Hydrogen: An Energy Source for Pragmatists

When a culture is forced to change its fundamental energy source, like climate change is forcing us right now to quickly move from fossil fuels to renewable sources of power, chances are all hell will break loose from time to time. And it seems that this winter and next spring and summer the world could face a slew of almost inevitable transitional nightmares caused by shortages and chaotic planning when making a change from a sure but deadly source of power to uncertain but far healthier options. We need to keep agile and open to possibilities if we hope to dodge the worst situations.

After decades of unconscionable dithering and procrastinating by global leadership, ours is not a time for purists and absolutists either, but rather for forthright pragmatists who do what works for as long as they can and then shift to something more adaptive when it appears.

That’s why I have to side with New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham’s move to make our state a so-called “hub” for hydrogen energy development. She’s following the example of countries around the world, including Japan and France, that are investing in hydrogen as a “niche” energy source that could cut the release of greenhouse gases by albeit limited but significant amounts, according to The Economist.

Hydrogen is not a panacea. But it can be a useful part of an all-out assault on greenhouse gas emissions. And, yes, it’s a gamble, but not a reckless one. We would be investing state funds in a volatile energy environment that could careen away from hydrogen and its technologies in response to new inventions, discoveries an d refinements. And probably will, but not perhaps in our lifetimes.

And, yes, hydrogen has its downsides. It requires more storage space than fossil fuels. It’s harder to transport by pipeline because it can make existing infrastructure brittle and prone to cracking, but its manufacture can be localized on-site and require no transport at all. And it has to be “manufactured” rather than extracted and refined, which can produce greenhouse gas pollution that has to be “sequestered,” perhaps underground.

But hydrogen has immense advantages too. It can be extracted from water as well as from fossil fuels, so its supply is virtually endless. And no matter how it’s manufactured, when it’s used, its “tailpipe” emissions are not of carbonized pollution but of H₂O. Adding hydrogen to the arsenal of alternative energy sources gives the world another option in the competing mix of new clean fuel sources. And oil and gas workers, of which there are thousands in New Mexico, can be, it is said, easily re-educated to operate hydrogen infrastructure and technology.

A bleak, cold winter all over Europe in the months ahead, made worse by COVID-induced economic and supply-side slowdowns, could stress limited energy supplies so profoundly that huge populations simply run out of power for long periods of time, causing economic and human disasters with the randomness of roulette. And a hot, brutal summer could do the same thing in the American Southwest, when drought has made hydro-electric power unavailable to stop blackouts from marauding through major cities and croplands, and solar production sites are not yet up and running because of manufacturing disruptions overseas.

To oppose hydrogen because of its downsides while supporting, say, “clean” nuclear power, as some billionaire “environmentalists” do, seems absurd to me. Hydrogen production will produce no Chernobyls, no Three Mile Islands, no Fukushimas. Helping to make “green hydrogen” that doesn’t come from carbon fuels, on the other hand, but involves electrically separating hydrogen from water might redeem nuclear power’s ridiculously dangerous realities in the short run, while giving renewable energy sources backup in hydrogen production.

I’d say hydrogen is in the middle range of the pollution spectrum. Fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas) and nuclear energy are at one end, and green hydrogen and renewables (solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, biomass) are at the other.

The issue is really in how hydrogen is produced. The vast majority of hydrogen in use today — 90 to 95% — is “blue hydrogen,” derived from a high temperature process in which steam “reforms” hydrocarbon fuels, like gasified coal and natural gas, with resulting high-intensity hydrocarbon pollution.

And there’s the rub. That can’t be allowed to happen in New Mexico. Whatever legal structure for hydrogen production the governor is creating before she sends a hydrogen bill to the Legislature next year must privilege green hydrogen over blue hydrogen. It must mandate that New Mexico be in the vanguard of producing green hydrogen by “electrolytic” processes, using renewable energy to create electricity that separates hydrogen from water molecules and produces no greenhouse emissions at all. That would make New Mexico’s investment in hydrogen a truly pioneering effort.

It’s not like hydrogen power is pie in the sky. Seven years ago Hyundai started leasing fuel cell cars in Los Angeles, and a year later Toyota and Honda did, too. Hydrogen can be used to make steel, which The Economist says accounts now for nearly 8% of all greenhouse gas emissions. It can be used successfully for commercial transport, including powering locomotives. And hydrogen can also “be used to store and transport renewable energy in bulk,” supplementing batteries. It can be “stored cheaply for long periods of time and converted to electricity on demand.”

But there is the issue of water to consider. In a time of drought, how can a nation depend on hydrogen produced either with vast amounts of steam (blue hydrogen) or large amounts of water (green hydrogen), and still be considered helpful in slowing down climate change and its worst effects? The question is all in how much water is used and where the water comes from. It’s generally assumed that desalinated sea water would be the source. And the amounts are unknowable. But to me it’s a sure bet that there will never be such a thing as a hydrogen economy in the sense that there is a fossil fuel economy, so water use would be, in the long run, relatively limited. Green hydrogen will probably always be part of a clean energy mix of various kinds of renewable sources that eventually phase out fossil fuels. But that may take many decades. And there’s really no time like the present for using green hydrogen fuel as a far cleaner transition fuel than natural gas and as a competitive alternative to hugely expensive and inevitably dangerous nuclear power options.

Moving to a renewable energy economy is the goal; hydrogen is a helpful way to get there. That’s the wave of the future. And that’s the wave New Mexico needs to ride as long as it lasts.

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it