The only people who benefit from the hydrogen economy are the oil and petrochemical companies that make the stuff.

Hydrogen is in the news again. Bianca Nogrady writes in Ensia that, "As the price of renewable energy drops and storage technologies mature, hydrogen fuel is drawing fresh attention."

US Department of Energy/Public DomainThis TreeHugger has long been skeptical about hydrogen because it is not a fuel. Even the US Department of Energy infographic that Nogrady includes in the article calls it "a clean, flexible energy carrier" - a battery. This is a fundamentally important distinction. Nogrady writes:

This is all going to be possible because the economics of hydrogen production are evidently changing. According to Jenny Hayward, senior research scientist at CSIRO and co-author of its 2018 National Hydrogen Roadmap:

“You’ve got production coming down in cost, but also you’ve got utilization coming down in cost,” Hayward says. Not only has the price of electricity from solar photovoltaic and wind dramatically decreased, but electrolyzer technologies have also become much cheaper, larger-scale and more efficient. At the same time, hydrogen fuel cells are also improving both in efficiency and cost, she says.



Nogrady also points out that some of the problems we have complained about with hydrogen are being fixed, like the difficulties of storage (better tanks) and the efficiencies of fuel cells. She notes that a great benefit is that hydrogen cars fill up fast, quoting a consultant who says, “In operations for trucks, for taxis, for emergency response services, you have to have the range and the refueling time that is similar to conventional vehicles.” And the tech is getting so much better. Morry Markowitz, president of the Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Energy Association says, “In the transportation sector and other areas, hydrogen vehicles meet or exceed anything that’s on the road today.”

A big change in the hydrogen situation is that we used to write about it being a shill for the nuclear industry. Now hydrogen is seen as a way of storing renewables and beating the intermittency problem of when the wind doesn't blow or the sun shine. In places like sunny Australia, they could make power all day and run generators on hydrogen at night. It might even get distributed through gas infrastructure (although because of embrittlement, only in the plastic pipes).

But it's almost all made from fossil fuels!

The proud sponsors of the Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Energy Association/Screen capture This all sounds terrific. Is it time to hang up my skepticism and embrace the hydrogen revolution? Should I stop complaining that the people behind the Hydrogen Energy Association are all car manufacturers and chemical companies? Perhaps, but down near the bottom of the article, Nogrady mentions a hiccup.