We’ve now been covering potential climate solutions on the show for about two years and yet, I must confess, I hadn’t thought much about green hydrogen until President Biden brought it up at the climate summit last week.
So, how viable is green hydrogen, actually? Rachel Fakhry is a policy analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council.
So the process basically involves using renewable electricity, like wind and solar, to split water into its components, extract the hydrogen and use it, producing no emissions or air pollution.
That said, experts expect some very large cost reductions in this decade, if we get the right supportive policies in place to get those cost reductions and deploy more and more of it, because the more we deploy of it, the cheaper it gets.
Wood: How would it work and what could it replace?Fakhry: Some of the highest-value applications include sectors that are very challenging, that don’t have other good established solutions.
However, as we move forward, as I mentioned, and we want to start pushing hydrogen into new applications like aircrafts and shipping vessels, industry needs to absolutely develop new safety protocols for these new applications.
This sort of sector coupling offers a pretty compelling case, because if you’re using it in ships, and aircrafts, and maybe in some industrial plants, there could be some interesting, you know, cost-sharing mechanisms and risk-sharing across all these industries.
This is why if you can just use your renewable energy directly into electric heat pumps in your home or electric cars, without going through the process of turning it into hydrogen first, this is common sense, that it’s a cheaper, more efficient approach.
However, experts do project that with the right policy framework, green hydrogen could become cost-competitive with natural gas-based hydrogen by 2030, at which point we could expect that the industry will grow and grow and grow.
There’s a good piece in the journal Nature about hydrogen and how central it is to the entire idea of carbon reduction.
Bloom Energy, based in California, announced this very week that it has deployed its first hydrogen-powered fuel cells, 100 kilowatts worth, in South Korea.