The prospect of a green hydrogen economy comes with significant opportunities and risks. There is a need to both promote and carefully shape the much needed expansion of production, while limiting the end use of green hydrogen.
- There is a renewed, significant interest – bordering even to hype – about hydrogen worldwide. Some of that interest is triggered by the realisation, that decarbonisation of „hard to abate sectors“ like certain industries and long distance sea and air transport needs to begin already now in order to reach the Paris temperature goals. Other players rather use hydrogen as a convenient smoke screen to continue fossil gas investments. This makes it sometimes ambiguous and difficult to form an opinion.
- Hydrogen can be generated with various technologies (Box1). Only green hydrogen made of renewable electricity can be truly sustainable. As there is currently very little green hydrogen available on the market, there is a challenge to scale up simultaneously production and a market for green hydrogen.
- There is a need to distinguish between production and end uses of green hydrogen. Each comes with a different set of challenges. Beyond the “greenwashing” issue mentioned above, the main problem exist in an excessive promotion of end uses where more efficient direct uses of electricity are possible.
- Production: If done in a environmentally and socially sustainable manner (see Box 2), scaling up of hydrogen production is generally beneficial and should be supported, promoting best practices, making sure green electricity and hydrogen are produced under good environmental and social standards, and that economic benefits accrue to the host countries.
- End use: There is a significant number of industries that promote the use of hydrogen to enable the continuation or even expansion of outdated, wasteful modes of transport and production. This needs to be opposed. To replace fossil fuels, the direct use of electricity or the efficient storage of green electricity in batteries (wherever possible) instead of the highly inefficient route via electrolysis to hydrogen and then back to electricity via fuel cells (e.g. for passenger cars, trucks). Hydrogen is very versatile, but its production is inefficient (losses of 15-40% of energy). It is precious and for a long time it is going to remain scarce. Therefore, it should be the fuel of last resort. Its use should be very targeted, and be used to replace existing dirty fuels. Its cleanness should never be used as an excuse for the expansion of wasteful energy uses, satisfying expansive desires (e.g. flying taxis, space flight, hypersonic flight etc.).
Summary
The prospect of a green hydrogen economy comes with significant opportunities and risks. There is a need to both promote and carefully shape the much needed expansion of production, while limiting the end use of green hydrogen.
There are a number of risks: The biggest risk is that the green hydrogen revolution gets called off or is delayed, and the fossil energy use prolonged. The second biggest risk is the use of hydrogen to greenwash dirty fossil fuels or nuclear energy via the hydrogen route (brown, grey, pink and blue hydrogen). A third risk lies in a wasteful expansion of hydrogen end uses (rebound effects), leading to a further delay of reaching a 100% green energy system, due to the inefficiencies inherent in production and use.
Avoiding these risks, a path forward for a rapid and significant, but sustainable scaling up of sustainable green hydrogen production must be forged, while keeping the end uses very focused on some priority areas and avoiding rebound effects.
