Once again, the world staged ClimateFest 26, aka the United Nations Conference of the Parties, where peddlers of alternative energy schemes try to plunge their dippers into the river of climate change funding that flows around the world.
This funding is generated by governmental pledges cadged out of economically developed countries at prior COPs.
One of the perennial candidates as a lower greenhouse gas-generating energy source is our old friend hydrogen. Although it’s the most abundant element in the universe, it continues to be woefully misunderstood and misrepresented by those who dream of replacing traditional sources of energy (like natural gas, diesel fuel or gasoline) with hydrogen.
This year, the hydrogen booster wish list as brought to us by the Canadian Energy and Climate Nexus (CECN) includes:
- instituting new government environmental regulations and fuel standards;
- public funding of “small regional ecosystems” to showcase hydrogen as an energy source;
- “Support for potential manufacturers with investment incentives, funding programs, subsidies and long-term policies.”
Ironically, when you think about recent government actions toward Canada’s other potential energy exports, the list includes initiatives to “help grow the potential export market, and encourage upstream investment.”
There are a few problems with the CECN hydrogen wish list. The biggest is that hydrogen, while a lovely element in its own right and an adequate carrier of energy, makes a poor substitute for other energy-carrying substances found on Earth, which hydrogen is not.
While hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, it’s not very common as a freely available substance. Diatomic hydrogen (H2) is found in the atmosphere at only 500 parts per billion. Oxygen, by comparison, is found in the atmosphere at about one part per million.
The vast majority of elemental hydrogen is bound up with other elements found on Earth (such as oxygen teaming up with hydrogen to make water, H2O).
To be used as a fuel, hydrogen must first be stripped of those other compounds (typically fossil fuels), using energy to do the stripping. As is the way of physics, there’s no free lunch, so you can never reclaim all the energy used to liberate the hydrogen when you use it as fuel.
If the input energy could have been directly useful in other ways, it makes the whole conversion to hydrogen something of a waste of time and energy.
Another problem with hydrogen is that it’s explosive when concentrated above about four per cent in air. To contain and transport hydrogen, you have to concentrate it so it can easily breach that four per cent mark in the event of a leak.
How would you like a few dozen cars with hydrogen fuel tanks parked in the parkade underneath your building?
Thought not.
Perhaps neighbourhoods and activist groups will be more welcoming to hydrogen pipelines or tankers with compressed hydrogen coursing along the rails, highways and byways where fossil fuels now travel?
Hydrogen as a fuel is simply not competitive with other potential fuels because of the factors mentioned above. That could explain why nobody has ever seriously tried to use hydrogen as a fuel.
Hydrogen-as-fuel is only useful as another environmental red herring (like wind and solar power) that people are supposed to believe can replace the conventional, reliable forms of energy that built and power our societies.
Hydrogen fuel dreams are also useful for extracting money from the global river of international aid that flows thanks to the efforts of the United Nations Conventions of the Parties.
Canada’s governments, contrary to the importuning of hydrogen fuel boosters, should eschew giving taxpayers’ hard-earned money to rent-seeking private firms that want to build yet another artificial, inefficient, government-funded energy industry.
Let the real energy industries, created through free (but still regulated) markets, do what they do best: keep our lights on and our heat working at costs we can afford.
Kenneth Green is a senior fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
Kenneth is a Troy Media Thought Leader. For interview requests, click here.
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Why does Troy Media (Portage La Prairie Voice and Nelson Voice) publish misleading opinion pieces from the Frontier Centre which encourage the continued use of fossil fuels? The Centre is strongly biased by its funding from the climate-change-denying Heartland Institute, supported funded partly by the Koch coal barons.
No one is touting hydrogen is an “energy source” so why state that they are? However, hydrogen is a very clean carrier of energy when it is obtained from water using renewable electricity.
The article states “Another problem with hydrogen is that it’s explosive when concentrated above about four per cent in air. How would you like a few dozen cars with hydrogen fuel tanks parked in the parkade underneath your building?” This is grossly misleading. The vast majority of auto manufacturers are committed to building battery-powered electric cars, not hydrogen ones. Hydrogen might have a use for long-haul transport trucks, but those trucks are not going to be parked under your building. If hydrogen occasionally does leak from them, because it is much lighter than air it goes straight up and never reaches an explosive concentration. In stark contrast, breathing fumes from burning fossil fuels is already killing as many Canadians prematurely every year as did COVID-19 in 2020.
Moreover, “hydrogen-as-fuel” does have many potential values. As one example, the manufacture of steel produces about 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions because fossil fuels are used to smelt the iron ore. However, hydrogen can also be used for this, as proven by Sweden’s HYBRIT which delivered the world’s first fossil-free steel last August.
The Center’s article concludes with “Let the real energy industries … do what they do best”. In other words, “Who cares about the future of our children and grandchildren? Just ignore the climate crisis and continue to burn the fossil fuels that are generating profits for the fossil-fuel industry.”
Alan Slavin,
Professor Emeritus of Physics, Trent University