Could White Hydrogen Succeed Where Green Hydrogen Stumbled?
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Oil Project Haley Zaremba is an energy journalist and researcher with more than a decade of professional experience covering global energy systems, land and natural resources, and… The green hydrogen hype has all but stalled out – but could white hydrogen take its place as the next big thing in decarbonization? Geologic hydrogen, so-called ‘white’ hydrogen, could potentially bypass the most critical barriers to scaling hydrogen use without significantly expanding the sector’s carbon footprint.
While the technology is still nascent, it could one day decarbonize some of the world’s hardest-to-abate industrial sectors.
This form of hydrogen involves sourcing naturally occurring hydrogen found in rocks and other deposits in the Earth’s crust.
“The potential is massive,” Pierre Levin, chief executive of Canadian geologic hydrogen startup Vema, told the New York Times earlier this year.
“You can find rocks like this all over the world, enough to produce billions of tons of hydrogen.” Hydrogen is extremely useful in traditionally emissions-intensive sectors like steelmaking and transportation because, like thermal or coking coal and heavy fuel oil, hydrogen can be combusted at high heat for use in industrial processes.
But unlike those notoriously dirty fuel sources, hydrogen leaves behind nothing but water vapor when combusted.
The problem is that most hydrogen is produced using fossil fuels, thereby negating its efficacy as a decarbonization tool.
In answer to this problem, ‘green’ hydrogen, which is made using only clean and renewable energy resources, has been promoted as a potential decarbonization game-changer for years now.
Yet, as of 2023, less than one tenth of planned green hydrogen projects were actually realized.
More specifically, “only 7% of global capacity announcements finished on schedule,” according to a paper called “The green hydrogen ambition and implementation gap”, published in the prestigious scientific journalNature Energylast year.
There are a few reasons for this – first and foremost, thenumbers just aren’t adding up.
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