Hydrogen is considered by its promoters to be an optimal low carbon fuel, essential to achieving the 1.5°C target. As a storable, flexible and clean-burning gas, it can conceptually do much of the work currently done by fossil fuels. Indeed, the fossil gas industry is one of the major advocates of hydrogen as a reliable fuel for powering cars, heating homes and burning in power plants. Gas infrastructures continue to be developed on the grounds that fossil gas could be replaced by hydrogen in the future.
However hydrogen comes with several red flags: it is voluminous and expensive to transport; the value chains and infrastructure needed to support widespread use of hydrogen are immature; its use is in many cases costly and inefficient; and there are unresolved safety and public acceptability concerns, particularly with respect to domestic uses.
Moreover, not all hydrogen is produced the same way and not all types contribute to the goals of the Paris Agreement. Currently, most hydrogen is produced using fossil gas (“gray hydrogen”) and, even with the addition of carbon capture technologies ("blue hydrogen"), its greenhouse gas footprint would be more than 20% larger than burning natural gas or coal for heat, according to new research from Cornell and Stanford Universities.
With hydrogen projects likely to attract significant investment in the following years, this webinar for financial institutions provided insights into the role hydrogen can play in the climate transition, as well as some of its limitations. In the first part of the event, we had an overview of hydrogen supply and its compatibility with climate neutrality. We also discussed the potential and challenges of hydrogen blending, hydrogen for heating and what it means in terms of infrastructure deployment. In the second part, we focused on blue hydrogen, explaining why its use seems difficult to justify on climate grounds and why this risks delaying a true decarbonisation of the global energy economy.
Learn more:
- Read E3G’s Hydrogen: Factsheet Series
- Read the article “How green is blue hydrogen?” and its press coverage.
- Watch our webinar “The role of biogas in the decarbonization of the energy sector: potential and challenges”
