubs’ or centers of a distribution network.
One idea that is taking hold in Europe is to retrofit existing natural gas trunk pipelines to be safe to carry hydrogen. This would be faster and cheaper than building a new pipeline. The German utility RWE announced a plan to convert 1,500km of pipeline to carry hydrogen from the Baltic to industrial sites in the Ruhr and southern Germany.
In the Netherlands, Gasunie plans an 85% conversion of pipeline network it thinks it can have ready by 2025:
Hydrogen at home
Blending hydrogen with methane is not a good idea — why ruin two good things? — but consistently comes up in the idea of using the existing natural gas distribution system to take H₂ directly to homes.
UK energy secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg, in nearly a perfect echo of Haldane, suggested excess wind power will produce green hydrogen that will heat Britain’s homes. The BBC provided a helpful graphic of how that would work:
Sadly for Rees-Mogg, several studies in the UK have concluded that using hydrogen for home heating would not only be very expensive, about 6 times the cost of methane, but also exceedingly unsafe.
In the Netherlands, a prototype hydrogen-heated house build by DNV gives the idea:
Supply push
Technology innovation is classically characterized as either ‘demand pull’ or ‘supply (or technology) push’.
In demand pull, a company guesses that a product is needed or wanted, then undertakes research and development to bring it to market.
Supply push is Field of Dreams: If we build it, they will come.
The EU’s plan to jump-start a vast and rapid commercialization of green hydrogen — ready or not — counts an extreme case of technology push. Both product and the demand for it will have to be created at the same time.
Past attempts at this sort of thing have not gone well. Synfuels, a creature of the 1970s US push for ‘energy independence’, ended in debacle.
Arguably worse are zombie programs that live on ongoing subsidies and mandates, such as corn ethanol in the US
‘Infant industry’ subsidies, always pitched as temporary, have a way of becoming permanent. Subsidies, of course, are insidious and hard to reverse: the beneficiaries have every reason to try to preserve them. If they have a strong lobby, as American agribusiness does, they usually will.
The chicken-and-egg problem of green hydrogen has been explicitly recognized by the Dutch government. It announced €22 million scheme to subsidize hydrogen filling stations, but to get the subsidy, station owners will have to commit to buying between 20 and 25 hydrogen trucks.
The Netherlands is offering an another incentive, of sorts. Like California, it has plans to ban the sale of fossil-fuel powered trucks.
For the Netherlands, this is supposed to happen by 2040. In California, the Air Resources Board has set the year at 2036. It gave large trucking companies until 2042 to convert to electric or hydrogen models.
For the record, we note that California garbage trucks must be zero-emission by 2039.
Fuel cell vehicles
Hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles (FCV) have electric drive trains, but a fuel cell takes the place of the battery.
The hydrogen fuel cell has been around a long time, having been invented in 1839 by William Grove, a British scientist. Hydrogen, carried in a tank, is combined with oxygen and, without combustion, releases electricity and water.
The advantage of a hydrogen-power FCV over a battery-powered EV is longer range and, important for fleet vehicles, faster refueling time.
In 1966, GM Engineering outfitted a Handivan with a fuel-cell propulsion system. The idea behind the ‘Electrovan’ was to come up with an electric vehicle that had longer range (150 miles) and refueled quickly.
After being outfitted with cryogenic hydrogen and oxygen tanks and 32 fuel cell modules interconnected by some 550 feet of plastic piping, the Handivan was considerably less handy:
GM only drove the Electovan own property. It was not taken out on the street due to ‘safety concerns’.
Hydrogen cars
Hydrogen cars got a lot of top-down technology push in decades past.
Despite this, nobody seemed to want to buy them.
In his State of the Union address in January 2003, George Bush announced “Tonight I’m proposing $1.2 billion in research funding so that America can lead the world in developing clean, hydrogen-powered automobiles.”
That initiative resulted in (take your pick) Daimler-Chrysler/Daimler-Benz/Mercedes-Benz producing a few hundred GLC-F-Cell model cars, eventually withdrawn from the market.
Japan has had generous hydrogen subsidies for years. They have had similarly disappointing results. Japan has around 8,000 hydrogen-powered passenger vehicles on its roads, out of a total of 80 million cars.
Toyota, Hyundai, and Honda combined sold 8,791 hydrogen cars in 2020. At least the Toyota Mirai is more stylish than the Electovan:
Trains and Boats and Planes
If there is any sweet spot for hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles, it will be in ‘zero emission’ busses or — less likely — heavy trucks.
Cities and municipalities worried about air quality and, to a lesser extent, CO₂, are the target market for ‘zero emissions’ vehicles. Hydrogen busses have to compete with electric ones.
At the moment, hydrogen busses are not faring very well in competition in European cities. In 2022 Montpellier cancelled an order for 51 hydrogen-powered buses after a newly-elected set of officials discovered electric buses would be six times to cheaper to run.
In December, the German city of Wiesbaden said it was going to retire ten hydrogen-powered fuel-cell buses, just one year after they were delivered. The city’s publicly owned transport company, ESWE, had its hydrogen filling station break down. It also decided the busses, made in Portugal by Caetano, too were small. For its longer trunk lines, Wiesbaden wants articulated — wait for it — diesel busses.
The funding details for Wiesbaden’s soon-to-be retired busses provides an interesting glimpse into the inner workings of Europe’s hydrogen SimCity. The vehicles were funded by €1.95m from the EU’s Clean Hydrogen Partnership and €1.68m from the German government. More than €2m of funding for the filling station came from the German states of Hesse (where Wiesbaden is located) and neighboring state Rhineland-Palatinate.
Politicians in Duisburg, however, have voted to purchase 100 hydrogen buses to replace its existing fleet of diesel vehicles by 2030. Duisburg is branding itself ‘The Hydrogen City’ and “the gravitational field for the hydrogen economy”. Its steel factories are single-handedly responsible for 5% of of Germany’s CO₂ emissions.
Hydrogen trains
Hydrogen fuel-cell trains are having teething problems comparable to those of hydrogen busses. A €500m fleet of 27 hydrogen trains was supposed to begin operation out of Frankfurt last December, but the project to date has been shambles. At last report, 12 are working.
Alstom in France built a prototype hydrogen fuel-cell powered train which it tested — for safety reasons — on a remote bit of track in Quebec’s Charlevoix region in July. In a video of the test, it never seems to go much above 30 miles per hour. Alstom says it has 41 orders for hydrogen trains from around Europe.
Italy, unfazed, announced a €300 national hydrogen infrastructure project that includes €24m to replace diesel locomotives.
For the less puritanical, natural gas remains the serious competition for lower-emission trains and heavy trucks. US-based rail operator BNSF, owned by Warren Buffett, tested LNG locomotives as far back in 2013.
Perhaps the whackiest bit of hydrogen fantasy are the concept planes of European plane manufacturer Airbus. These will supposedly run on a mixture of hydrogen combustion and H2-powered fuel cells.
The Airbus project is code-named ZEROe, which stands for ‘zero emission’.
It’s also likely what the initiative will amount to.
Never say never again
It’s hard to make predictions, especially if they’re about the future. In forecasting, one should never say never.
Geologic hydrogen might turn out to be a real thing.
It’s always possible, if not terribly likely, that some technical breakthrough will revolutionize hydrogen production.
There are some intriguing things that might fall out of advanced research into solar cells and artificial photosynthesis. ‘Artificial leaf devices’, using materials like perovskites, have been made that produce hydrogen from sunlight and water.
To date, those devices have had short, non-economic lifespans. That could change. In 2023, Israeli researchers, also studying artificial photosynthesis, found a microbial process that makes hydrogen.
The attempt to jump-start ‘pure green’ hydrogen by electrolysis seems destined for failure — or worse, decades of being just around the corner, if only subsidized a little longer.
The realities of physics and economics will keep green hydrogen a niche product. The breathless forecasts for world domination by 2030 or 2050 will prove to be so much hot air.
More sensible, and more likely, the existing ‘gray’ hydrogen market will evolve, becoming somewhat cleaner and greener — call it gray-green. Companies who experiment with using hydrogen in the real-world won’t have the luxury of being picky about its color.
This also suggests we will have to endure, for years to come, virtue-scolding by green hydrogen purists.
Barring a revolt by European taxpayers, a lot of money will be wasted on green hydrogen.
At the moment, Europe appears to be rich enough to indulge its fantasies.
Although one has to wonder, Why? Europe might do better to take inspiration from Haldane, and put its hydrogen fantasy another 400 years off.