Iran War Energy Shock Puts Hydrogen Back on the Table
Kinder Morgan Restores U.S.-Mexico Gas Flows After Pipeline Outage 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… This year’s global energy crisis has revived international interest in hydrogen’s potential to replace fossil fuels in a wide range of industrial applications, from steelmaking to shipping.
Green hydrogen is still massively expensive to produce, reducing its potential for commercial scaling, while gray and blue hydrogen relies on the same fossil fuels that many global markets are trying to move away from.
But scientific breakthroughs are piling up to expand the hydrogen rainbow in ways that could sidestep these pitfalls and potentially decarbonize and disrupt some of the world’s hardest-to-abate sectors.
Hydrogen holds massive potential for replacing fossil fuels in manufacturing and transportation because the element can be combusted at high temperatures like thermal coal or heavy fuel oil.
But unlike those particularly high-emitting fossil fuels, hydrogen leaves behind nothing but water vapor when it burns.
As a result, green hydrogen – or that which is made using renewable energies alone – has long been touted as an invaluable tool for the global clean energy transition and decarbonization pathways.
However, green hydrogen ambitions have remained elusive.
The process of splitting hydrogen from water is costly and energy-intensive, and in many cases producing green hydrogen is an inefficient use of clean energy that could be more effectively consumed directly.
Indeed, a2022 reportby the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) warned against the “indiscriminate use of hydrogen” and suggested that policymakers should instead weigh competing priorities carefully and consider that extensive use of green hydrogen “may not be in line with the requirements of a decarbonised world.” But agroundswell of funding into hydrogen researchon the heels of the United States’ and Israel’s war in Iran has arrived at the right time for a number of scientific projects seeking to find alternative ways of sourcing hydrogen while maintaining a low carbon footprint.
Just this week, a team of scientists at Oregon State University published apaperelucidating a new method for deriving green hydrogen from water using sunlight alone, through the application of a sulfur-based chemistry.
Compared to standard methods of splitting hydrogen from water using electricity, “Photocatalysis is a much more direct approach, as it uses a material in its high-energy state activated by sunlight to bring about the same reaction and at a faster rate,” according to a summary from Interesting Engineering.
“Our work provides a blueprint for designing better materials that can bring down the cost of green hydrogen,” said Oregon State’s Kyriakos Stylianou in apress release.
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