Blue Hydrogen, Big Oil’s Newest Lie

A study published in Energy Science & Engineering by two leading climate scientists, Robert Howarth and Mark Jacobson, exposes the myth of the so called “blue hydrogen” and its provenance: the oil and gas industry.

For years, the industry has been trying to convince the world that it believes in sustainable energy, making hydrogen as a by-product of natural gas processing. In the process, it has received billions of dollars in subsidies, and aided and abetted by the motor industry giants like Toyota that are desperate to slow down the transition to electrification and hold on to its profits. The company is trying to win the public over to hydrogen, and recently put the company’s president behind the wheel of a Corolla converted to hydrogen in an endurance race.

The reality? Not good: blue hydrogen generates, over its production cycle, more climate-damaging emissions than any other fuel. Assuming methane leakage rates of 1.54%, 2.54% and 4.3%, based on their research and EPA estimates, the authors expose the oil industry’s lies to show that blue hydrogen production generates more greenhouse gas equivalents than simply burning natural gas. In fact, with a leakage rate of 3.5%, not at all unusual for such operations, blue hydrogen production is even worse for the climate than burning coal, the most harmful fuel to the environment.

The problem lies in the combined emissions of carbon dioxide and methane, which are higher for gray hydrogen and blue hydrogen — whether or not they are treated with carbon capture processes — than for any of the known fossil fuels. In this sense, the adoption of carbon dioxide capture facilities by the oil industry has been a diversionary maneuver to direct attention to carbon dioxide while the clearest climate culprit, methane, remained unchanged.

The conclusion couldn’t be clearer: blue hydrogen should never be considered as alternative to anything, because its use is even more harmful. Which, considering that up to 96% of the hydrogen produced today, according to the International Energy Agency, is obtained from fossil fuels, exposes the oil industry’s lies to buy time and continue extracting oil and gas from the ground.

The truth is that the only acceptable hydrogen comes from the electrolysis of water using renewable energies, and at the moment, these processes are costly. The long and the short of it is that hydrogen of any color is not a viable alternative and is simply being used as a way to stop the advance of electric vehicles. Once again, it’s been shown that we cannot believe anything Big Oil, which has single-handedly done more damage to the planet than any other industry, says.

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This post was previously published on Medium.

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