Carlton Supporters Club

If they could get a license, but the political will is not there, lobbyists are too powerful, the engineering and science doesn't really matter.

So when you claimed blue hydrogen production wouldn’t produce methane emissions because the methane would be catalysed into commercially saleable by-products, you were being a bit disingenuous as you knew the political will isn’t there and the lobbyists are too powerful?

Critics have previously described the project as “just a new fossil fuel industry” that would see Australia generating greenhouse gas emissions onshore while exporting a cleaner fuel.

Neither of the two carbon storage sites identified by the project are close to being operational, yet are key to the project’s goals of producing cleaner hydrogen.
…
Stone said the project would bring coal gasification technology from J-Power’s Osaki CoolGen facility to Australia which, he said, was able to capture 90% of CO2 emissions from the process of turning the coal into synthetic gas and then extracting the hydrogen.

Stone said there were still investment decisions and government approvals to be gained, but the project was looking to produce its first hydrogen before the end of the decade.

Capturing and storing the CO2 “has to be part of the project” because without it “we can’t reach the carbon intensities that countries want” from clean hydrogen, Stone said.

The project’s target was to produce hydrogen clean enough to meet emerging benchmarks, he said, such as those of the US government which is providing tax breaks for hydrogen that emits less than 4kg of CO2 for every kilogram of the gas produced.

“We’re doing everything possible to make this as clean as possible. We’re trying to minimise CO2 in all elements of the project. Right now there’s 90 million tonnes of hydrogen being made every year with no abatement at all. That’s about 11.5kg of CO2 for every kilo of hydrogen.”

Captured CO2 would be sent by pipeline, Stone said, with two potential offshore storage facilities in the Bass Strait – Exxon’s Bream field project using depleted oil reservoirs or the Victorian and federal government-backed CarbonNet project. Neither project has been given the go-ahead.

Harada said: “This is a complex project and there is still some way to go in terms of approvals, design, construction and commissioning but this is a major boost for the Victorian economy on its journey towards a clean energy future.”

Dr Fiona Beck, an ANU expert on hydrogen’s role in the low carbon energy transition, said investment in infrastructure to liquefy, store, load and transport hydrogen was “really welcome”.

But she said investment in producing hydrogen from fossil fuels “risks locking us in to using fossil fuels for longer” when costs of producing hydrogen from renewable energy were falling fast.

“There’s a risk of stranded assets in this area,” she said.

Yep, nothing in there about converting methane into useful product or other means of disposing of it. 

How dare they fail to talk about a technology that has been around for almost a hundred years as part of an article on new technologies, shocking!

Abstract
Hydrogen is often viewed as an important energy carrier in a future decarbonized world. Currently, most hydrogen is produced by steam reforming of methane in natural gas (“gray hydrogen”), with high carbon dioxide emissions. Increasingly, many propose using carbon capture and storage to reduce these emissions, producing so-called “blue hydrogen,” frequently promoted as low emissions. We undertake the first effort in a peer-reviewed paper to examine the lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions of blue hydrogen accounting for emissions of both carbon dioxide and unburned fugitive methane. 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. For our default assumptions (3.5% emission rate of methane from natural gas and a 20-year global warming potential), total carbon dioxide equivalent emissions for blue hydrogen are only 9%-12% less than for gray hydrogen. 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. Perhaps surprisingly, the greenhouse gas footprint of blue hydrogen is more than 20% greater than burning natural gas or coal for heat and some 60% greater than burning diesel oil for heat, again with our default assumptions. In a sensitivity analysis in which the methane emission rate from natural gas is reduced to a low value of 1.54%, greenhouse gas emissions from blue hydrogen are still greater than from simply burning natural gas, and are only 18%-25% less than for gray hydrogen. Our 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.

How green is blue hydrogen?, R.W. Howarth et al, Cornell University:Wow, that’s quite a take-down 😂

Then why the hell is no one doing it?

It’s already used for rocket fuel, but it is now being pushed as a clean and safe alternative to oil and gas for heating and earthly modes of transport. Political support is mounting with almost $26bn of US taxpayer money available for hydrogen projects thanks to three recent laws – the Inflation Reduction Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act and the Chips Act. Hydrogen is politically hot, but is it the climate solution that its cheerleaders are claiming?

Why all the hype about hydrogen?
The short answer is that the fossil fuel industry sees hydrogen as a way to keep on drilling and building new infrastructure, and has successfully deployed its PR and lobbying machines over the past few years to get policymakers thinking that hydrogen is a catch-all climate solution. Research by climate scientists (without fossil fuel links) has debunked industry claims that hydrogen should be a major player in our decarbonised future, though hydrogen extracted from water (using renewable energy sources) could – and should – play an important role in replacing the dirtiest hydrogen currently extracted from fossil fuels. It may also have a role in fuelling some transportation like long-haul flights and vintage cars, but the evidence is far from clear. However, with billions of climate action dollars up for grabs in the US alone, expect to see more lobbying, more industry-funded evidence and more hype.
…
Blue hydrogen is what the fossil fuel industry is most invested in, as it still comes from gas but ostensibly the CO2 would be captured and stored underground. The industry claims to have the technology to capture 80-90% of CO2, but in reality, it’s closer to 12% when every stage of the energy-intensive process is evaluated, according to a peer-reviewed study by scientists at Cornell University published in 2021. For sure better than nothing, but methane emissions, which warm the planet faster than CO2, would actually be higher than for grey hydrogen because of the additional gas needed to power the carbon capture, and likely upstream leakage. Notably, the term clean hydrogen was coined by the fossil fuel industry a few months after the seminal Cornell study found that blue hydrogen has a substantially larger greenhouse gas footprint than burning gas, coal or diesel oil for heating.
…
What’s at stake?
In addition to $26bn in direct financing for so-called hydrogen hubs and demo projects, another $100bn or so in uncapped tax credits could be paid out over the next few decades, so lots and lots of taxpayers’ money. Fossil fuel companies are also using hydrogen to justify building more pipelines, claiming that this infrastructure can be used for “clean hydrogen” in the future. But hydrogen is a highly flammable and corrosive element, and it would be costly to repurpose oil and gas infrastructure to make it safe for hydrogen. And while hydrogen is not a greenhouse gas, it is not harmless. It aggravates some greenhouse gases, for instance causing methane to stay in the atmosphere for longer.

“This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to invest in actual zero-emission solutions, but could be a disaster if the federal government pours scarce resources into infrastructure and technologies that could make the climate crisis worse and cause further public health harms,” said Sara Gersen, clean energy attorney at Earthjustice. “Sowing confusion about hydrogen is a delay tactic, and delay is the new denialism.”

Is there any role for hydrogen in a decarbonised future?
Yes, but a limited one – given that it takes more energy to produce, store and transport hydrogen than it provides when converted into useful energy, so using anything but new renewable sources (true green hydrogen) will require burning more fossil fuels.

According to the hydrogen merit ladder devised by Michael Liebreich, host of the Cleaning Up podcast, swapping clean hydrogen for the fossil fuel-based grey and brown stuff currently used for synthetic fertilisers, petrochemicals and steel is a no-brainer. The carbon footprint of global hydrogen production today is equivalent to Germany’s annual greenhouse gas emissions, so the sooner we swap to green hydrogen (created from new renewables) the better. This could also be useful for some transportation, such as long-haul flights and heavy machinery, and maybe to store surplus wind and solar energy – though none are slam dunks for hydrogen as there are alternative technologies vying for these markets, said Liebreich.

But for most forms of transport (cars, bikes, buses and trains) and heating there are already safer, cleaner and cheaper technologies such as battery-run electric vehicles and heat pumps, so there’s little or no merit in investing time or money with hydrogen. Howarth said: “Renewable electricity is a scarce resource. Direct electrification and batteries offer so much more, and much more quickly. It’s a huge distraction and waste of resources to even be talking about heating homes and passenger vehicles with hydrogen.”

I’m not guidable, or should I say I won’t take you on as my guide.

Is hydrogen really a clean enough fuel to tackle the climate crisis?, The Guardian.

Looks like the fossil fuel industry will get its teeth into clean energy funding one way or the other in the US and here with the Latrobe Valley blue hydrogen plant. The fossil fuel industry is like a vampire - unless you put a stake through its heart, it’ll survive any attempt to limit climate change. Just as the cigarette companies moved seamlessly to vapes.

Again, big emitters like oil and gas companies are sitting on an absolute gold mine! But strangely enough, they flare the methane or, as with the Turkmenistanis, just release it directly into the atmosphere. Something doesn’t add up, does it?