2. Hydrogen won’t be green if it ignores when, where and how (with Paul Martin)

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) along with Canadian, EU and other jurisdictional policies are incentivizing a transition to green hydrogen, albeit in different ways and with often foolish use cases. If governmental money is a thumb on the scale, they should be insuring that the hydrogen actually is green. From that perspective, three terms become important: additionality, temporality and locality. They aren't in the debate for heat pumps or EVs, but are in the debate for hydrogen.

Paul Martin is a co-founder of the Hydrogen Science Coalition and has worked with hydrogen in chemical process engineering design and pilot plants for decades. He’s worked on almost every use case imaginable for the molecule and knows what it’s suitable for. And that isn’t a store or carrier of energy or a pre-cursor of expensive synthetic fuels.

The Coalition’s members thought long and hard about their position on what makes hydrogen actually green as opposed to blackish-blue, and Paul shares his thoughts on the subject. The first principle is that a kilogram of CO2 produced when manufacturing a kilogram of hydrogen, regardless of the process used to get there, is reasonable. The Coalition is agnostic on the process, but that doesn’t mean that they are unrealistic about the costs, quite the opposite. Low-carbon hydrogen will be more expensive hydrogen without significant governmental subsidies like the $3 per kg under the US IRA.

Governmental money should come with strings attached. Those strings are that the low-carbon electricity should be net new generation on the grid (additionality), that production of hydrogen should be matched to the times when the new generation is operating (temporality) and production facilities shouldn’t be on filthy grids where extra electricity will actually be generated by coal or gas with the new renewable generation a thousand kilometers away.

Listen in as Paul and Michael discuss what makes sense, edge conditions and nuances around green hydrogen.

Don’t forget to like the episode and follow Redefining Energy - Tech, and don’t forget to follow parent channel Redefining Energy, where Laurent Segalen and Gerard Reid focus on how the global transition is getting financed.