No doubt attracted by the irresistible scent of mountains of government money, renewable energy and climate activism are fields rife with charlatans, troughers, rent-seekers and frauds. From the billions the clueless Obama sunk into boondoggles like Solyndra, to the obvious scam of burning trees and calling it “emissions free”.
Most often, the hyped-up claims of renewables advocates are easily punctured by some basic maths. As Carl Sagan wrote, in The Demon-Haunted World, back-of-the-envelope calculations are an invaluable tool for quickly spotting bad science. When mining billionaire “Twiggy” Forrest, claims his new venture will produce 50 million tonnes of hydrogen a year, back-of-the-envelope maths shows that this would need almost all of Australia’s current energy consumption.
But hydrogen remains a favourite boondoggle of the watermelon climate-botherers. After all, it all sounds so “clean”, doesn’t it? A fuel that only emits water.
But that’s far from the whole story. The whole story is a very dirty one, indeed.
The trouble is that hydrogen isn’t the same as natural gas and oil. You can’t just dig it up because it reacts with other elements, like oxygen, so easily. Hydrogen has to be produced – and that takes energy. You can split water molecules up, but this requires a lot of electricity. Granted, you could use spare electricity from renewables like wind and solar when it’s not needed for the National Grid. But that would not provide nearly enough energy considering how much hydrogen we would need to produce to replace existing fuels.
Spare me, Poindexter. Surely there’s some scientamifical magickery we could use, instead?
The simplest and cheapest way to produce hydrogen is to mix methane with very hot steam. The trouble is that this process ends up making not just hydrogen but also, er, CO2 – the very thing we are trying to avoid by moving to hydrogen in the first place. So to make this process eco-friendly, future hydrogen plants will have to use carbon capture and storage (CCS) to trap the CO2 and store it underground. But no one has managed to do CCS on a large enough scale or for a low enough price. The government is betting the whole policy on something that might never happen[…]
Even when you look past the problems of producing hydrogen, actually using it is expensive. Tokyo introduced a fleet of buses for the Olympics powered by hydrogen fuel cells. As a report in the Financial Times notes: ‘A fuel-cell bus from Toyota costs ¥100million ($900,000) for a six-year lease. A diesel bus costs ¥24million ($220,000) and has a useful life of 15 years.’ The buses are also more expensive to run, with fuel costs two-and-a-half times higher than that of diesel buses. Hydrogen-powered cars have the same problems. In terms of costs, even battery-powered electric vehicles look good in comparison. No wonder that most car manufacturers prefer them.
Besides all that, anyone who’s ever seen the famous footage of the Hindenberg crashing in flames knows that hydrogen has a troublesome habit of going “bang”. In very big ways. Hydrogen fuel cells are claimed to be safer but, at the same time, cars have a propensity to crash. As we’ve seen, even lithium-ion batteries can catch on fire spectacularly in a crash. A quick search of the literature on hydrogen fuel cell safety seems to turn up a lot of hand-waving. For instance, that in a combustion incident, “the gas disperses rapidly”. Or, what we laymen might call “explodes”.
So why is hydrogen suddenly the Biggest Next Big Thing since wind turbines?
Hydrogen power is only being pursued again because of the government’s ridiculous Net Zero target […] But the reality is that hydrogen doesn’t really solve any of the big problems. The hydrogen economy is like one of those old castles in rural Scotland that costs the same as a one-bed flat in London. It looks amazing until you realise what a money pit it would be if you wanted to turn it into a viable home.
The government’s hydrogen strategy is another desperate attempt at making its crazy Net Zero target make sense […] The hydrogen hype is another displacement activity to avoid having an honest debate about our irrational climate-change policies. It deserves to go down like the Hindenburg.
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But, in the meantime, a whole bunch of troughers will hoover up billions more from the taxpayer’s pocket, and middle-class climate-botherers will get to add another smugmobile to their garage.
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