The road to the mythical climate utopia is littered with scams, boondoggles, and just plain lunatic ideas. Few are more lunatic than so-called “green hydrogen”.
Yet, for all its obvious nutbaggery, this has become the latest idea to rule supreme in the empty, clanging heads of the Climate Cultists. And where hooting, shrieking Climate Cultists go, unscrupulous charlatans follow, sniffing the trail of taxpayers’ money. A lot of taxpayers’ money. The $2 billion “Hydrogen Headstart” initiative is just one river of other peoples’ gold.
But there’s just a few problems with the idea that hydrogen is some kind of energy saviour.
The thing about hydrogen … well, not everything is as it seems and there are good reasons to be concerned that expectations for hydrogen are too high. Primarily, hydrogen energy has already been a “big thing”, several times, without much evidence of commercial success. Long gestation periods for new technologies are always a worry. The rapid greening of electricity supplies seems to have built confidence generally in green technology innovation. But electricity production was the easiest green target. The basic technologies had been known for decades.
Not unlike fusion, hydrogen has been the Next Big Thing for decades. The first wave of hydrogen hype was in the late 60s and early 70s. It came to nothing. The second wave was in the early 2000s, when George W. Bush announced a $1.2 billion fund to develop hydrogen-powered cars. Once again, it came to nothing.
Third time lucky? Don’t bet on it.
Especially not when the Albanese government is backing it so enthusiastically. Rule of Thumb: if Albo and Boofhead are backing it, it’s almost certainly heading for ignominious failure.
The basic problem is that while hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, there’s not a lot of it on Earth as hydrogen. Pure hydrogen is so light that it easily escapes Earth’s gravity. Consequently, the hydrogen that is present on Earth is almost entirely locked up in heavier molecules, such as water (remember your H2O).
Certainly, hydrogen can be split off from water. But that requires energy, in the form of electricity, which has to be generated by other means.
Once again, it is not insurmountable: even mining coal and drilling oil requires energy. But coal and oil are so energy-dense that the payoff from every joule of energy expended in mining and refining them is high enough to make it worthwhile.
This is not the case with hydrogen.
Development efforts will need to face well-known and unavoidable energy losses in applications of synthetic Green hydrogen. All hydrogen production methods consume energy. When that hydrogen is put to use it yields less energy, often much less, than was consumed in its production.
Such efficiency penalties are well understood, in the literature at least. They were crisply summarised over 20 years ago by Dr Ulf Bossel, a Swiss engineer who pioneered hydrogen fuel cell research: “If renewable electricity is converted to hydrogen, and hydrogen is subsequently reconverted to electricity, then…only about 25% of the original electrical energy may be recovered by the consumer”.
Take note: if renewable energy is converted to hydrogen.
Electrolysis is expected to be the main method worldwide for manufacturing Green hydrogen. When the electricity is Green the hydrogen is Green.
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This is the caveat of “green hydrogen”: it must be produced by “renewable” energy. With the exception of hydro, “renewables” are vastly more expensive than fossil fuels. So “green hydrogen” already comes with a much higher relative price tag.
Even a battery-driven EV is more efficient than a hydrogen fuel cell EV. Something even consumers are innately aware of. While EV sales are dropping sharply, hydrogen fuel cell EVs have never taken off. Barely a handful have been sold in Australia.
With price tags starting at over $60,000 — and as much as $189,000-$250,000 for a hydrogen-powered ute — that’s hardly surprising.
