The result of all these puts and takes is a lower demand in the end than I’d originally projected for 2100. My original projection was around 90 million tons, now it’s slightly under 80 million tons.
Like the tiny corkscrew, blade, and toothpick on the Swiss Army knife, hydrogen just isn’t the go-to molecule if there are alternatives, and there are almost always alternatives. And in hydrogen’s case, a lot of the current use cases are going to diminish due to economic and climate imperatives, not grow.
The US hydrogen strategy was positioned in the wrong federal department. It was put in the hands of people who deal with fossil fuels all day long and have a paradigm of burning them for energy, not a paradigm of electricity for energy. It fails Rumelt’s test for the first thing that makes a good strategy, and so its principles and actions will be failures as well.
All of the people shouting from the rooftops about the wonders of hydrogen are just as wrong as all of the people shouting about the wonders of hemp, and for the same reasons.
As a contribution to the literature on what will happen in the real world, this is a fairly slight addition, one which is being promoted far beyond its actual merit by the usual suspects.
Hydrogen demand today is two-thirds for petroleum refining and fertilizer manufacturing. Both of those uses are going to drop precipitously in the coming decades, and the one area of demand growth won’t replace the loss.
Hydrogen demand today is two-thirds for petroleum refining and fertilizer manufacturing. Both of those uses are going to drop precipitously in the coming decades, and the one area of demand growth won’t replace the loss.
Chemical process engineer and expert on biofuels and hydrogen Paul Martin and I discuss Michael Liebreich’s hydrogen ladder, agreeing and disagreeing in turn with aspects of it. This first half focuses on places hydrogen won’t play.
Originally posted on EVANNEX. by Charles Morris Reasonable minds may differ on the question of whether hydrogen fuel cells have a place in the clean-energy future. However, it’s a fact that the fossil fuel giants have been heavily hyping hydrogen, and it’s not hard to see why, as the vast majority of hydrogen … [continued]
Michael Liebreich, who founded BloombergNEF (originally New Energy Finance), is passionate about helping the environment, and thus humans. He recently said that the oil sector is lobbying for inefficient hydrogen cars because it wants to delay electrification. Recharge noted that he’s against using hydrogen in some sectors when in those … [continued]
