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A taxpayer-funded drive for ‘blue’ hydrogen is good news for fossil-fuel lobbyists, but bad news for the climate crisis
With the impacts of the climate crisis so apparent for all to see, it is becoming ever harder for governments to fob off voters with promises of action tomorrow. At Cop28 we’ll see increasingly overt action by fossil fuel companies and petrostates to preserve their traditional power. But it is just as important to scrutinise emerging so-called green or low-emission solutions, which sound plausible, but are often simply big oil’s business-as-usual in a new guise.

The UK’s much touted low carbon hydrogen standard (LCHS) is an example of this. While hydrogen can be a low-emission fuel, the UK’s plan is quite clearly a fig leaf for “blue” hydrogen – which is made from fossil fuels – and according to one study, is even more at odds with our commitment to limiting global temperature rises to 1.5C than burning coal.

Today, the vast majority of the UK’s hydrogen production is made from natural gas (the marketing term for methane) in a very carbon-intensive process. Blue hydrogen would also be produced from methane, but with promises that the resulting CO2 emissions would be captured and buried underground. But even if most of the CO2 can be safely captured (a very big “if”), blue hydrogen’s full life-cycle emissions are likely still to be high.
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This is not the result of reasoned, evidence-based policy for rapidly decarbonising our entire energy system. It’s an agenda aligned with the fossil fuel industry. Chris Jackson, the chair of a leading hydrogen industry lobby group, even resigned in protest in 2021, stating that the blue hydrogen projects on offer in the UK were “not sustainable” and “make no sense at all”.

The next government may well be concerned about honouring contracts. But these agreements were struck without honour. The drive for blue hydrogen is a subversion of the decarbonisation agenda. It will lead to yet another immense transfer of wealth from ordinary people to the fossil fuel industry, for a false solution likely to make the climate crisis even worse. We urge the next government to abide by the UK’s Paris commitments, stand up to the fossil fuel lobbyists and stop this great hydrogen swindle before it’s too late.

Oliver90owner wrote: ↑Tue Dec 05, 2023 1:58 pm Unfortunately, hydrogen (from whatever source) is termed “clean” so many confuse ‘clean’ with ‘green’.

Any hydrogen, when used is clean but none (well, very little) will be green until this blue stuff is confined to history.