Big Oil’s New ‘Clean’ Fuel Is Dirtier Than They Say

New analysis finds that blue hydrogen, touted by fossil gasoline producers as a local weather answer, truly has a 20% bigger greenhouse gasoline footprint than simply utilizing pure gasoline. The study, revealed Thursday in Energy Science & Engineering, provides some necessary context on a much-hyped new gasoline, one that occurs to be the “clean energy” apple of the fossil gasoline trade’s eye.

Hydrogen, the commonest aspect within the universe, has a lot of promise for the energy transition: it could actually energy automobiles, present electrical energy to buildings, and be used to assist decarbonize powerful industries like manufacturing and building. The downside with hydrogen is that it must be separated from different components, which in and of itself takes loads of vitality. Hydrogen might be separated from oxygen in water by way of electrolysis to create what’s referred to as inexperienced hydrogen—an possibility free from any greenhouse gasoline emissions, however one which’s fairly costly. It will also be harvested from fossil fuels like coal and gasoline, to create what’s referred to as grey hydrogen. This is a bit cheaper than inexperienced hydrogen, however emits various CO2 in the course of the hydrogen extraction course of.

Faced with rising calls to decarbonize—in addition to an enormous provide of pure gasoline that they wanted to search out makes use of for—fossil gasoline producers got here up with the concept of repackaging the picture of grey hydrogen as low-carbon by capturing all of the carbon emissions that will include its creation. A brand new kind of hydrogen was born: blue hydrogen, which is grey hydrogen that makes use of carbon seize and storage expertise to eliminate all these pesky carbon emissions and be, technically, a lower-carbon gasoline. Big Oil saw the opportunity to make use of blue hydrogen as a part of their public relations push for a lower-carbon future.

“As far as I can tell, no one was talking about blue hydrogen until just a few years ago,” examine writer Robert Howarth mentioned in an e mail. “The Hydrogen Council was established in 2017 by BP, Shell, and Total, and they and other industry-related groups started pushing this blue hydrogen idea hard. They described [blue hydrogen] as low emissions, or sometimes zero emissions. But they never presented real data to back that up.” Until this paper, Howarth mentioned, there hasn’t been any peer-reviewed effort to investigate the greenhouse gasoline footprint of blue hydrogen—simply “industry summaries” that he mentioned “do not hold up well to close scrutiny.”

Unfortunately for the oil and gasoline trade, intently trying on the creation strategy of blue hydrogen uncovers some uncomfortable truths. Howarth’s examine discovered that blue hydrogen has solely a barely decrease carbon footprint than grey hydrogen—and, by way of methane, the image is quite a bit worse.

“While CO2 emissions are less for blue than for gray hydrogen, methane emissions are greater,” Howarth mentioned. “That is because more natural gas is consumed to make the blue hydrogen, as energy is needed to power the CO2 capture, and this energy comes from natural gas.”

Methane emissions solely keep within the ambiance for a bit over a decade, far shorter than carbon dioxide’s 300-to-1,000-year lifespan—however they pack fairly a punch whereas they’re there, as methane is round 80 occasions stronger than carbon dioxide. The IPCC report launched this week for the primary time referred to as out methane as an enormous local weather downside, discovering that methane emissions have risen drastically over the previous decade. Chief among the many methane culprits are oil and gasoline corporations, which launch loads of methane within the strategy of extracting pure gasoline. The IPCC estimates that fossil gasoline corporations have been answerable for 1 / 4 of world methane emissions.

The methane findings within the IPCC report are particularly worrisome when contemplating what a natural-gas-heavy course of creating hydrogen from fossil gasoline and storing the CO2 emissions is. In reality, making the hydrogen is so energy-intensive that blue hydrogen’s greenhouse gasoline footprint is larger than that of pure gasoline. In different phrases, burning this supposed “clean” gasoline truly is worse, greenhouse gas-wise, than simply utilizing pure gasoline itself.

“It takes a large amount of natural gas to make hydrogen, using the methane in the gas as the feedstock source, but also to burn it to power the steam-reforming process and the CO2 capture process,” Howarth mentioned. “There are emissions of both CO2 and methane associated with this large use of gas.”

There’s loads of hype across the potentialities of hydrogen proper now, as governments and industries world wide look to decarbonize. The infrastructure invoice that handed the Senate Wednesday included $8 billion earmarked for hydrogen energy development; Department of Energy officers have talked in the past about how blue hydrogen can match into the Biden administration’s clear vitality objectives. The hydrogen trade mentioned in February that more than 30 countries have created plans round growing extra hydrogen tasks. The UK is growing a hydrogen technique of its personal, and a authorities official informed the Guardian that hydrogen would be “essential” to the UK’s own climate goals.

“We need to move away from all fossil fuels as soon as possible,” Howarth mentioned. “The best way to do that is with 100% renewable electricity from solar, wind, and hydro sources, combined with beneficial electrification to provide heat from high-efficiency heat pumps and to provide transportation from electric vehicles. Blue hydrogen is a dangerous distraction, which, if actually employed at scale, would aggravate rather than help address climate change. Policy makers should be skeptical of such ideas until they are thoroughly vetted by independent full lifecycle analysis by scientists and engineers in a transparent and peer-reviewed framework.”