camelot-forum.co.uk

https://theecologist.org/2021/may/18/bl ... n-hydrogen

A snippet...

"In the short term future, BP is working on plans for a major blue hydrogen facility in Teesside, north-east England, which could generate as much as 1 gigawatt of blue hydrogen by 2030.

That in itself is up to 20 percent of the UK’s goal to have five gigawatts of low-carbon hydrogen capacity by 2030, supporting as many as 8,000 jobs. A final investment decision on the development will be taken in 2024."

..........
Hmm, so looks like any infrastructure investment funded in part by general taxation will not be green but will be cheaper & more profitable, ..the same old merry go round of appeasing the profitable money flow to their expectations & theirs only, the big offenders who messed up the planet knowingly for decades "ride high again".

By actively embracing BLUE (fossil fuel origin hydrogen) process, our government have bent us over & taken us up the backside roughly, it isn't GREEN it's just cheaper to produce by current means but the public will hear "green-er" without much awareness of the alternative, nor how much more of a conundrum it is.

The definition of decarbonise = "to remove carbon" that should not include burying it, which is the still there supposedly "locked away" ..if thats how the industry is going it is disingenuous & just another means to pollute rather than close the loop on clean hydrogen production

What are the plans for the EU?
https://www.fchea.org/in-transition/202 ... ate-europe (outide EU, US based piece)

You would need to read further to establish the Blue / green route of each country, however a lot of "coronavirus recovery fund" money (ie increased taxation) is being pumped into this.

Here is the actual EU issued "hydrogen strategy" from mid 2020

https://ec.europa.eu/energy/sites/ener/ ... rategy.pdf

In its strategic vision for a climate-neutral EU published in November 2018, the share of hydrogen in Europe’s energy mix is projected to
grow from the current less than 2% to 13-14% by 2050.


Additional..

To add confusion to the situation the EU (July 14 2021) now propose "a 50% target" of renewable fuels of non biological origins, essentially green hydrogen in the share of hydrogen fuels used within european industry by 2030 whether as feedstock or in final energy consumption.
The current (admittedly small) hydrogen industry is 96% fossil-gas based.

The 50% is a massive step down from EU fanfare from 8th july 2020 when the EU commission unveiled plans to promote hydrogen based entirely on renewable electricity with "short term" *cough* hydrogen from fossil fuels to scale up production.

Let's be honest here - if big oil is allowed to set up an entire "blue" hydrogen production industry within the next couple of years, there's no way in hell that the self same companies will invest in fully "green" hydrogen production at scale.

As we have recently seen, although renewable energy generation is being deployed at record levels globally, it seems it's still barely making any penetration in the overall global energy mix as demand for oil/gas/coal continues to rise. So there will be no "spare" renewable energy on a significant scale for the foreseeable future.

I think you two have hit the nail on the head. There won't be cheap excess leccy to produce cheap green H2, for a long time. We need to displace FF's, and meet intraday storage demands first, and that's a long way off.

I'm genuinely concerned that the push for H2 today, is largely coming from the FF industry as a way to maintain production and sales, and divert attention and investment away from FF displacing renewables. Be it hydrogen storage (today) when we need battery storage, or inefficient hydrogen road vehicles, when we need BEV's asap, or H2 into the gas system, when we should first be looking to minimise gas consumption through insulation and heatpump rollouts.

If we push for H2 now, rather than using what will hopefully be a semi-abundant source later (for leccy storage) as a way to address edge cases, then we will need to use non-green H2, or divert vast amounts of leccy, when we first need to displace FF leccy generation, and create unnecessary or unnecessarily large H2 industries, when simpler and cheaper alternatives would have sufficed.

I can see a trap here, by the same people, as usual.

Continuing with the theme of the concerns raised on this thread, here is a timely article on the rollout of EV's, and towards the end, a very interesting paragraph:

Contrary to popular belief, the oil industry is not oblivious to what’s going on — oil giants are responding to the news in ways both positive (investing in EV charging companies) and negative (hyping hydrogen in hopes of derailing or delaying the transition to batteries).

Ernst & Young: Electric Cars Are Coming Sooner Than Expected

This article refers to a study which shows how the use of blue H2 may actually be worse than burning gas, or coal, when fugitive emissions are included. It further strengthens the argument against 'going' hydrogen too soon, as that will mean using FF's, rather than excess RE generation. It's no wonder that the FF industry is trying to push a hydrogen economy today, and yet again, they'd benefit in $'s, whilst everyone else will suffer the consequences.

Theory Versus Reality: The Dirty Hydrogen Story

The hydrogen myth refuses to go away. The theory is fine — hydrogen when used as a fuel produces no carbon emissions. At most, it results in some water vapor and a little heat. If the world ran on hydrogen, the theory suggests, we could slash carbon and methane emissions and maybe forestall the existential climate crisis that is staring us in the face.

The reality is very different. According to the New York Times, a peer-reviewed study by researchers at Cornell and Stanford has been published in the journal Energy Science & Engineering which finds that most hydrogen used today is extracted from natural gas in a process that requires a lot of energy and emits vast amounts of carbon dioxide. Producing natural gas also releases methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas.

For our default assumptions (3.5% emission rate of methane from natural gas and a 20-year global warming potential), total carbon dioxide equivalent emissions for blue hydrogen are only 9%-12% less than for gray hydrogen. While carbon dioxide emissions are lower, fugitive methane emissions for blue hydrogen are higher than for gray hydrogen because of an increased use of natural gas to power the carbon capture.

Perhaps surprisingly, the greenhouse gas footprint of blue hydrogen is more than 20% greater than burning natural gas or coal for heat and some 60% greater than burning diesel oil for heat, again with our default assumptions. In a sensitivity analysis in which the methane emission rate from natural gas is reduced to a low value of 1.54%, greenhouse gas emissions from blue hydrogen are still greater than from simply burning natural gas, and are only 18%-25% less than for gray hydrogen. Our analysis assumes that captured carbon dioxide can be stored indefinitely, an optimistic and unproven assumption. Even if true though, the use of blue hydrogen appears difficult to justify on climate grounds.