The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread

[Mav]

Interesting response to a stupid Matt Canavan tweet attacking Green Hydrogen and lauding Blue Hydrogen:
The Australian’s back-of-the-envelope green hydrogen figures are overblown and forget climate impact, The Guardian.

What a flog Canavan is. Why would you bother to consider a ridiculous scenario in which Australia is the sole supplier of Hydrogen to the world?  It’s about as sensible as considering whether the Australian Defence Forces would be able to defeat the aliens from Independence Day. Of course, even after making that ridiculous assumption he goes on to fudge his results.

But the article points out the problem with using Blue Hydrogen to combat climate change:

But Beck said comparing green hydrogen with blue hydrogen was like “comparing apples and oranges”. While green hydrogen would use more land, her own published work suggests blue hydrogen would have a sizeable greenhouse gas footprint.

She said even if the CCS industry could capture 90% of the emissions from the production stage of blue hydrogen, that would still release about 1Mt of CO2 for each 1Mt of hydrogen.

But Beck said if emissions from extracting and processing the natural gas before it’s turned into hydrogen were also counted, this would see blue hydrogen responsible for “a whopping 1314Mt of CO2-e in a year to make 530Mt of blue hydrogen in Australia, using 1961Mt of natural gas.”

For context, that is almost three times Australia’s current greenhouse gas footprint.