The problem with hydrogen | Global Witness (2024)

Fossil fuels

At first glance, hydrogen seems to be the perfect solutionto our energy needs. It doesn’t produceany carbon dioxide when used. It can store energy for long periods of time. Itdoesn’t leave behind hazardous waste materials, like nuclear does. And itdoesn’t require large swathes of land to be flooded, like hydroelectricity.

All in all, hydrogen seems too good to be true. No wonderthe energy industry is currently pushing hydrogen as the fuel of the future.So…what’s the catch?

Not allhydrogen is created equal

While it’s true that hydrogen is carbon-free at the point ofuse, this only tells part of the story. Before we get to the stage wherehydrogen is used, it first needs to be produced. And it’s this process wherethe complications begin.

The other method is to mix natural gas (or as we prefer to callit, fossilgas) with steam. This method currently accounts for 98%of all hydrogen production. While not as bad as using electricity generatedusing fossil fuels, the process still releases huge amounts of carbon – eachtonne of hydrogen produced releases eleventonnes of CO2, equivalent to driving 72,000 km in a passenger car.

“Blue hydrogen”is a dead end

Fossil fuel companies know that their days are numbered. As,slowly but surely, governments accelerate the changes to our energy systemrequired to tackle the climate crisis, sales of fossil fuels will fall andproduction of renewables will ramp up. This is bad news for companies whichhave invested a lot of money into building infrastructure for the extractionand transportation of fossil fuels, which may no longer be needed well beforethe end of its natural life cycle.

As it’s become clear that the days of coal and oil arenumbered, fossil fuel companies have increasingly shifted their focus to fossilgas. And now they’re worried that gas, too, will go the same way. So they’repinning their hopes on hydrogen made using fossil gas in a last-ditch attemptto keep their industry alive.

These companies are putting a lot of effort into pushing theidea of hydrogen as the clean, green fuel of the future. The problem, ofcourse, is that their chosen method of producing hydrogen still releases a lotof CO2.

To get around this, the fossil fuel industry is claimingthat they can capture the carbon emissions released during hydrogen production,and store them safely underground where they can’t contribute to global heating.Fossil fuel companies like to call this 'blue hydrogen'.

However, there is noevidence that these carbon capture plans will be able to work at anythinglike the scale or level of efficiency required to mitigate the emissions from fossilhydrogen. In fact, when we looked into one of the only operational fossil hydrogenplants using carbon capture technology in the world, we found this technologyto be severely lacking.

Shell’s Quest site in Alberta, Canada, has beenlauded by the company as an example of how it is taking action on the climatecrisis. However, just48% of the plant’s carbon emissions are captured, falling woefully short ofthe 90% carbon capture rate promised by fossil hydrogen advocates. When theplant’s overall greenhouse gas emissions are factored in, it has the samecarbon footprint as 1.2 million petrol cars.

Renewablehydrogen has a (small) role to play

Despite the problems mentioned above, hydrogen does have animportant role to play in the renewable energy transition. But not at the scalethe fossil fuel industry is claiming.

When produced using renewable electricity, hydrogen could bean invaluable tool to decarbonise sectors which are difficult to electrify,such as steelmaking, and to store energy from renewables when their supply is scarce.

But aside from some limited uses, for the most part it isboth cheaper and more efficient to simply use renewable electricity directly,rather than adding the extra step of producing hydrogen. For this reason, renewablehydrogen does have a place in the future energy mix, but a limited one. Ourefforts are much better spent cutting energy demand, ramping up renewables, andelectrifying as much as possible.

Fossil fuel lobbyists are claiming that hydrogen couldprovide up to a quarter of the EU’s energy by 2050 – up from just 2% today –and are encouraging the EU and national governments in Europe to fund theconstruction of hydrogen infrastructure in line with this figure. This riskslocking us into hydrogen dependency, increasing demand for hydrogen above whatcan (or reasonably should) be produced with renewables, to a level that canonly be filled by fossil hydrogen.

This wouldn’t help us reach our climate targets, and in factthe vast amount of CO2 released through fossil hydrogen production would onlymove us further away from them. The only people it would help are fossil fuelcompanies who are trying every trick in the book to prop up their dyingindustry, and avoid the long overdue debate about winding down the fossil gasindustry.