The ad is of course, at least in part, a canny business move for a man who’s investing heavily in a particular hydrogen-based future.
But to actually make hydrogen fuel requires industrial processes, and it also needs to be stored at -253°C, no small feat.
Brown hydrogen is produced from coal, through gasification – a process that releases CO2 andcarbon monoxide.
Blue hydrogen – the type that was shipped to Japan – is similarly made from fossil fuels, but the carbon is captured and stored so it’s not released into the atmosphere.
However, upstream in the blue hydrogen production process, fugitive methane emissions can make the fuel highly polluting – an August 2021 study found the greenhouse gas footprint of blue hydrogen is 20% greater than burning natural gas or coal for heat, and 60% greater than burning diesel oil for heat.
The technicalities here are important: methane is a particularly potent and fast-acting greenhouse gas – that’s why one of the major pledges to come out of the COP26 Glasgow Summit was to slash methane emissions by 30% by 2030.
The project aims to produce and transport what it calls “clean liquid hydrogen” from the La Trobe Valley, in Victoria, to Kobe in Japan.
The project has purchased carbon credits for 2,905 tonnes of CO2 emissions – representing all the CO2 emissions from the Australian arm of the pilot phase.
The demand for critical minerals, and rare earths and steel and copper and concrete and land to build all the wind farms and solar farms that will be required to replace that 84% will be enormous.
Finkel says that we need to take into account the likelihood that future blue hydrogen plants will be designed to minimise emissions, and that operators of those future plants will minimise upstream emissions.
Work on a robust well-to-gate hydrogen guarantee of origin scheme – one that looks at total greenhouse gas emissions per tonne of hydrogen produced – is advancing.
The ultimate goal is to have internationally accepted measurement methodologies that are approved by the International Organization for Standardization .
But Finkel counsels caution when it comes to ruling out future technologies on the basis that they may not be cost-competitive.
“There’s communities whose whole livelihoods are based on fossil fuels.
“I don’t see the hydrogen economy as the goal here, personally,” says Beck.
“As the convenor of a hydrogen fuels project, I don’t necessarily believe we need a hydrogen economy to do this.