Advocates of blue hydrogen — produced from fossil fuels with carbon capture and storage (CCS) — are talking “utter rubbish” and pulling the wool over policymakers’ eyes, according to the boss of one of the world’s largest electrolyser manufacturers.
“I’m worried that governments have been sold a pup with blue hydrogen and CCS,” says Graham Cooley, chief executive of UK-based ITM Power, using a British expression meaning “to be tricked into getting something not as good as promised”.
“Not only is it more expensive than green hydrogen [over the medium term], it does not help you with energy storage or assimilate more renewables on the network, and is not a net-zero [emission] technology,” he tells Recharge, pointing out that it is not possible to capture all of the CO2 emissions when creating H2 from methane or coal. A net-zero energy system — such as the UK government has promised by 2050 — will therefore simply not be possible using blue hydrogen.
“Blue hydrogen will always require a methane pipeline, which will always leak,” he adds. Methane is 84 times more potent a heat-trapping greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide over 20 years, according to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
By contrast, green hydrogen — produced by using renewable energy to split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen inside an electrolyser — is an entirely zero-emissions gas, Cooley says - link
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