As the problems with so-called alternative energy become clearer and more pressing, a new green saviour appears on the horizon: hydrogen. As in green hydrogen. Hydrogen is all the rage, including with investors souring on previous failed breakthroughs. Including Justin Trudeau, who in a disastrous interview about how dumb Albertans are tossed out glibly, based on a lifetime uncontaminated by real-world commerce or engineering, “If you can build a pipeline for oilsands oil, you can build a pipeline for hydrogen”. Says the man who can’t build a pipeline for oilsands oil even after dumping $21 billion of taxpayer money into a $5 billion project. And should he turn his business acumen next to hydrogen he’ll find it's not really green and it doesn’t really work. Except at incinerating public subsidies. Conventional or “blue” hydrogen suffers from the problem that it’s extracted from methane at considerable energy cost with the byproduct being (ulp) CO2, just as if you’d burned the methane directly and saved several steps. Whereas “green” hydrogen has to come from wind and solar (or nuclear) and since wind and solar don’t really work and most environmentalists still fear nuclear, well um uh back to those subsidies.

Lots and lots of them. The Manhattan Contrarian just took a contrarian look at hydrogen as the new alternative energy saviour. As he points out:

“OK, there’s nuclear, but environmentalists and regulators have nuclear completely blocked. That means that to be carbon-free, most electricity must come from the wind and sun, and in turn that means need for energy storage far beyond the capabilities of any batteries. Hydrogen is the one and only remaining solution.”

And the trouble with hydrogen, as he also observes, is that conventional production involves breaking down methane (CH4) to get the H out, and dumping the carbon into the air as CO2, which rather defeats the purpose, being just like burning the methane except less efficient. Thus:

“Over at the government, their minds move slowly, but they have recently figured out that keeping their energy transition fantasy alive can only be accomplished with vast amounts of green hydrogen. And so they have undertaken to address the issue in the only way they know, which is to throw oodles of taxpayer funding at it.”

Which is only necessary if it’s not, well, actually efficient and thus profitable. Who wouldn’t love to virtue-signal by powering their factory, servers or whatever with green hydrogen? Anyone who saw the price tag, that’s who. Because green hydrogen is actually horrendously energy-inefficient. As in not really green.

After walking us through the math in some recent reports, and suggesting that a lot of it is fishier than a salmon steak, the Contrarian winds up conceding the obvious and insisting on it simultaneously:

“We won’t really know how much this green hydrogen stuff actually costs until there are some real facilities up and running. But whether it is ten times as expensive as the stuff [hydrogen] produced from natural gas, or only five times as expensive, doesn’t really matter. It is uneconomic, and nothing is going to change that. Nobody will ever buy it or use it without government mandates or subsidies or both.”

Maybe time to revisit nuclear. And credit where due; the Canadian province of Ontario, which already uses a lot of it, is looking to use more not less, while the Globe & Mail ran an op ed calling spent nuclear fuel “a non-carbon source of affordable energy for every global citizen over the coming centuries.” It may not get them a lot of friendly notes about getting that “high-level waste” cooking again, but it’s proven technology despite all the scare-mongering about “nuclear waste as an ‘unsolved’ and ‘unsolvable’ problem”.

Going with what we know works seems especially wise when we also read headlines like “Ministry of Transport Under Scrutiny: Allegations of Favoritism in Hydrogen Funding” and learn that:

“Allegations of favoritism have surfaced within the German Ministry of Transport, sparking concerns about the integrity of funding decisions related to hydrogen projects.”

Of course one swallow does not make a spring, nor one scandal a failed industry. But anyone who thinks government’s typical flaws including favouritism and corruption won’t turn up with the vast subsidies sloshing around for alternative fuels because their goals are uniquely virtuous, like every other state program, is again not living in the real world of incentives and tradeoffs. And the subsidies aren’t just vast, they basically are the industry; as Canary Media notes:

“It’s far from clear how the demand side of the clean hydrogen economy will evolve to match the millions of tons of supply set to be unleashed by the Inflation Reduction Act’s 45V production tax credits. Those credits could direct hundreds of billions of dollars toward electrolyzers powered by carbon-free electricity – and, potentially, fossil-gas-fed hydrogen facilities combined with carbon capture – over the coming decades.”

So nobody wants it, and it’s only being supplied in response to tax credits. Not paying customers. Bummer. And another thing.

One minute Canary Media is all “Clean hydrogen gold rush” as “Clean hydrogen is driving the next Gulf Coast energy boom”. The next it asks “Clean hydrogen for clean electricity?” and says apparently not:

“Utilities say the fuel can help them achieve a carbon-free grid. Climate hawks say it opens up a morass of waste and greenwashing that may impede better solutions.”

Here we should give Canary Media credit for trying to keep a level head. It really would be foolish to bet the farm on a technology that “is either a silver bullet or a fatal flaw in decarbonization plans, depending on how it’s made, how it’s used – and who you ask.” And for trying to start a rational debate, warning in an email kicking off a long hydrogen series that:

“The era of ‘clean hydrogen’ is fast approaching, thanks to massive subsidies from the Biden administration. But there’s no guarantee that’s a good thing for the energy transition.”

Part of the problem, especially serious coming from Canary Media not some grumpy contrarian, is that hydrogen has some serious physical limitations as fuel:

“Natural gas is basically methane; hydrogen is much less energy-dense, so you need to burn more of it to get the same amount of energy output. That necessitates bigger valves, pipes and nozzles to deliver higher volumes of gas. Hydrogen also burns hotter than methane, which produces more NOx, a regulated air pollutant that needs to be mitigated.”

Oh, just that. As for the better solutions it might impede, that “Clean hydrogen for clean electricity?” article forgot to list them. And the “gold rush” one said:

“Methane-based hydrogen producers are looking to add carbon-capture devices and sequester emissions underground. Others plan to funnel solar and wind power directly into electrolyzers, producing hydrogen without any fossil fuels.”

Great, huh? Well um no. Looking to and plan to aren’t on a level with are doing. Instead:

“Thus far, though, clean-hydrogen production scarcely exists, and it remains far from achieving industrial scale. Climate advocates hotly contest what should even qualify as ‘clean’ hydrogen and how exactly this resource should be used to best serve the economywide transition from fossil fuels.”

Other than that, a brilliant solution.