No.

Hydrogen was seized on by politicians who always look for a simple easy solution to technically difficult problems. These are the ones where non-technical people say “All you have to do is…” or “Why don’t they just…?” and in the case of politicians demand credit while leaving other people to deal with boring details like scientific fundamentals.

Hydrogen. It burns to pure water. No CO2. No global warming. No pollution. Why did nobody think of it before? Why have we been burning coal for electricity and running cars on gasoline when we could have been using hydrogen?

The fundamental deep ignorance was to suppose that hydrogen could simply be magicked out of thin air, or at least water. (See questions on Quora along the lines of “as water contains hydrogen, why don’t they just…?”)

So why did all these chemists and engineers not see what a politician could grasp? Why have we been digging coal and pumping oil and gas, when you can make hydrogen from water?

The answer is that when you burn hydrogen the product is water, plus the energy value as a fuel. To make hydrogen you have to unburn the water. And how much energy does that take? The same amount? Close, but not right. The same amount and more. No matter how clever the chemistry or physics, you will have to put in more energy than you take out, thanks to rules of the universe called thermodynamics.

Hydrogen is not a free lunch.

It is technically feasible to run all our power stations, vehicles and ships on hydrogen.

If we had hydrogen! For example if natural gas was hydrogen instead of methane. But it isn’t. We have to make it from something else, using energy. So instead the hydrogen we need is mainly got from methane by some chemistry, which produces CO2. (Both by the main process and the extra methane you have to burn in order to get the energy. Neither of these processes are 100% efficient.)

So every litre of water coming from your green and virtuous hydrogen car has already released more CO2 than it would if you had run it on methane.

Very little is produced by electrolysis of water, because this requires even more energy. (It is more efficient to convert methane into hydrogen chemically than to burn the methane to make electricity and then electrolyse water.)

This is generally answered by vague hand-waving about renewable energy, as if solar panels and wind farms were free. However, if you do have low-cost electricity why not use it to directly power electric trains and trams, and charge up batteries for cars? Cut out the middle bit.

Hydrogen has some possibilities as a means of transmission of energy, but is not, repeat NOT an energy source.

With enough determination it could be used on vehicles to limit local pollution (but not global) and this may happen in some areas, mainly from political reasons (and the influence of industries on politicians).

It can be mixed with natural gas, or even replace it (though it is much harder to prevent leaks compared with natural gas.) And if it is made from natural gas, why bother?

The main theoretical possibility comes from a breakthrough in nuclear fusion which would produce large amounts of energy at low cost. Hydrogen might be a possible way of using some of this energy. More immediately it could replace the vast use of hydrogen to manufacture ammonia (and thus fertilizers which feed more than a quarter of the world’s population) and in industry, reducing the current CO2 production involved in nearly all of it.

Hydrogen can be got from microbes, (it is a common component of farts) or by direct thermal splitting of water from solar power but not in the immense quantities required at an economic rate.

I am personally concerned about the safety implications of large-scale use of hydrogen. (To the extent that I am a contributing author to a technical paper on the subject. That is, we have considered the technical requirements, known possibilities of failure and done the calculations on the consequences. I also know someone in the hydrogen business who has witnessed a test release of a large amount of liquid hydrogen as an experiment to see what could happen in an accident.)

The thing that almost all hydrogen proponents don’t understand is:

HYDROGEN IS NOT A FUEL

You have to manufacture hydrogen - and that takes a lot of energy.

So it’s not in competition with things like solar, wind, nuclear, coal, oil or natural gas.

HYDROGEN IS A KIND OF ENERGY STORAGE SYSTEM

The cycle is that you use energy to make hydrogen - you stick it into a tank someplace - and then you either burn it to produce heat - or stick it into a fuel cell to make electricity.

It’s in competition with batteries, with molten salt, with high pressure pneumatics, pumped hydro, gravity batteries…that kind of thing.

HYDROGEN IS A VERY BAD STORAGE SYSTEM

Turning energy into hydrogen happens in one of two ways:

• Using fossil fuels in the “Steam Reformation” approach - not too efficient - but produces a ton of CO2.
• Using electrolysis - which is wastes two thirds of the energy you put into it.

Storing hydrogen is hard:

• It leaks from any seal.
• It causes microscopic cracking in metals and plastics that make them brittle.
• Hydrogen has very low density - so you’re forever compressing it to be able to store it or ship it - but that produces a lot of low grade heat - so you lose more energy.
• Hydrogen doesn’t burn like gasoline - it explodes.

It’s the latest and surely the final last gasp effort to extend the wind and solar energiewende debacle. Germany has far too much off peak surplus RE generation. Germany is deeply into the diminishing returns curve with their over saturation of intermittent wildly variable wind power. The correct cost effective way forward is to simply stop adding more wind and even worse solar. Doing so will allow the percentage of grid contaminating RE (Ruinous Energy) to reduce as the turbines succumb to the environment as Germany restarts their prematurely shuttered newer nukes. After the coming February 25, 2025 snap election there’s a possibility that the suicidal economic path Germany has been on for more than a decade (2010) will end and the economy can begin to heal.

Green hydrogen is created by a complex and costly hydrolysis process that splits water using energy provided by solar, hydroelectric, and wind sources. Green hydrogen costs four times as much to manufacture as grey hydrogen which is produced from steam reforming natural gas. Renewable energy must be utilised to split water into oxygen and hydrogen in order to call hydrogen green and carbon neutral.

The benefits of green hydrogen have been widely publicised in media outlets across the world, particularly in the European Union. On closer inspection, it appears that FTI Consulting, a big fossil fuel PR firm, is behind most of the media blitz championing green hydrogen as the new bridge fuel. A hydrogen lobby has even been developed, with the majority of members affiliated with fossil fuels, particularly fracking gas corporations. Last year, this lobby spent more than 72 million dollars attempting to influence policy making in Brussels.

Officials in the industry are not being candid or upfront regarding the usage of hydrogen as a fuel source. They are trying to sell governments on green hydrogen when what is now being generated is far from green. Several questions remain unanswered, including how much hydrogen can be used in gas power plants, how much hydrogen will come from renewable sources, what other air emissions are produced, whether existing pipeline infrastructure can be used, and whether this fuel will wean us off of fossil fuels.

The obvious is stated in an article in Nation of Change. The major reason green hydrogen isn't a smart alternative for decarbonising the economy is that it requires massive amounts of renewable power to produce. It would be far more efficient to use this energy to directly support the grid or to charge battery storage devices. According to Bloomberg NEF, producing enough green hydrogen to cover one-fourth of our energy demands would need an expenditure of $11 trillion in production, storage, and delivery. Hydrogen will never be a critical component of our future energy demands.

Hydrogen (H2) is NOT an “energy source” like you think it is.

On Earth, as used today, it is or could be an “Energy Carrier”, in which you USE energy to MAKE H2 as a fuel to use in other system.

And if you are going to MAKE an energy carrier, the list of better ones than H2 is LONG! So no, not the “perfect energy source for the future” for “on earth”.

Hydrogen IS the Perfect source of Energy for the future.. for the SUN!

See, the SUN fuses the Hydrogen into Helium, and makes heat, thermal energy, etc., that we get to enjoy a safe distance away. And use via solar panels.

But on Earth?

Even for our engineered FUSION, Hydrogen isn’t great.. instead we focus on using isotopes of Hydrogen, hard to get, called Deuterium and Tritium, way easier, way more net energy for the effort.. and yes, once we get fusion rocking and rolling for power production, MAYBE we will get so good that some regular H2 will work.

but as to the “hydrogen economy” that was “sold” back 15 years ago as the “future”?

That was a bunch of badly regurgitated “science” spoken by fools and PhD types, who were not engineers that really work with H2.

H2 LEAKS thru just about all the normal stuff we can build pipes and tanks out of cheaply.

H2 can’t go into existing pipelines for Natural Gas.

H2 is easy to make go boom, and hard to sense.

THUS, if you MAKE a fuel that goes everywhere, stick to what you KNOW! And that is to make CH4 (Methane), or another more easily compressed to liquid “fuel” like Propane. Energy density matters for vehicles.

Hell, if you are “making” an Energy Carrier, try to make clean Gas!

But H2 IS super easy to make, just split water, store the H2 (toss the O2 on Earth). And if you have a way to MAKE extra power and want to save it? may be cheaper to make H2 and store it than buy a bunch of batteries, as you would only need a fuel cell or ICE generator to USE that H2 to turn back into electric.

Here are the pros and cons of using hydrogen as a transportation fuel :-

PROS :

1) hydrogen fuel cells produce no local pollution from their exhausts. (but then so do EV’s)

2) If you ever find yourself in a hot desert region with no drinking water you could drink the water from the exhaust and survive.

Cons :

1) Most hydrogen (H2) is locked up in water or methane (CH4) which requires an input of energy to release. currently 90% comes from steam cracking natural gas (CH4+) which requires alot of energy resulting in a gas (H2) with half the calorific value of the original gas (NG).. The other way is to use vast amounts of electricity to electrolyze water, so if you take renewables, other people go without and have to use fossil fuels to compensate. So from the get-go, hydrogen is definitely not green.

2) It is difficult to store on board vehicles. For an average car, you’d need 5kg of hydrogen, which doesn’t sound much, but at 300bar would require a tank 400Litres in size. This cannot be form-filled like batteries or a gasoline tank so would fill up your entire trunk space. So they use carbon-fiber reinforced steel tanks and pressurize them to 600 bar, but nobody has tested carbon fiber for long periods at such pressures. Any mainstream adoption would have to limited to 300bar, meaning hydrogen fuelled vehiceles would have less range than current EVs.

3) To make matters worse, hydrogen has a nasty habit of stress cracking steel at high pressures, so all tanks would have to shed their carbon fiber and be X-ray tested once a year, which could also compromise the carbon fiber. All in all, this is a safety nightmare.

Recently we had the tragic accident of the submersible that imploded in the North Atlantic when it was diving to the Titanic. This is an example of carbon fiber weakening under repeated pressurization/depressurization cycles.

Imagine everyone having these tanks in all the cars. It just wouldn’t work safely, and would be impossible to make safe.

4) You cannot transport hydrogen efficiently. Politicians have talked about re-purposing existing natural gas networks, but you can only safely transport hydrogen by mixing it to maximum of 30% in natural gas. Hydrogen is such a small molecule it escapes 5–8 times more readily than natural gas, and the tracer mercaptan molecule that is added will not follow the hydrogen.

If you attempted to pipe 100% hydrogen down existing networks it would leak and fill up void spaces everywhere in peoples houses, and there would be no way to detect it. Add to this hydrogen has a much broader range of flammability and has a lower ignition energy requirement and you have another safety nightmare. You are piping an untraceable, dangerously explosive, highly escaping gas into people houses.

5) A dedicated safe hydrogen network would cost any country hundreds of billions of dollars/euros/pounds to create and would have to be industrial spec. and cost many millions to maintain.

6) Your only resupply option would be trucks, and they would have to be pressurized cylinders. You would need at least10 trucks for every gasoline or deisel truck that now currently supplies your fuel network. That’s alot of inefficiencies and extra energy cost.

7) Hydrogen fuel cells are expensive as they require platinum and rhenium and rodium to make. And they aint getting cheaper. A 1KW stack costs about 1000 bucks, and you need about 30 stacks for an average car + electric motor train.

8) Hydrogen fuel cells perform worse than lithium ion in cold weather. They use a Ion-exchange membrane and the hydrogen + air and the reaction proceeds much slower than the ionic reactions in Li+ batteries. This means much more heating would be required for the fuel cell in winter months, which reduces range still further.

9) None of the above problems are ever really solvable with technology as the problems are associated with the physics and chemistry of hydrogen itself. Any improvements technology may make will be very small and not change the underlying inefficiencies.

10) All of the above problems also require additional energy to be used, so when you calculate from production to usage, you have ended up emitting more carbon dioxide into the air than conventional fuels.

Well, there are a couple of things to understand about this.

The first is that offshore wind farms in Europe are enormous. They are generating a very large amount of electricity.

The second is that building them was faster than building adequate transmission to get all that electricity to the big parts of Europe. That problem is going to go away eventually and big HVDC lines will get the electricity where it needs to go efficiently.

But in the meantime, there’s a challenge where they have times when they are capable of generating more electricity than they can transmit. So they feather the wind farms.

Or they could sell that electricity really, really cheaply so that they at least get something for it.

Electrolyzing water for hydrogen is something that only makes sense with incredibly cheap electricity. That’s a big part of what is driving the European model.

The second thing to know is that it’s the fossil fuel folks who are strongly backing this. 20% hydrogen means that there’s still 80% natural gas in the pipelines, and that gas generators that burn it are still used. It’s a 20% cut in CO2 emissions at point of generation, which is nothing to sneeze at, but as gas generation is running about 500 kg per MWh, that still means every MWh produces 400 kg of CO2. As the article points out, the target is an 80% reduction, not a 20% reduction. This is a bandaid and likely a dead end.

Last thing to know is that the electricity is much more efficiently used directly, if that’s possible. Say you start with a MWh of electricity, 1,000 kWh.

You throw away about 20% of the energy during electrolysis using PEM for hydrogen alone, more in most of the other manufactured gas schemes. So that leaves you with 800 kWh of energy. Then you mix it in an industrial process with natural gas. Some ancillary energy loss there, but let’s be kind and say it’s 2%. That leaves you with about 780 kWh worth of energy.

Then you pump it into a natural gas pipeline, and moving large masses of natural gas even when mixed with 20% hydrogen takes a lot of energy, much more than moving the equivalent energy in electricity over transmission lines the same distance. Call it 20%. That leaves you perhaps 625 kWh of energy equivalent. And remember, the reason you are doing this is because of the opportunity presented by insufficient transmission, so you can’t store it locally and use it, you have to pipe it somewhere.

Then you burn it in a natural gas generator with an efficiency of around 60%. That leaves you with the equivalent of perhaps 375 kWh of energy.

Basically, you’ve thrown away over 60% of the energy before it’s even starting to be used for anything.

Long-distance HVDC transmission loses about 5% over 2,000 kilometers. That means if you put it in an HVDC line you get 95% of the energy out the other end, but if you convert it to hydrogen you get less than 40% of the energy out the other end.

That’s why most people look at this approach and think it’s a bandaid at best and at worst a means for the fossil fuel industry to keep pumping fossil fuels.

No, hydrogen as it’s currently available is not even remotely clean. Nearly all the world’s supply of hydrogen is derived from steam reformation of fossil fuels (76% natural gas, 23% coal). Only around 2% of world hydrogen comes from clean sources. It’s essentially an even dirtier form of the fossil fuels it’s made from, due to the inefficiency of the conversion process.

A steam reformation plant which converts fossil fuels to hydrogen

You can make hydrogen from cleaner sources, but doing so requires very large amounts of electricity, so in order to make proper green hydrogen you need to use green electricity. The problem is that in almost all cases it’s much more efficient to just use that green electricity directly than it is to convert it into hydrogen. The only time it makes sense to use hydrogen is for any niche situations that are hard to electrify.

So no, the future is electric. Although hydrogen may have a small role to play supporting that.

Anybody who thinks he KNOWS what the future holds, in terms of which technologies will be the most dominant knows a lot less than he thinks he does.

Some people think the energy cost of using hydrogen as fuel is too high, and that therefore batteries will dominate. They reason that by using electricity directly to charge a battery, you use a lot less energy in total to move a car, etc.

This is a good argument, but it’s not watertight. The electricity needed to manufacture hydrogen ( separate it from other elements chemically and purify it for use as fuel ) may get to be cheap enough that the cost of it hardly matters. The people who believe in THIS scenario believe wind and solar electricity will eventually get to be dirt cheap you see.

Other people believe the very expensive materials such as platinum used as catalysts in fuel cells are in such short supply and so expensive that fuel cells will never be built by the tens of millions. It’s rather likely that platinum will always be very costly, but the people who are experimenting with fuel cells have already discovered several other substitutes that work well enough to be practical, and that will cost far less.

And the actual cost of building fuel cells might eventually fall to the point that they are CHEAPER than batteries. It’s true that batteries are getting cheaper these days, but stop and think about WHY. The raw materials aren’t getting cheaper. Batteries are getting cheaper because as the industry grows up, as it scales up, the people doing the work are constantly discovering new ways to lower the cost of every single step in the job of manufacturing a battery, plus new designs are cheaper to manufacture and use less materials per unit of capacity.

This same continuous process of lowering the cost of production applies to fuel cells as well.

Some future day, fuel cells may be CHEAPER to build than batteries, and they may last longer, and be more reliable.

But for what it’s worth, my guess is that batteries will dominate in the electric vehicle market for quite some time, especially in the light car and truck markets.

I think this is a safe bet because even if fuel cells do get to be cheaper than batteries, there isn’t any infrastructure in place to distribute and sell hydrogen to the owners of cars and trucks, whereas the electric grid extends to even the smallest backwoods communities these days in modern countries. Upgrading the grid to charge millions of cars will be an expensive undertaking, but the electric company will be glad to spend the money, because you spend money to make money, lol.

Supplying hydrogen at just one or two locations where the same vehicles can be refueled on a daily basis is easier, so if a city wants to use fuel cell buses, that city can put in just a small handful of hydrogen fueling stations to serve it’s entire bus fleet. That’s not so hard, and not so expensive as to be impractical.

First, Europe is not “making it work.” It is a planned initiative, and not an unmitigated success.

Second, the incentives are different. The pioneer in this effort is Denmark. The Danes have good reason to do so; they have so much offshore wind that only offloading the power to larger countries to the South allows them to stabilize their grid. They frequently have points at which more than 100% of their demand is met by wind; conversely, some weather events cause major deficits. Grid stabilization has a much higher premium in that part of Europe than in the United States, where renewables penetration is still low and we have no locations that are powered by an exceptionally high proportion of renewables like Denmark is.

Third, US gas firms prohibit the use of hydrogen in their natural gas lines. The SciAm article doesn’t go into the reasoning behind this, but I am quite confident that I know why.

Hydrogen is a major cause of corrosion through Hydrogen Embrittlement of Steel. If your gas pipeline infrastructure is built with chromium-molybdenum alloy steel to withstand it, then that’s great. If it’s not… then injecting hydrogen into the system is a terrible idea. The Europeans aren’t stupid, so I assume they’ve got the right materials in place.

In the US, on the other hand, the ASME standards for pressure piping recommend carbon steel or carbon/manganese alloy steel for line piping. Those are definitely vulnerable to hydrogen embrittlement.

It’s also the case that hydrogen diffuses through metal like crazy. Long-distance transmission is possible, and done, but mostly in bulk over short distances in specialized pipelines in the Rhine-Meuse-Schedlt and Houston/Gulf Coast petrochemical areas, where it makes sense to swap hydrogen. At pressure, we are talking about serious hydrogen losses, even for pipes buried underground.

Is hydrogen the perfect energy source for the future?

There is no free hydrogen available in the environment, so hydrogen is not a “source” of energy. It is simply one of the ways you can of store and distribute energy produced somewhere else. And sorry, it is far from a perfect way of storing and distributing energy.

Right now hydrogen as a fuel for passenger cars is mostly a dead-end.

Hydrogen may be a part of a future fuel and energy mix. But hydrogen won’t have a major role in passenger cars until something new comes along to make hydrogen more competitive with batteries.

The “Hydrogen economy” seemed like a good idea 50 years ago. But battery technology overtook hydrogen and now it is simply a niche product. It will remain that way until someone comes up with new materials and processes that make production and storage of hydrogen cheaper.

The round-trip efficiency of the process electricity > hydrogen > electricity is less than 40%. Compared with the same round trip for electricity > batteries > electricity at 85%.

That means your vehicle (or process) needs more than twice the input energy using hydrogen compared to batteries.

Add back the extra cost of special (read “expensive”) materials for the transmission, distribution and storage of hydrogen (because of Hydrogen embrittlement and corrosion) and add back that most (>90%) of the world’s hydrogen is produced by steam reforming from natural gas and what you have is an expensive idea.

Batteries won the passenger car market. The evidence of that is that every major car manufacturer either already has a battery-electric drivetrain on the showroom floor or has announced one. Only a handful of manufacturers are still experimenting with hydrogen.

Hydrogen might win some niche markets, ones less sensitive to cost and more sensitive to fuel or energy density.

If you are asking whether we should make hydrogen using electricity and then use that hydrogen to make electricity, then no. For a start, you lose 58% of the input energy doing that. It would be like offering to buy an apple from the store and paying for the apple by exchanging two apples. It makes no sense.

There are a handful of places in the world where wells similar to oil wells produce natural hydrogen and in these places it might make sense to use hydrogen power. However, the amount of electricity produced is tiny; not even a rounding error in the world’s overall electricity production.

Hydrogen as a fuel for passenger cars is a dead-end. The car industry figured that out.

Q: Does hydrogen power have a future?

The answer would be YES as well as NO.

Hydrogen seems a likely alternative to the toxic fuels that choke the earth. But before we embark on casting the die, we need to ensure that the process of generation of the gas is indeed green. Thus far, the ‘hype’ is justified. But we need to be aware of the fact that over-dependence on one source as a universal solution to our problems is fraught with dangers. For this, we need to create a bouquet of energy solutions.

Depleting the atmosphere of hydrogen is not a solution as it may set off a series of chain reactions with undesirable results-both direct and surrogate. Hence we need to depend on water and considering our gluttonous energy consumption, we need high volumes. Hence we need to link the production facility of Hydrogen with wastewater treatment facilities. However, hydrogen can be e produced efficiently using new technologies in electrolysis.

But the real catch is that the process itself needs energy and creates a conundrum where we are only starting a chain without finding a real solution. So, we should first be discussing a primary source of energy before we discuss the possibilities of its large-scale commercial use. So we are back to the chicken and egg conundrum. But thankfully, there is the Sun which seems to be the ultimate solution for all our problems; directly or vicariously. So the ultimate scenario should be like this; A huge wastewater treatment plant using solar power for treatment and the electrolysis plant again using solar power to split the hydrogen from the treated effluent water and it will be more than two birds with one stone and a classic example of sustainability!

But a word of caution: Our attitude to the use of energy has to change. Energy binging is likely to cause more negatives than what we can think of right now!

Replacing fossil fuels with hydrogen fuel would only be of marginal help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and then only from tricky areas. But electrifying the energy supply is the best way to green it, and hydrogen only has a secondary – and at best temporary – role to play.

Green hydrogen uses electricity from renewable energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. But electrolysis is expensive and inefficient. If hydrogen made from electrolysis was used for heating homes, say, only 62 per cent as much heat energy would be created as the electrical energy started with. If electricity is instead used to drive a heat pump, 280 to 410 percent more heat energy is produced than the electricity consumed, because heat pumps use the electrical energy to extract the heat energy already present in the air or ground near a building.

Hydrogen has very poor energy efficiency,“water-to-wheel” (as it were) that it makes sure that battery-powered EVs are an order of more efficient than the fuel cell car. Ultimately also more expensive than the battery version due to the high energy losses

Even blending 20% of green hydrogen (the maximum the system could tolerate with current equipment) into existing natural gas pipelines will only save around 7% of carbon emissions. Blending hydrogen with natural gas reduces the energy content, meaning more of the mix is needed to deliver the same amount of energy to the consumer. Furthermore, the safety of hydrogen in domestic environments is questionable and where hydrogen is burned in a gas cooker or gas boiler, it still generates NOx (nitrous oxides, which are powerful greenhouse gases) emissions. Blending hydrogen with methane results in higher average energy prices. -higher prices, but no environmental advantages.

No. If abundant clean energy is the future, green hydrogen is a distinct subset of that future. The future is dominated by utility scale wind and utility scale solar. Energy efficiency is the third technology group needed for a 100% renewable future.

I don’t make predictions if I can avoid it. Green hydrogen from various processes to separate hydrogen from oxygen in water are clearly going to play a role in the future. But a larger part of the current non-electric energy use of the world can transition faster and more easily to cheaper electricity from wind and solar.

Hydrogen is likely to be reformed into a lot of other fuels and chemicals. Although there is a lot of talk about hydrogen, most of the more than $100 billion worth of wind and solar projects that I know about are planning to make that hydrogen into something else before it leaves the plant. Ammonia, methanol, gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and plastics feedstocks are all being planned. I haven’t heard of anyone planning to make methane, but when I do, I will consider it the end of the fossil fuel era because it is game over for fossil fuels if we can transition by feeding green methane into the existing natural gas supplies and pipelines and storage caverns. Most of the developed world has much more natural gas storage than would be needed to make wind and solar provide 100% of our energy, with about 20% of it stored as methane and burned in existing natural gas combined cycle power plants.

Many sectors are going to mix green fuels and electricity, at least for a while. Jet fuel is the hardest sector I have identified, to make renewable, and I know of no alternative to do that other than hydrogen made into jet fuel. Biomass can also be made into jet fuel, but replacing the current jet fuel from fossil fuels with biomass would require about all of the biomass that is presently used for any energy purpose whatsoever, and some of that biomass may not be suitable to convert to jet fuel.

Using hydrogen from wind and solar is not cheaper than today’s hydrogen from fossil fuels. But in a decade or so, when some large region of the world has enough wind and solar to produce more power than it needs for some hours of the year, and I assume it needs to be distributed around the year fairly well, we will see very inexpensive electricity and while there are industrial customers who will compete for that electricity, hydrogen is likely to be a first order use, because it can be tailored to the irregular timing of availability.

Any way you look at it, hydrogen is likely to be less than a third of total energy, and I think it will be serving the dual purposes of storage and easing the transition to electricity using equipment. It could be more than that, but if you look at something like the hydrogen fuel cell car, it is clear that electric cars will be cheaper and more easily accessible. Hydrogen fuel cells have a more likely role in heavy transportation and vehicles where high duty cycles are important.

If the purpose is to create an energy economy that produces minimal or no carbon dioxide, then Hydrogen is a potential energy source that can help accomplish this goal. Hydrogen can be used as a fuel for heating or to create electricity using turbines, reciprocating engines or fuel cells. It can also be used as a reducing agent in a smelter to produce metals from their ores (iron/steel for example) a process that now uses metallurgical coal/coke which produces the reducing agent carbon monoxide and a lot of carbon dioxide.

Burning Hydrogen produces only water vapor, and while water vapor is a greenhouse gas, its extremely short lifetime in the atmosphere makes it a “reactive” greenhouse gas. It doesn’t drive earth’s climate, its concentration in the atmosphere is a reaction to changes in earth’s climate that’s driven by other factors, most importantly carbon dioxide and to some extent methane.

Hydrogen can be made directly by applying an electric current to water (Electrolysis), a process that lends itself well to generating Hydrogen from non-carbon electrical sources like: Wind and Solar power, hydroelectric power, and nuclear power. Electrolysis is currently about 70% efficient in producing Hydrogen, and fuel cells are about 40 - 60% efficient in creating electricity, so using Hydrogen for storage of energy does impose a significant efficiency cost (it’s about 28 - 40% efficient overall using fuel cells).

Other types of storage strategies: Gravitational: (e.g. using a crane and electrical power to stack weights high up and letting them slowly descend while driving an electric generator), Pumped Hydropower: (using electrical energy to pump water uphill to a reservoir and then running it through a turbine generator as it flows back downhill), Compressed air energy storage: (pumping a large underground cavern with compressed air and releasing it later to drive a turbine generator), Batteries, etc. can produce efficiencies in the 80 - 95% range. However these other strategies have issues with land use, siting, resource availability (batteries especially), and scale some of which are much easier to resolve using a fuel like Hydrogen where much of the infrastructure (storage tanks, pipelines) is already in place.

It should be noted however that Hydrogen will still require much retrofitting of this existing infrastructure. Hydrogen H2, is a very small molecule that will readily leak out of existing natural gas pipeline, oil pipeline, and natural gas storage seals. Hydrogen can also degrade metals like steel (by absorption) and titanium (by reacting with it) (see “Hydrogen Embrittlement”). One way to avoid some of these unwanted attributes of elemental Hydrogen is to convert it to a compound like a metal hydride, store it that way, and convert it back when using it as a fuel. This solution would however impose further efficiency costs.

So to your question, “Why would Hydrogen be essential for energy transition?” (to non-carbon sources presumably). Possibly because despite its inefficiency and the difficulty of adapting existing infrastructure, it would be the easiest to implement given the current resource and land use situation in densely populated Europe.

It will be far more profitable to build long electric transmission lines to Europe and simply sell the electricty that they make to make the Hydrogen with (assuming its solar or whatever) than convert the energy to Hydrogen and store and transmit it that way.

If you need storage batteries are a cheaper option than Hydrogen.

Much the same way the UK is building a electrical transmission line to Morocco, were solar and wind farms will mostly send power to the UK.

It doesn’t make any sense to use Hydrogen for energy purposes, its expensive, dangerous, problematic and very inefficient. You throw away more energy than you sell.

Any such “studies” are usually just scams to extract money from investors.

We currently have no source of molecular hydrogen. Most is made from natural gas by steam reforming, a process that releases CO2. So the hydrogen we use is actually a refined fossil fuel. CO2 is released, not when you burn it, but when you produce it.

When you make hydrogen by water electrolysis you need more energy to produce it than you get out of it. In the future hydrogen may be produced by photolysis or thermolysis of water, which is potentially cheaper, because you do not use grid electricity.

Deep in the earth crust some scientists assume huge amounts of hydrogen (most of it rather dispersed), but this resource is unreachable in the foreseeable future.

So although hydrogen cannot solve “energy problems” it may some day become a valuable means of energy storage. Current methods of hydrogen production are too inefficient though. Another problem is to keep hydrogen from leaking. In its atomic form hydrogen can even disperse through steel.

An intrinsic problem with hydrogen is its low voluminous energy density (J/l), so for usage it must be compressed or liquified, which both needs a lot of energy. An advantage is its high specific energy density (J/kg).

EDIT: This answer did not age well. Seems hydrogen is catching on now, much earler than I thought. Suddenly there are a great number of projects planned, and many of them are “green hydrogen” projects (electrolysis using renewable energy). Some are “blue” (steam reforming with CO2 capture), “turquoise” (pyrolysis of natural gas, no CO2 emissions) and “red” (electrolysis using nuclear energy). Native hydrogen wells close to the surface also exist (“white hydrogen”), but only one is tapped so far (in Mali).

Q: Is green hydrogen the 'energy of the future' for Asia?

A: No, it’s not the'energy of the future' for Asia (my bolding) or anywhere else for that matter.

It has a role to play, but that role is widely misunderstood. Part of this is the deliberate misinformation spread by the more cynical. But even so, exactly why they do this is often a puzzle. And often it even seems in good faith. I guess ignorance sometimes just breeds more ignorance.

Hydrogen can replace electricity, but it cannot replace fossil fuel, solar, wind or nuclear. That may not be what you’ve been told.

There’s a lot of interest in replacing natural gas and even electricity by Hydrogen. That’s what green Hydrogen does when it is generated by using renewable electricity. But why anyone would want to do this is a real puzzle.

The key point here is that Hydrogen should be seen as a STORE of renewable energy not as a source of energy.

As others have mentioned, Hydrogen can he produced using solar or wind energy using electrolysis. This isn't a very energy efficient process when comparing other methods of generating energy. But it may be a cost-effective method ot STORING energy at grid scale.

The biggest challenge for massive adoption of solar and wind energy greater than 20% of the total grid supply is intermittency. For example solar PV is the only major global energy source that turns off every single day at sunset. If we are to achieve 100% renewable electricity supply then we need some way to store intermittent renewable energy for use at night and on windless days. At this stage the only gridscale, cost effective storage available is hydro pump storage. Unfortunately this type of storage is dependent on having the right topography - which many countries don't have. As yet, no battery technology is even close to being cost effective at grid scale. THIS is where Hydrogen might find its niche. Thus the question becomes "is Hydrogen the most cost effective, grid scale energy storage option?"

I can't answer that question but I'm sure one of the many Quora experts can.

Can green hydrogen be a sustainable renewable energy solution?

The current hype about a coming "hydrogen economy" obscures a key problem in the technology that has somehow escaped the attention of hydrogen evangelists. It doesn't appear like people who have been listening to the message have grasped it either. The fault is mostly caused by physical laws.

Hydrogen must be produced by electrolyzing water, which separates it into the H2 and O that it is made of, in order to be totally green. H2 can be made from fossil fuels (typically methane), however this produces either "grey" hydrogen (which still emits a lot of CO2) or "blue" hydrogen (which emits very little CO2) (which captures 90 percent of the CO2 and stores it, merely delaying the problem).

Only using electricity generated from renewable sources to electrolyze hydrogen from water makes the fuel completely green.

This is a wasteful and inefficient system. The process of electrolyzing hydrogen already wastes 30% of the energy used in the water splitting process. You then lose another 26% of the remaining energy in getting the hydrogen to the fuel station, resulting in a total loss of 48 percent of the energy before any hydrogen reaches a car. Some of this can be saved by producing hydrogen on-site, but electrolysis plants are expensive, therefore they will most likely be centralised. By comparison, the average loss from transporting electricity across cables to a charging station is only 5%, leaving you with 95%.

Officials from the hydrogen industry are not being honest or clear about the challenges around the usage of hydrogen as a fuel. They are attempting to persuade legislators that hydrogen is "green," while in reality, what is now produced is far from green. Several concerns remain unanswered: what proportion of hydrogen can be burned in power plants; how much hydrogen will come from non-renewable sources; what other air pollutants will be created; can current pipeline infrastructure be used; and will this fuel help us move away from fossil fuels?

Hydrogen is is not a positive step forward in energy transformation.

Hydrogen is an energy storage media, not a new fuel. Making hydrogen is equivalent to charging a battery. Using hydrogen is equivalent to discharging a battery. For a battery this is about 95% efficient round trip. However, this process for hydrogen is at best 50% efficient, wasting fully one-half of the energy.

• Present hydrogen production comes from fossil fuel feed stock, notably natural gas. This has absolutely no environmental value.
• Hydrogen can be made from water by employing energy (electricity) to separate the hydrogen and oxygen. This is part of the process described above that is 50% efficient. If the hydrogen is burned or used in combustion engines, versus fuel cells, the efficiency drops to ~10% (wasting 90% of the energy).

Presently, only 15% of the electricity is from renewable sources, 85% from conventional sources. Using nominal electricity to generate hydrogen, wastes 50% of that energy, a majority of which is fossil fuel based. Using renewable energy (versus simply using it to offset the 85%) to produce hydrogen reduces the renewable portion, and INCREASES fossil fuel consumption.

When we have energy to waste, hydrogen makes sense. As long as a majority of the energy is from non-renewable sources, hydrogen is a complete waste.

• Investing in the grid to enable superior offset of fossil fuel production from excess renewable power during narrow peaks is a superior solution.
• Investing in pumped hydro storage of energy, which is ~85% efficient and a presently used, readily available utility-scale storage technology
• Investing in underground compressed air energy storage, which is ~70% efficient, available technology, ready at utility scale
• et al

Hydrogen makes no technical, economic or environmental sense. It is “green snake oil”, being advertised by shysters seeking to line their pockets with well-meaning interest.

Original Question:

“What is or could become green hydrogen with regard to the energy transition of a country? What do you think about it?”

Short answer for now- no. Here's why.

EROI is the key. (Energy Returned On Energy Invested) How much energy is consumed to produce energy? See link below for a table of various energies and the cost to produce this.
18.0 Wind
80.0 Coal
100.0 Hydro
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_invested

http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/articles/2007/08/hydrogen-hype-49540.htmlThey envision homeowners generating their own renewable power (using solar, geothermal, micro-hydro, or whatever they've got) and turning it into hydrogen that they can store on-site, then consume in their hydrogen-powered cars or in the fuel cell stack that powers their home.

Unfortunately, the vision breaks down when we analyze the energy return on investment (EROI) of the process. According to the second law of thermodynamics, when energy is converted from one form into another, a little energy is lost in the process, usually as heat. Essentially, every time you convert energy, you pay a tax.

Graphic view:

http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2013/03/energy-return-on-investment-which-fuels-win/

In India it sure is good.

The Cabinet has cleared India's Rs 20,000 cr National Green Hydrogen Mission to make the country a global green hydrogen hub in Jan 2023.

The government has formally approved the National Green Hydrogen Mission, with a stated aim of making India a global hub for the production of green hydrogen.

A mission outlay of Rs 19,744 crore was cleared by the Union Cabinet on Jan 4, 2023, aimed at the creation of export opportunities for green hydrogen and its derivatives; decarbonisation of the energy sector and use in mobility applications in a bid to lower the dependence on imported fossil fuels; and the development of indigenous manufacturing capacities.

The ultimate aim is to fuel key sectors of the economy using hydrogen that is made by splitting water through an electrical process called electrolysis, using a device called electrolyser that is powered entirely by renewable energy.

Hydrogen as a fuel Hydrogen, the most common element in nature, exists only in combination with other elements, and has to be extracted from naturally occurring compounds like water (which is a combination of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom).

Hydrogen is a clean molecule, but the process of extracting it is energy intensive.

While hydrogen’s potential as a clean fuel source has a history of nearly 150 years, it was only after the oil price shocks of the 1970s that the possibility of hydrogen replacing fossil fuels came to be considered seriously.

Three carmakers — Japan's Honda and Toyota, and South Korea’s Hyundai — having since moved decisively to commercialise the technology, albeit on a limited scale.

The sources and processes by which hydrogen is derived are categorised by colour tabs.

Hydrogen produced from fossil fuels is called grey hydrogen, which constitutes the bulk of the hydrogen generated today.

Hydrogen generated from fossil fuels with carbon capture and storage options is called blue hydrogen, while hydrogen generated using electrolysers powered by renewable power sources is called green hydrogen.

Green hydrogen potential Green hydrogen has specific advantages.

One, it is a clean burning molecule that can decarbonise a range of sectors including iron and steel, chemicals, and transportation.

Two, renewable energy that cannot be stored or used by the grid can be channeled to produce hydrogen.

Green hydrogen is not commercially viable at present.

The current cost in India is around Rs 350-400 per kg; it is likely to become viable only at a production cost of under Rs 100/ kg.

This is what the Hydrogen Energy Mission aims for.

With implicit subsidy support and a government-backed R&D push, the plan is to target lower costs of renewable power generation and to bring down the costs of electrolysers to make the production of green hydrogen cost-competitive.

Green hydrogen could eventually potentially replace fossil fuels and fossil fuel-based feedstocks in fertiliser production, petroleum refining, steel production, and transport applications.

The United States and European Union have already pledged incentives worth several billions of dollars for green hydrogen projects. India’s Mission was first announced by the Prime Minister in his Independence Day speech in 2021.

The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy is in the process of formulating guidelines for the scheme that seeks to promote the development of green hydrogen production capacity of at least 5 million metric tonnes (MMT) per annum with an associated renewable energy capacity addition of about 125 gigawatts (GW) by 2030.

A major part of this is a proposed Strategic Interventions for Green Hydrogen Transition Programme (SIGHT), under which two financial incentive mechanisms — targeting domestic manufacturing of electrolysers and the production of green hydrogen — will be promoted to achieve a reduction in fossil fuel imports and abatement of annual greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.

The draft Mission document is likely to propose support for production and deployment of green hydrogen, alongside a major push for hydrogen in the auto sector, R&D for fuel cell development and pilot projects for fuel cell vehicles.

Auto sector, fuel cells

Hydrogen is an energy carrier, not a source of energy. Hydrogen fuel must be transformed into electricity by a device called a fuel cell stack before it can be used to power a car or truck.

A fuel cell converts chemical energy into electrical energy using oxidising agents through an oxidation-reduction reaction. Fuel cell-based vehicles most commonly combine hydrogen and oxygen to produce electricity to power the electric motor on board.

Since fuel cell vehicles use electricity to run, they are considered electric vehicles (EVs).

Inside each fuel cell, hydrogen is drawn from an onboard pressurised tank and made to react with a catalyst, usually made from platinum.

As the hydrogen passes through the catalyst, it is stripped of its electrons, which are forced to move along an external circuit, producing an electrical current.

This current is used by the electric motor to power the vehicle, with the only byproduct being water vapour.

Hydrogen fuel cell cars have a near-zero carbon footprint. Hydrogen is about 2-3 times as efficient as burning petrol, because an electric chemical reaction is much more efficient than combustion. The Toyota Mirai and the Honda Clarity cars are powered by fuel cells. Use cases in India India’s electricity grid is predominantly coal-based and will continue to be so, thus negating collateral benefits from a major EV push — as coal will have to be burnt to generate the electricity that will power these vehicles.

In several countries that are pushing EVs, much of the electricity is generated from renewables — in Norway for example, 99 per cent is hydroelectric power.

Hydrogen vehicles can be especially effective in long-haul trucking and other hard-to-electrify sectors such as shipping and long-haul air travel.

Using heavy batteries in these applications would be counterproductive, especially for countries such as India, where the electricity grid is predominantly coal-fired.

Also, given that much of the generation capacity addition over the last 10 years has been by way of renewable energy sources such as solar and wind, this can be diverted for green hydrogen production during non-peak hours.

Besides auto, there is a concerted attempt to leverage green hydrogen in sectors such as petroleum refining and steel.

In April 2022, state-owned Oil India Limited commissioned India’s first 99.99 per cent pure green hydrogen plant in Jorhat, Assam.

In the proposed Mission, the steel sector has been made a stakeholder, and it has been proposed to set up pilot plants with part funding from the government to explore the feasibility of using green hydrogen in Direct Reduced Iron (DRI) production by partly replacing natural gas with hydrogen in gas-based DRI plants.

Based on the success of the pilot projects, the gas-based DRI units are to be encouraged for large-scale adoption of the process.

Kerala has set up a high-level working group for its own Hydrogen Economy Mission to devise a strategic roadmap, policy formulations, and implementation plans for facilitating investments in green hydrogen and making the state “a green hydrogen hub”.

Indian Oil Corporation Ltd\u2019s R&D centre, in collaboration with Tata Motor Limited, had earlier carried out trials of hydrogen fuel cell buses.

Companies such as Reliance Industries Ltd, Adani Enterprises, JSW Energy, and Acme Solar have plans to tap the green hydrogen opportunity.

Adani announced in June that it will collaborate with France's Total Energies to jointly create the “world's largest green hydrogen ecosystem”.

US-based Ohmium International has commissioned India's first green-hydrogen factory in Karnataka.