▲ | hannob 12 hours ago | |
This comes up on a regular basis in the discussion around hydrogen, sometimes it's also known as turquoise hydrogen. The claims made here are very misleading, let me quickly explain why. The idea here is that you make hydrogen from fossil methane by splitting it into hydrogen and carbon. Now, the claim is that you now have "clean" or "climate neutral" hydrogen. But it's made from fossil gas, and there's carbon. If you would now bury that carbon or do something else that guarantees that carbon never ends up in the atmosphere, ok, you might claim that. (Still with caveats: your fossil gas production has upstream emissions you need to account for.) But that is not economically feasible. So the idea is: sell that carbon as a co-product. But now, that carbon will in almost all cases eventually still end up as CO2 emissions. But these pitches never talk about that. Claiming that hydrogen is "climate neutral" is, then, more an accounting trick. If you are honest, you would have to do something like associate half of the eventual emissions to it. I wrote about it in more detail before: https://industrydecarbonization.com/news/the-problem-with-tu... |