Green Hydrogen: What’s Really Real in a Gathering of haters, hypers, pettifoggers, filibusters, and transformative technologies like you’ve never ever seen: 

On June 7, 2021, the US Department of Energy launched the Hydrogen Shot, which got kinda mixed up with the Moderna and Pfizer shots in the Battle for The Nation’s Attention that erupts on Facebook each morning. So, if you missed it, don’t feel alone. 

It’s the first Shot in a series the DOE is calling its Energy Earthshots, and if the term sounds vaguely familiar, it’s probably because, over in the UK, Sir David Attenborough and the Duke of Cambridge are pushing the term with The Earthshot Prize. Here. the DOE Energy Earthshots Initiative aims to accelerate breakthroughs of more abundant, affordable, and reliable clean energy solutions within the decade.)

If there’s confusion about the origin of the term, there’s no confusion about the goals. In vigorous, blunt terms — the way we like our goals in the land of Uncle Sam — the Hydrogen Shot seeks to reduce the cost of clean hydrogen by 80% to $1 per 1 kilogram in 1 decade, which they call a 1-1-1 (presumably because doing something by 2030, nine years away, might have been otherwise described as a ‘9-1-1’). DOE also set some goals for 2025 for clean hydrogen, which is four years away — and, so, you may be in the market for a 4-1-1. 

What is it?

First of all, what exactly is clean hydrogen? Or, rather, what isn’t?

Hydrogen, a colorless gas, comes in more ‘colors’ than a starter box of Crayola Crayons, and pretty much everyone calls the hydrogen they make “clean”. 

Pink’s clean because nuclear’s clean. Yellow’s clean because it comes from solar. Blue’s clean because CO2 is produced but captured. And grey’s clean because it’s made from natural gas, which is clean, er, sort of. Brown hydrogen is cleaner than black hydrogen. There’s turquoise hydrogen, olive hydrogen. I wouldn’t be surprised if, before all is said and done, if there’s a Periwinkle Hydrogen and a Jazzberry Jam Hydrogen, to name two more colors out of the Crayola box as yet unused. There’ll be Neon Carrot Hydrogen if its made from the gasification of food waste, or Purple Mountains’ Majesty Hydrogen, for hydrogen produced by drilling for trapped hydrogen in the Rocky Mountains.. They’re a ‘swarm of bees’, a ‘pride of lions’, a ‘barrel of oil’, a ‘bushel of corn’…and a ‘crayola of hydrogen’.

Since we’re a Digest, and sworn to brevity, today we’ll focus down on green hydrogen. 

And, there’s more cant, pettifoggery, exaggeration, bogusiositude, and real science and ventures of substantive merit in the green hydrogen field than any set of energy technologies since someone promoted ingesting petroleum as a cancer cure. Consequently, there’s no better way to start a riot here in the summer of 2021 than to shout “green hydrogen’s coming!” in a crowded theater.  

As the DOE points out, there’s reason to focus on hydrogen, despite the hype. They say: “With approximately 10 million metric tons of hydrogen currently produced in the United States each year, the primary demand for hydrogen today is for petroleum refining and ammonia production. However, hydrogen can be used across multiple sectors to enable zero or near-zero emissions in other chemical and industrial processes, integrated clean energy systems, and transportation. Emerging hydrogen markets within these sectors include data centers, ports, steel manufacturing, and medium- and heavy-duty trucks.”

So, the demand is there, the supply is in question — so let’s look at the problems, the solutions, and some technology that’s around the corner.

So, what are the problems? 

They are two. First, the high capex for green hydrogen projects. Second, hydrogen lacks the pipelines we have for water, electricity, natural gas and oil. So, hydrogen struggles to compete in the fuel cell markets with electrons, because of distribution, and with fossil-fuel based hydrogen in industrial feedstock markets because of cost. 

What are the solutions?

Again they are two, in the near-term. Novel technology will provide some tasty alternatives and we’ll get to those in a minute. But, for the here and now:

1. Use biobased steam methane reforming to compete with oil  If water splitting is expensive, why not use renewable methane. Simply a matter of connecting more and more upgraded biogas production to the natural gas pipeline network, and use conventional refineries and existing process to make hydrogen.  

One note. We’d suggest one variation in the traditional hydrogen production process, which looks like:

CH4 + H2O -> CO + 3H2 

CO + H2O -< CO2 + H2

We’d simply like to see the CO2 reacted with Calcium oxide to make limestone as a great building material and a permanent store for the carbon dioxide — as opposed to venting it. 

2. Competing with electricity. As one wag put it, “why transport green electricity to make hydrogen for fuel cell vehicles, when you can simply use the electricity to power the car in the first place?” It’s a good question, in some cases the answer comes down to storage — you can store an awful  lot more energy in liquid form than putting electrons in batteries. It matters for heavy-duty vehicles making extended journeys or needing lift — planes, heavy-duty marine, and forklifts.

In lighter-duty, there’s the distribution problem as well. Electric wiring is everywhere, hydrogen pipeline and fueling is not. Yet, it would take 80 hydrogen fueling stations, costing roughly $160 million in capital, using this DOE study as a guideline, to provide a hydrogen fuel option within 6 miles of any point in Los Angeles. That’s the cost of building one-third of one mile of subway in Los Angeles.

Now, no one is going to give anyone hydrogen infrastructure for Christmas, but let’s think of it this way. Even if you have fueling stations, how do you move hydrogen from big refineries?

Infrastructure follows function, not the other way around

Lesson from history. If you build it, infrastructure will come. If, what you build is genuinely differentiated. Disney World begat Orlando, the car begat the freeway, water begat the aqueduct, food begat the fridge.  Yet, Fantasy Land did not revive Alexandria, the Stanley Steamer did not begat the freeway, fetid water did not make anyone build anything to bring it nearer. And same-as products inspire same-as infrastructure.

So, the key is differentiation.

What is hydrogen’s mobility selling point?

Extended range is nice, low weight is nice, more leg room and less battery is nice. Design?  Not really. 

It’s the re-fuel. A hydrogen pump shovels in 72 miles per minute (380 miles of range in a 5-minute re-fuel. A Tesla Supercharger transits a measly 13 minutes of range per minute. And that’s top of the line for electrics, and they don’t tell you hast fast a battery wears under supercharging conditions. 

What does that mean? Hydrogen’s fast, electrics are slow. People like fast, convenient travel and hate standing around. That’s why personal vehicles exist in the first place. After all, you could just take a bus.

Sometimes, I wonder why the conversation about hydrogen wanders from this point, since there’s no need. Hydrogen and electric cars are, in the end, luxury vehicles as the term is understood right now — that is, priced at a significant premium owing to premium brand or performance attributes. Luxury cars are owned by people in a big hurry, and standing around an extra 10 hours a year while refueling, and stopping an extra 12-15 times, that’s a differentiator for people with six-figure jobs, as luxury car owners generally have. 

In the end, how and why does price matter? The price of what?

A few days ago I was chatting with an auto salesman, and he told me about a new customer of his, who bought a .$1.2 million McLaren. If the price does make your eyes water, consider this: you can’t drive the car on US roads, only on race tracks. So, not only is there zero point A to point B commodity value in the vehicle, there’s not much for bragging rights, since you can’t park it in the driveway and drive neighbors to distraction with envy. So, no utility value, little cachet — the car, in the end, was bought for the experience. One of the reasons people are lining up for tickets into suborbital space, for those who can afford such luxuries.

Which brings us to a point. Yes, some people buy or lease cars the way they book Ubers, all about the money and the performance. Some buy for the cachet. Some buy — as vacations are bought — for out-of-body experiences. 

Something I learned from Ritz-Carlton, who pivoted some years ago from a focus on selling luxuries to selling experiences. OK, Ritz-Carltons are pretty spiffy. But if you look around the world of travel these days, there’s more attention paid to zip lines than the thread count in the pillow. It wasn’t always so, but it is a direction towards which the culture is marching.

Lesson for hydrogen? Sell more experiences, less attributes. More heart, less features. When someone mentions mentions money, mention time.  You can make back the money you lavish on a high-experience vehicle, but you never make back the time spent standing around re-fueling or re-charging.

Alternative tech

There are quite a few interesting ideas floating around about how to beat the cost of water-splitting or steam methane reformation. Some of the relate back to photolysis, which is splitting water using photons rather than using photons to generate electricity and splitting water via electrolysis.

One other approach is well worth a look, that’s been on the mid-burner in R&D circles the last decade or so when new approaches began to bubble up at Lawrence Livermore National Lab. The company developing those ideas is Nzyme2HC.

Nzyme2HC technology makes H2 from acidic industrial waste (steel, mining, other), and utilizes a hydrogenase enzyme as a catalyst, which — Zounds! – is much cheaper than platinum.  

Specifically, the idea is based on the electrochemically‐mediated production of H2 from acidic water using purified hydrogenase enzyme immobilized onto an electrode surface. 

This very interesting investigation by NREL validated that you can actually make hydrogen this way. The claim for production at scale is that the cost of production would crest under $1/kg. Earthshot achieved!

Well, not so fast, more work is needed here. Various improvements will be needed to keep the process

operating continuously with industrial acidic water as the source of protons, and among other next steps, testing a novel membrane to pre‐treat the waste water before utilizing it in the electroreactor.

Unlike steam reforming of methane, you don’t need to use fossil fuels or find a kindly RNMG project nearby. You don’t need the scads of energy that electrolysis needs to split water sans catalyst, and you don’t need to build a farm to produce algae or other biomass to split hydrogen. So, enzymatic hydrogen, very interesting — for more on that, Steve Cardona is CEO and he’s here.

Unlike SMR, it doesn’t depend on fossil fuel feedstocks; it does not require a lot of energy to split water like electrolysis; and finally, unlike in vivo enzymatic methods, it doesn’t need a lot of real estate like algae farms. In addition to being clean, green and renewable, it’s also less expensive.

The Bottom Line

Hydrogen’s hot, and not just the solar kind, the earthshot kind. water-splitting and industrial chemical use is all the rage — but there are alternatives to consider in production and use.