What To Know About Biden-Backed 'Blue' Hydrogen And Why It Might Be A Worse Polluter Than Coal

A renewable energy resource hailed by President Joe Biden as being a tool in mitigating climate change might actually be worse for the environment than fossil fuels, according to a new scientific report published in the scientific journal Energy Science & Engineering.

What Happened: In the article “How Green is Blue Hydrogen?”, authors Robert W. Howarth and Mark Z. Jacobson — professors at Cornell University and Stanford University, respectively — took aim at the so-called “blue hydrogen."

Blue hydrogen is derived from a steam methane reforming process that combines natural gas with scalding steam in the presence of a catalyst that results in a chemical reaction creating hydrogen and carbon monoxide. Adding more water to the mixture turns the carbon monoxide into carbon dioxide, thus generating creating more hydrogen.

The problem with the process, according to the professors’ report, is it requires a large expenditure of energy to obtain and winds up generating creates 20% more greenhouse gases than coal and 60% more than burning diesel.

“Far from being low carbon, greenhouse gas emissions from the production of blue hydrogen are quite high, particularly due to the release of fugitive methane,” the report stated. “While carbon dioxide emissions are lower, fugitive methane emissions for blue hydrogen are higher than for gray hydrogen because of an increased use of natural gas to power the carbon capture.”

The professors added that their “analysis assumes that captured carbon dioxide can be stored indefinitely, an optimistic and unproven assumption. Even if true though, the use of blue hydrogen appears difficult to justify on climate grounds.”

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Why It Matters: The federal government has been advocating hydrogen as an alternative fuel resource for years.

• In 2003, President George W. Bush unveiled a $1.2 billion initiative to develop technology for commercially viable hydrogen-powered fuel cells, along with a hydrogen infrastructure to power vehicles, homes and businesses.
• Barack Obama canceled that initiative when he succeeded Bush as president in 2009 in favor of electric vehicle development, but reversed his decision in 2012 with an energy policy to encourage the development of vehicular hydrogen fuel cells.
• Donald Trump didn't focus on hydrogen until the final year of his presidency when his Department of Energy announced a five-year $100 million project to advance hydrogen and fuel cell technologies research and development.
• Biden’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure package contains an $8 billion provision for developing “clean hydrogen.”

The leading advocate for hydrogen as an alternative fuel is the focus of The Hydrogen Council, an international consortium of energy companies, automobile manufacturers and technology corporations — its membership includes General Motors GM, Royal Dutch Shell plc (NYSE: RDS-A), Microsoft Corporation MSFT and Chevron Corporation CVX

“We further note that much of the push for using hydrogen for energy since 2017 has come from the Hydrogen Council, a group established by the oil and gas industry specifically to promote hydrogen, with a major emphasis on blue hydrogen,” the new scientific report said, adding that the council’s lobbying overlooks critical elements in the creation of blue hydrogen.

“In fact, there is no experience at commercial scale with storing carbon dioxide from carbon capture, and most carbon dioxide that is currently captured is used for enhanced oil recovery and is released back to the atmosphere,” the report continued. "Further, our analysis does not consider the energy cost and associated greenhouse gas emissions from transporting and storing the captured carbon dioxide.

“Even without these considerations, though, blue hydrogen has large climatic consequences. We see no way that blue hydrogen can be considered ‘green.’”

Also Worth Noting: Blue hydrogen is also seen as a competitor to so-called “green” hydrogen, which is produced by using renewable energy technologies and electrolysis for splitting water, as well as “grey” hydrogen, which is produced from methane that releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

In May, the question of the economic viability of blue hydrogen production was questioned by Jon Andre Lokke, CEO of Nel ASA NLLSY, a Norwegian hydrogen company. According to a report from S&P Global, Lokke observed that green hydrogen can be produced at costs below $1.5/kg by 2025, which would make it competitive grey hydrogen, while blue hydrogen is unable to achieve similar cost effectiveness.

"When it comes to blue, I really don't think from a cost perspective that blue has a chance, to be honest," Lokke said during an energy industry event. "I think it is pushed very much by the big oil companies because they don't have a choice, and they're afraid of losing power and the oligopoly position. But I think with green renewable hydrogen, the cost is going to go down much faster than the analysts think — look at what happened in wind."