Don’t give up on green hydrogen

Like many addressing a pending technology transition, the opinion piece, Let’s be realistic about green hydrogen, pointed out all the reasons it won’t work based on flawed assumptions and anchoring on the status quo. The thrust of the piece is that green hydrogen costs more than fossil fuel-derived hydrogen, it is hard to transport, and hard to get enough cheap renewable energy to produce, so we should just give up on trying to use it as a primary tool to combat climate change. But the huge, unspoken assumption in this opinion piece is that we will never consider the cost of climate change when making energy decisions. In many parts of the U.S. and the world, that is already a false assumption.

The reality is that we will never achieve a carbon-free economy without green hydrogen and green hydrogen carriers like ammonia, ethanol and formic acid. It is true that the transition to green hydrogen faces significant challenges, including one that the author did not directly cite — government regulations and purity tests that other electricity-consuming industries don’t face. However, we shouldn’t let the fact that it will be hard to make the transition dissuade us from moving as rapidly as possible in that direction. 

Production costs for green hydrogen are indeed a big challenge and the Inflation Reduction Act provided incentives to assist with the cost differential between grey and green hydrogen. Even so, in most cases it is true that if there is no cost to emit carbon, fossil fuels will be a cheaper way to produce hydrogen. It is also true that sourcing renewable energy at all hours will be difficult, if not impossible, in the near future. 

Wind and solar technology developed and became cost effective in part because states passed renewable portfolio standards that required a portion of energy production come from those technologies. Notably, those standards did not require that the energy production come at certain times of the year or day. One way to make significant progress toward a carbon-free economy is to allow hydrogen producers to retire Renewable Energy Certificates, or RECs, for the annual energy consumed regardless of when those carbon-free generators were built and what time of the year the RECs were produced. 

Distribution of gaseous hydrogen is another challenge and ammonia and other hydrogen carriers do indeed require more energy to create. However, this is a challenge we will have to overcome to produce fuel for marine vessels, aviation, railroads and long-haul trucking. It will be possible to move people and goods without using fossil fuels, but it will require a lot of new clean energy sources. The alternative of just continuing to use cheap fossil fuels and ignoring the costs and impacts of climate change is not the rational choice.

Finally, the end-uses of green hydrogen. Those who say that no market will exist because green hydrogen will cost more than grey hydrogen ignore the cost of carbon in the production of grey hydrogen. In states like Washington, there is already a price on carbon and consumers of fossil fuels and grey hydrogen are investigating a transition to green hydrogen. Across the country, numerous projects were proposed with partial funding from the federal government as part of the hydrogen hub process.

In summary, policy-makers should not narrow the applications of green hydrogen research and application, but rather look for ways to incorporate the true societal costs of greenhouse gas emissions into all energy sources. Then we will see what is realistic when it comes to green hydrogen.