What Is the Future for Blue and Green Hydrogen?

Over the last few weeks, we've looked into the hydrogen economy and its four main objectives for using hydrogen as fuel: transportation, grid power generation, industry, and home/office heating and cooling. To this point, only a small fraction of hydrogen--of any color--is used directly for energy. The vast majority goes toward making ammonia for such uses as fertilizer, or toward making methane, smelting iron and steel, refining petroleum, and other industrial uses.

And most of all that hydrogen--estimates center around 96%--comes from natural gas, in a process known as natural gas reformation/gasification. In this process, natural gas (CH4) reacts with high-temperature steam to separate the four parts hydrogen from the one part carbon. This is the cheapest and most efficient method, but it releases carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide in the process--exactly what the environmental, social and governance (ESG) movement is working to eliminate.

Let's define the hydrogen color spectrum--an admittedly odd idea for a gas that itself is odorless and colorless, and whose flame is also odorless and colorless. But the color of your hydrogen rides on how it's produced, not on how it looks.

• Green hydrogen: Produced without releasing any greenhouse gases, from surplus renewable energy including wind and solar. It uses water electrolysis to separate the hydrogen and oxygen atoms in H2O.
• Blue hydrogen: Made by reforming natural gas, which also releases carbon dioxide, as stated; using carbon capture and storage (CCS) to capture the CO2 makes this "blue."
• Gray hydrogen: Made from natural gas without CCS.

There are other colors such as yellow, referring to hydrogen produced by solar energy, pink using nuclear energy and so forth. Green, blue and gray are the ones worth noting.

Europe, Oceania and other regions of the world began seriously pursuing green hydrogen about five years ago, said Industrial Info's Trey Hamblet, vice president of research for Chemical Processing and Petroleum Refining, while the U.S. and Canada have lagged. Hamblet said that much of the difference lies in the fact that oil and gas are much less available in Europe and elsewhere, and much more expensive than in North America. This has allowed the U.S. to continue using fossil fuels, while other regions have seen less of a price difference between fossil fuels and green hydrogen.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the resulting oil and gas embargoes have made the situation even more concerning, especially in Europe.

So while the U.S. Bipartisan Infrastructure Law's (BIL) $8 billion for building four hydrogen hubs is progress, Hamblet says Europe is far ahead on that score.

Green hydrogen is certainly the Holy Grail, but the blue variety seems more likely to gain traction in spite of the high cost of CCS. Hamblet related that CCS has been investigated for many years, but that research did not reach economic feasibility. In the new ESG climate, he said, those cost considerations are on the wane.

If a chief executive officer "stepped forward to the financial community 10 years ago and said I'm going to spend a billion dollars on a CCS unit and I'm going to get nothing tangible in return, the community would've been really unhappy," Hamblet said. "If they step up today and say they're going to spend a billion dollars?and?I'm going to decrease my carbon footprint by x percent, more are likely to embrace it and say, 'Go, spend it.'"

It is also true that the CCS technology has improved, reducing those costs at least somewhat.

Hamblet listed?Dow Canada's?(Calgary, Alberta)?net-zero ethylene unit addition at Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta, as an example of this devil-may-care attitude toward CCS costs: "They're planning to build a new, integrated ethylene cracker and derivatives and carbon-capture unit. Their intentions are to, by mass at least, have a zero-carbon footprint." The cost of the CCS unit is less of an issue because of its ESG benefits, he pointed out.?