Can you define your hydrogen colors for us? It sounds like you have something interesting to say, but I can’t parse what it is out of your company’s jargon.
There's also "white" which is naturally occurring pure hydrogen.
Mostly it's seen as being economically infeasible to extract, though there is one working well in the world, and some other potential sources that may be feasible to extract discovered recently.
But the big problem with hydrogen is that right now, the majority of the supply is grey/brown/black, which all emit CO2 to produce. Green is far more expensive, and the carbon capture needed for blue is also expensive and the methods of storage are dodgy.
The thing about green hydrogen is that it's more efficient to transmit and store electricity than convert it to hydrogen and distribute and store that, so it's basically just a worse way of utilizing green energy sources. The only reason hydrogen is at all economical is that grey/brown/black are cheap, and it's hard to see any path for green or blue to become competitive (and truly zero emissions for blue).
It's possible that we'll find reserves of white hydrogen and efficient ways to extract it, but that's purely speculative right now, while building renewable energy sources, electric distribution, and batteries can be done right now.
10% of power is lost to distribution anyway. Batteries can also lose 10%.
The issue with hydrogen isn't producing it, it's that it's an absolute nightmare to transport and store. Hydrogen can soak into metals, causing them to become brittle - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_embrittlement and it leaks if there's absolutely any chance of it possibly leaking (thanks to the small molecules, and its tendancy to cause everything it touches to go brittle), and can cause a very big bang if it does leak.
It might work well for planes (where power to weight is at an absolute premium) but for cars and buses the weight of a bigger but tamer battery just makes more sense. It's absolutely a good rocket fuel.
The issue isn't that it can't be green. The issue is that it's rocket fuel - high performance but dangerous and high maintenance. Putting rocket fuel in a bus is just dumb.
But then you have even more losses when you convert the hydrogen back to energy.
The formula is that 55kW of electricity used to generate hydrogen from water and then converted back to electricity in a gas turbine or fuel cell results in 15kW of energy.
That's a lot more than 20%.
Compare that to just storing the 55kW in batteries and using them to spin an electric engine. "Hydrogen economy" only makes sense if you have infinite free electricity or massive overproduction.
> "Hydrogen economy" only makes sense if you have infinite free electricity or massive overproduction.
Or when batteries are really expensive and global production and/or geopolitics prevents a global power grid.
Both were the case 15 years ago (and geopolitics still prevents a global power grid today, but metal production has increased and is now sufficient).
Hydrogen wasn't entirely stupid back then; even though PV was more expensive than today, the trends were already clear.
Now? I think hydrogen is suboptimal for most users. But I wouldn't bet against the idea of someone, somewhere, likely in the arctic or antarctic circles, deciding that they really do need multiple months of energy storage, and for those specific weird edge cases I think it's at least possible they might decide a cryogenic liquid hydrogen tank the size of the space shuttle external tank, refuelled every summer by a comically large PV array that works 24 hours in some days, is less silly than 3 gigawatt-hours of batteries.
That's calculated in the total losses. You either need to compress it or freeze it. Usually for vehicles it's compressed, for long term storage or transfer it could be either.
Frequently the green energy used to split water is "surplus" energy. For example the bulk of offshore wind energy happens between 10pm and 2am when energy demand is at its lowest. That energy goes to waste if not stored in hydrogen. Hence, efficiency is irrelevant.
Sure, but as long as we are burning natural gas, hydrogen is a bonus. Either use it or let it be wasted.
Using it to power public transportation is a great idea, if only we can get some better hydrogen fueling infrastructure. It should have a fair shake against electrics as electric vehicle power generation is using a lot of natural gas stations to charge up those cars !
Red hydrogen: produce hydrogen from a thermochemical reaction between water, iodine, and sulfur at a high temperature, around 900°C, using the thermal energy from a nuclear reactor.
"Blue hydrogen" is commonly used for hydrogen produced from natural gas. If it is produced by steam reforming (most common), then the associated CO2 emissions are worse than if you just burn the natural gas directly.
"Green hydrogen" is usually hydrogen produced from water by electrolysis, using electricity from non-CO2 source, e.g. wind or electricity.
Right, if you "oops" don't have working capture because it's never been practical you're making "Blue" hydrogen in which your customers can tell everybody they're environmentally friendly but due to a technical hitch you are emitting lots of CO2. Maybe you can agree a token $1B fine, of course offset against the taxes you were already going to pay, and everybody carries on as before. Hooray for your profitable corporation and oops, too bad for the stupid humans who live on the gradually less inhabitable planet you're destroying.
This would only be really dumb if the corporation was owned by humans. Huh.
Green hydrogen is produced from electrolysis of water where the energy is comming from a renevable source. (Imagine solar panels which are directly connected to an electrolysis plant.)
“Green-ish” hydrogen is produced from electrolysis of water where the energy is comming from the grid. (And thus as green as your grid is.)
