Hydrogen Energy: False Hope or Solution?

Energy Insights speaks with Paul Martin about all things hydrogen. 

Paul is a chemical engineer by training and has an extensive 30-year history with making and using hydrogen and synthetic gas, working as a designer and builder for several pilot and demonstration scale plants for the chemical process industry.

Paul is also a lifelong environmentalist and advocate for climate action and decarbonisation. He's one of the five co-founders of the Hydrogen Science Coalition, where they support a fact-based approach to hydrogen as an energy source to ensure that public investments in hydrogen are used responsibly and effectively without vested interests, public or private.

Topics discussed include the feasibility of hydrogen as an energy source, the limitations of hydrogen and the optimism bias for it across governments and the private sector, the physical thermodynamic limits of producing hydrogen, its role in hard-to-decarbonise industries like steel and shipping and the issue with the ideas that hydrogen could be used with existing energy infrastructure and many other topics.

Twitter: @SpitfireRsrch

LinkedIn: Paul Martin

Website: Hydrogen Science Coalition 

Website: Spitfire Research

Transcript

  12. Paul Martin Transcript - Energy Insights

Host (01:35): We are here with Paul Martin. Paul, thank you so much for coming on the show. 

Paul Martin (01:39): Pleased to be here.

Host (01:40): I wanted to pick your brain on all things hydrogen today. But before we get started, I think it would be useful if you could give us a little background on who you are and what you're currently working on.

Paul Martin (01:52): Sure. I'm currently an independent consultant. I have a little consultancy called Spitfire Research, and I provide services to people that are developing chemical process technology. I'm a chemical engineer by training. I've got about 30 years [of] experience doing that, and in the course of that work, I've spent decades and innumerable projects making and using hydrogen and syngas. Another thing that I am involved in is a pro bono activity. I'm a co-founder of an organization called the Hydrogen Science Coalition that exists basically to provide an unbiased, financially disinterested position about hydrogen and its role in decarbonization, where it fits and where it doesn't. So that's me in a nutshell. 

Host (02:36): How did you come to work on the most abundant element in the universe? How did it track you? 

Paul Martin (02:43): Oh, yes. It's a factoid that's both true and irrelevant. Totally irrelevant because it's never found on earth uncombined or almost never found on earth uncombined. How did I come to work on hydrogen? Well, I was using hydrogen as a chemical during my undergraduate and my master's degree. It's a very useful chemical, and in fact, it's a chemical that we make 120 million tons of a year in the world. We make all of it from fossil fuels. 

Now, I've been an environmentalist my whole life, basically. And I was very concerned back in the 1980s about climate change already when I was doing my undergrad and my graduate work. So in a simple-minded way that might occur to an undergrad student, you know, if we can't burn fossils anymore and we need to burn stuff, hydrogen's kind of it. So I had that kind of simple-minded thinking about hydrogen back when I was in my 20s and ended up working in the environmental industry and then later ended up working with hydrogen. In fact, I was involved in one of the efforts, one of the peaks of interest in hydrogen. There have been several in history since the 1970s, but I was involved in one of them in the late 1990s, early two thousands, trying to make hydrogen. First it was going to be for feeding fuel cells in vehicles and then later for combined heat and power in homes. It was in the course of that work and patenting devices for making hydrogen from natural gas and to feed fuel cells and so on that I came to contend with hydrogen's very immutable and difficult properties as a fuel and came to realize that it's basically always going to be the fuel of the future and never the fuel of the present.

Host (04:33): Let’s linger on that point for a moment. You've just given us a brief tour of this kind of peaks and troughs of hydrogen's interest and it goes back quite some time now and what exactly happened? Why does it go in these peaks and troughs throughout history when we're talking about hydrogen? I mean, it kind of reminds me of nuclear fusion for that matter too, right? It's got the similar kind of…

Paul Martin (04:57): I mean, it's very much like that. Again, it appeals in a simple-minded way and the devil is in the details, when you look at the details. And in fact, the devil is not hiding in the details. The devil is waving his pitchfork at you from the details, making rude gestures at you with his other hand, honestly. I guess the thing is, though, that it's seductive, right? It's simple-minded, it's seductive. And so we reach for it, and it's the same, you know, fusion is very similar. People make it out to be, well, you know, one day fusion's gonna take care of it all for us. We'll have limitless energy, it'll be too cheap to meter this sort of thing. But honestly, when you look at fusion itself, and I'm not a nuclear physicist, but you don't need to be to understand the fundamental fraught difficulties of using fusion as an electric electricity source either. The devil's in the details there, too, in a big way. As a consequence, unfortunately, these sorts of things get used as a distraction from doing something, doing the hard thing that will actually require us to change how we live, change our relationship with energy. 

(06:18): The things, people really want us to just invent a way out of it, to make it possible for us to just keep living the way that we've been living, not really change too much of anything. Hopefully make life cheaper, make energy cheaper, and get rid of the greenhouse gas emissions and the toxic emissions too. Unfortunately, that's too tall in order. So, we have to pick among those, which of those are most valuable to us. Then, the engineers and the scientists, people like me can actually come up with a set of solutions that will suit that set of values.

But of course, we want it all. And you know, my wife and I said to our kids when they're growing up, it's nice to want things, right? But we have to contend with reality here. It's nice to want things, but there are only certain things that you can have and honestly, as a society, sometimes I kind of feel like, oh, that's why we can't have nice things because we don't think about things in an adult way.

Host (07:15): Now, I think mentioning peaks and troughs of interest, in the past few years, we've definitely, we're hitting a peak in big hydrogen interest. Right. 

Paul Martin (07:22): Oh yeah, big bubble. 

Host (07:24): Arguably a bubble, as you just mentioned. 

Paul Martin (07:26): Yes. A big, very much lighter-than-air bubble, but as you mentioned, it's not the first one. There was a peak of interest, basically during and immediately after the energy crisis in 1973, the oil crisis. In 1973, when all of these sorts of, I guess, obvious potential alternatives came out on the table. At that time it was, oh yeah, we'll just build nuclear reactors like mad and we'll use them to electrolyze water to make hydrogen. Then, we won't have to burn fossils anymore and hence we won't be held over a barrel anytime anybody decides that they don't want to give us their fossils or sell them to us or they want more money for them or whatever. 

Then, once we started contending with climate change, that added to the desire to get rid of the fossils. It wasn't just an economic thing anymore. On top of it, there were the difficulties of trying to make the effluent from vehicles tolerable in terms of their air pollution. So the big push that was going on in the late 1990s, early 2000s was less related to climate change and more related to emissions. It was more related to toxic emissions from vehicle tailpipes. When you look at hydrogen, the benefit that you get there is that, in a simple-minded way, the effluent is just water. You just get water vapor when you burn hydrogen. Unfortunately, that's not true. When you burn anything in air, including hydrogen, you react nitrogen with oxygen and you make nitrogen oxides, which are toxic and one of them, nitrous oxide, that you don't get very much of when you burn things, but you get some of, happens to be an enormously powerful and persistent greenhouse gas with a global warming potential of 260 something times that of CO2. So it's not just toxic stuff in there. There's also some global warming potential. 

(09:26) Hydrogen has global warming potential as well. It's about eleven and a half times that of CO2. We didn't know about that. I mean, in the 1990s, we were thinking that you could vent hydrogen as long as you kept it below its explosive limit, you could vent it, and there was really no problem because it wasn't toxic and it wasn't considered a greenhouse gas. So it really wasn't a worry to vent it. There's a lot of hydrogen in the world that's vented at the moment on that false notion. We know better now. 

Host (09:53): Awesome. I just wanted to go back and linger on that. You mentioned the oil shock and I guess there's a comparison with hydrogen and conventional fuels in terms of energy density. I'm just wondering if, is that why hydrogen is seen to be such an attractive energy source compared to say, a conventional oil? 

Paul Martin (10:18): No, it's actually quite the opposite. So hydrogen's problem is that as a fuel, which honestly right now, of [those] 120 million tons of hydrogen that we make per year, we don't use any of it as a fuel. Virtually none of it is used as a fuel. I mean, it's used in a kneeling furnaces, but not really as a fuel. It's used in rockets, but that's such a tiny quantity that it's really insignificant. There are a few fuel applications for very high-temperature things like glass blowing when you're working with quartz and things like that. But these are negligible issues. Like they're really tiny, virtually no hydrogen is wasted as a fuel. A lot of it is used to make fuels, like to remove the sulfur from fossil fuels.

But the issue with hydrogen as a fuel is that whereas gasoline is inefficient in an engine, but very effective because it's a liquid, and you can pour it, and you can store it easily, you can move it around with very low energy costs to move it around, hydrogen's neither efficient nor effective. So, that's its fundamental problem. Hydrogen's energy density per unit mass is quite good, but its energy density per unit volume is terrible. It's just positively awful. Numbers are useful sometimes. To give you an idea, if you compress hydrogen to 700 times atmospheric pressure,  700 bar, which is a pressure of five tons per square inch, for those who think in those units, quite enormous pressure - 10,000 PSI. It's only 41 kilograms of cubic meters. If you were to cool it down to make a liquid out of it, which you can at 24 degrees above absolute zero, it's only 71 kilograms of cubic meters. So energy density per unit volume is terrible. I guess we'd contend with that if we could make hydrogen very efficiently and have it end up making work very efficiently at the end. 

(12:25) The fundamental problem with hydrogen is not really that the individual steps are too inefficient, it's that there are too many steps. So, you make hydrogen, you lose some energy, and then you store it and you lose some energy and you can lose either between a little bit of energy if you compress it, or a lot of energy if you liquefy it. Then, you convert that hydrogen back to work to mechanical energy moving a vehicle or into electricity again. And you lose a lot of energy again and loss, times loss, times loss gives you very little when you're done. It's basically a terrible battery. It's not just a terrible battery in efficiency terms, it's a terrible battery in terms of its volume. Honestly, hydrogen, we don't move it and store it very much at all today. We make almost all the hydrogen that we use in the world right where we need it. We make it from something else, from natural gas or coal, and rarely by electrolyzing water. And we make it right where we need it because hydrogen itself is hard to move in store. So it's not an ideal way to move and store energy, whereas gasoline, oh man, it's not efficient, but boy, is it effective. Tremendous energy density per unit, mass per unit volume. Very easy to store, very easy to move around, very energy efficient to move around. That's hydrogen's problem as a fuel, and that's basically the deal killer right there. It's [a] lack of efficiency or effectiveness. We’d be happy to use it if it was one or the other, but it's neither. 

Host (14:04): What do you make of the claims that, given all of the downsides to transporting hydrogen that you've just mentioned, what do you make of the claims that we would just need to modify existing infrastructure to accommodate more mass-produced hydrogen, for example? Like, some people are talking about reusing natural gas pipelines and things like that. What do you make of those suggestions? 

Paul Martin (14:30): Well, I've evaluated those claims in considerable detail. I'm actually in the process of writing a peer-reviewed journal article with another author on the topic, but I've written some in informal and very thoroughly peer-reviewed, but not formally peer-reviewed work on this subject and looked at it in considerable detail. Basically this argument that we can use the natural gas infrastructure to move hydrogen is a sales pitch that's being given to you by a desperate industry, the natural gas industry, natural gas distribution industry, in particular, people that own the pipes that carry gas and sell gas door to door. For those people, it's either hydrogen or go out of business. So can you believe a word they say about the effectiveness of hydrogen? No. You should listen very skeptically to anything that they say, because their alternative is to go out of business. So of course, they're gonna sell it like it was the best thing since sliced bread. And believe me, it's not.

When you look at the details, there are problems with the piping material or problems with compression, energy used to compress, the size of the compressors are wrong, compressors have to be replaced, pipes have to be derated in pressure because the material isn't as tough when it's in. The presence of hydrogen has a tendency to fatigue [and] crack, so every time it flexes the cracks grow faster and not by little, by as much as 30 times as fast as they'd grow in natural gas. So there's just a heap of problems with reusing the natural gas infrastructure. 

(16:06) Of course, what does the gas industry say? They say, well, we're gonna contend with these problems over time, and maybe we'll invent ways to fix them, which is disingenuous. But, set that aside for the moment, what they say is, well don't worry, we'll just add a little bit of hydrogen to the natural gas system right now, 20% by volume. 20% sounds like a lot, but the problem is, remember how a minute ago we were talking about energy density per unit volume? Well, it has a third the energy density per unit volume that natural gas does. It's basically like adding water to gasoline. So it's 20% by volume, hydrogen, but it's only 7% in terms of energy content and at considerable cost. It's a really, at best, a very marginal reduction in the amount of green greenhouse gas emission that could be produced, even if the hydrogen itself were made with no greenhouse gas emissions, which is obviously, it's possible, but it's difficult and expensive to do. 

So, yeah, the notion that hydrogen's problems are going to be contended with by just reusing the natural gas infrastructure, that's a myth that's being spread by people who will go to business if that myth isn't believed. 

Host (17:19): So basically, what I'm hearing is that if they were to use existing infrastructure, it would require a complete overhaul of everything that we currently have?

Paul Martin (17:30): Yeah. They'll reuse something, it'll be the land. It'll be the right of way. That's pretty much it. So, if one looks at the job of replacing natural gas with hydrogen, first of all, not everywhere and every user all at once will be ready to use hydrogen, pure hydrogen. You need different devices to use pure hydrogen than you do to use natural gas, so you'll have to replace all the boilers and the heaters and the burners and cooktops and ranges and turbines and everything else that uses natural gas right now would have to be ripped out and replaced with something that's suitable for hydrogen. And that's not gonna happen all at once. 

So guess what? You're gonna have to twin the whole network. Right now, we have a transmission pipeline and it carries pipeline spec natural gas, and there is only one. Now it might be twined in a few areas where that's required strategically or for capacity. They built one, and then it was too small, and they built another one in parallel in order to increase capacity or something like that. But the notion that we would twin all of them, ultimately, basically what you're saying is, well, we're gonna reuse the natural gas infrastructure by not reusing the natural gas infrastructure by building new natural gas infrastructure and calling it, reusing it. All the end user devices have to change, the pipelines have to be twinned. It's, yeah. 

(18:50) Again, you're being sold a bill of goods and the people that are selling you the bill of goods have an invoice waiting for you. By you, I mean the public purse. That's the problem. If this was all being funded by the likes of Shell and gas distributors worldwide, that would be a different matter. But it's not, it's being paid for outta the public purse. And so, hence people like us at the Hydrogen Science Coalition, we wanna make sure that if public money is spent on things, that's spent on things that are actually going to decarbonize something, we don't wanna just prop up the guys that are in the business of selling natural gas to keep them in business. I don't mind giving them money if they're doing something that is actually, earnestly, in the interest of long-term decarbonization, but converting the natural gas network just because it's there is not a strategy. Honestly, it's a strategy only to prop up the natural gas industry and to allow them to pretend for a time that their assets are assets rather than what they really are in a decarbonized future, which is liabilities with an abandonment cost. They're worth less than nothing. 

Host (20:02): Let's shift to, for example, we've been talking a lot about hydrogen and its decarbonization potential in the economy, but I think a lot of the conversation has now shifted to hydrogen being used in hard-to-decarbonize industries. As you mentioned, a lot of the hydrogen now is being produced on-site, for example. Now a lot of these industries are, like shipping or steel manufacturing or cement production, just to name a few. I just wanted to get your thoughts on this. Is there any evidence to suggest that using hydrogen in these industries is viable as we move forward?

Paul Martin (20:43): Let's take this question apart into two pieces. So the first question is, what should we do with any green hydrogen, meaning hydrogen that's made, you know, clean hydrogen, hydrogen that's made with low CO2 emissions in earnest. Like, actually low CO2 emissions regardless what you make it from. What should we do with it? Well, the absolute highest priority use for any green hydrogen or clean hydrogen that we think we can make is replacing those uses of black hydrogen, hydrogen made from fossils without carbon capture, which people call gray or brown to try to make it sound a little bit less offensive. But we should be replacing that stuff in those uses that are durable post-decarbonization with the green stuff. That's pretty obvious, isn't it? Before we think about taking the product and burning it, as a substitute for things that we burn, surely we should use it where we use hydrogen today, where it's inarguably necessary. So, let's list those sorts of applications.

(21:45) The very first one, and the very most important one is the production of ammonia. [The] production of ammonia is super important to humans and their food animals. Because basically, without it, about half of them die from lack of calories. We managed by the invention of the process by which we make ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen, which is called the Haber Bosch process; we managed to double crop yields and in that single effort, and doing that by other means is extraordinarily difficult. Honestly, that's 40 of the 120 million tons of hydrogen that we make today is using ammonia production. Right now, there are people talking about making ammonia, but what are they talking about doing with the ammonia? They're talking about doing dumb things like burning it in steel plants or burning it in coal-fired power plants and burning it in ships and stuff like this. Those applications are just not the right thing that we should do with ammonia if we make it from green feedstocks. We should be using it to feed the world. Right? 

So ammonia's first, and then there are a bunch of other applications like that, that are existing uses of hydrogen that will need to continue to use in a decarbonized future that add up to another 50 million tons a year. They include things like making methanol, which is used as a chemical, it's used in plastics and various other applications, and to make a host of other chemicals. It's used in the direct reduction of iron ore to iron metal, that's a process that's called direct reduction of iron, but today we don't do that with pure hydrogen, although we can. It's been demonstrated that we can. Today, we do that with mixtures of hydrogen and carbon monoxide that are made from natural gas. Those mixtures are called syngas. And we use syngas for that process right now. In the decarbonized future, we'll have to use pure hydrogen, which means we'll need more hydrogen to replace the carbon monoxide that does the same job.

(23:50) There are lots of applications like that. The remaining 50 million tons, they're all essential and of the, so we end up with 90 million tons that we have to replace and 30 million tons that we don't. What are the 30 million tons used for? They're used to desulphurize fossil fuels before we burn them so that they don't kill us. They don't make acid rain and toxic particulate matter that shortens people's lives and gives them asthma and that sort of thing.  So it's instructive to think about just how difficult a problem that is to solve. First of all, 90 million tons of hydrogen has an emission of greenhouse gasses associated with its manufacturer today that's greater than that of the entire aviation industry. The whole aviation industry, not just the long-distance jets, all of it. To replace that 90 million tons, let's say we were going to use wind and solar electricity to make hydrogen by electrolyzing water, we would need, at [the] barest minimum, 4,500 terawatt hours of electricity to make 90 million tons of hydrogen. Remember, this isn't leading a molecule of hydrogen extra to do anything else. This is just replacing the existing uses. 4,500 terawatt hours of electricity happens to be more than twice as much wind and solar as we made on earth in 2019. 

(25:17) So all of this talk about hydrogen being used as a fuel or to decarbonize anything else is decades premature. And it's a misfocus. You know, people are focusing on the wrong thing. It's very simple. It's a very simple thing. Green hydrogen or clean hydrogen with low greenhouse gas emissions should be used to decarbonize existing uses of hydrogen that are durable post-decarbonization. Anybody that's talking about using hydrogen as a fuel, they're talking about something that's very questionable. It's really ultimately that simple. Now, [the] Hydrogen Science Coalition actually has five principles that we agree on as a group. We have a little bit more of a nuanced view on it than that. But what we do say is, yeah, we need lots and lots of clean hydrogen in the world. Let's get on making it. Let's just make sure that we use it for the right things.

Now let's talk about a few new things that we could do with hydrogen that makes sense. You mentioned one of them, which honestly is just extending what I was talking about with the direct reduction of iron. So there, hydrogen's not being used as a fuel, it's being used as a chemical-reducing agent. It's being used to take the oxygens off the iron, the iron oxide, that's the iron ore, and to produce water and iron metal. That's a beneficial use, and it's been proven, and we're gonna have to do a lot of that in the future because although there are other things that we can do to make iron, we're going to have to put a lot of research and development into them to get them to scale. They're not at scale yet, whereas this direct reduction of iron with pure hydrogen, we know it works. We know we can do it. Just have to do it. 

(26:58) There are a few other applications like that. I would not list cement as one of them because in cement making, honestly, hydrogen, first of all you can do cement making. Half of the energy input in cement making is for the process. That's called calcining, and you can do that electrically. So there's no problem calcining electrically. Then, the really hot part that they call clinkering, that's where you run it in a kiln, and you have a fire in the middle of this kiln that rotates, that material rotates in the kiln and gets cooked and forms balls that you then grind up and make cement out of. That process requires a radiant flame and hydrogen doesn't produce a radiant flame. So you'd honestly be much better off burning something like biomass in a cement kiln than burning hydrogen. And you'd achieve the same basic reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by so doing because all of the CO2 that's in biomass came from the atmosphere in the recent past. So that would be a better application. 

But there are a handful of others where hydrogen does make sense. It's generally though, not being used as a fuel. It's generally being used as a chemical or reducing agent to do something different than what we do right now with fossils as a starting material.

Host (28:13): So given everything that you've just said, that would, technically speaking, mean all that talk as well, by extension would extend to say hydrogen fuel cells in cars. I mean like…

Paul Martin (28:27): Oh yeah. Hydrogen and transport is just nonsense. Like total nonsense. When you look at it in detail, it just, it makes you shake your head and wonder what people have been thinking. Honestly, in the 1990s, it did make sense because, at that point, we had invented the lithium-ion battery, but we hadn't scaled it enough. It was still super expensive. And so the thought of making a car outta $3,000 a kilowatt hour batteries was just not on, right? You weren't gonna do it. That was impractical. But we did scale the lithium-ion battery. I mean, we all bought cell phones and laptops, and eventually somebody went, hey, you know, if these things get an order of magnitude cheaper, we can afford to put them in cars. And they did. So that problem's been solved. It's called electric mobility.

And of course, although we should always, always, always first think about how do we not move people. For instance, I didn't fly to visit you for us to have this conversation in person. We're having it virtually, and moving information instead of moving people is obvious. The pandemic showed us how easy it was to do and how effective it could be, and that's way better than moving people around by any means. And the same, you know, moving people around individually in little two-metric-ton chunks of metal is not really all that smart. If we can move people around by active transport and then electrified public mass transport, we should do that to the maximum extent that we can. 

(30:00) But ultimately, in cities that have been designed around cars, we're gonna need some cars. When we look at cars, the kind of car we should be thinking about are electric cars because, honestly, they afford the owners an opportunity to move around in personal and closed comfort in return for a cost to them per ton of CO2 emissions generated that's negative. I mean, I bought one myself recently, my first OEM electric vehicle. But ten years ago, I converted a gasoline engine car to an electric car, a little British sports car. I did that in part because I wanted to understand whether or not the claims that were being made about electric cars were accurate. So when I built this vehicle, I built it with the opportunity to make all the measurements necessary to validate the claims about efficiency and so on. It's a no-brainer, especially anywhere in Canada, where I live, where 80% of us have access to a grid that's 40 grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour or less. Electric vehicles are just, I mean, they're absurdly good, but when I converted that car, for instance, I had the opportunity to get the fuel efficiency performance of the car while it was a gasoline car and then convert it. Then, [the] same car, different drivetrain, compare it. And I was able to drop its greenhouse gas emissions from source, driving it back and forth to work, which I did for four years. I was able to drop its emissions by a factor of 97% relative to the same car with the gasoline drivetrain. 

(31:50) But the amazing thing is relative to my Prius, which is the other car that I was driving back and forth to work, which is the most efficient car you can still buy in Canada that doesn't have a plug, I dropped my daily emissions from driving by 94%. So this isn't a small difference. This is a giant difference. This is almost two orders of magnitude better. Granted not everywhere has a grid as clean as Canada's and so on, but there are clear solutions to certain things like transport and wherever transport by electric means, either directly or via batteries, is feasible. It is the right option. It's the right option for sure. In my opinion, it's not just cars and light trucks where the market is spoken. If you look at a graph of the number of electric vehicles versus the number of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles on the same scale, you can't see the hydrogen fuel cell vehicles because virtually none of them have been sold. I mean, a few thousand in the world compared to millions and millions. 

So not only do I think that's going to be the direction that we go with cars, but it's going to be the way that we go with heavier transport as well. Freight trucks and trains that can't be directly electrified and short-distance aircraft and inshore and short-distance shipping as well, like ferries and the like. So that really, only in transport, leaves us with two things. It leaves us with long-distance aviation like transoceanic flights and transoceanic ships. They're the only things left in transport that require fuels. Well, that and some remote and rural transport. I mean, you're never going to be using electric or hydrogen or anything else to move goods to northern communities in Canada that are resupplied over ice roads. That's going to need to be a liquid fuel and we'll probably just use fossils there because it amounts to three-quarters of nothing in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. It's really more a matter of what's most practical. Transport's definitely electrifying, and hydrogen doesn't have a role in it, in my opinion, at all. And yet people are still flogging it. Why? Why are they flogging it? 

Host (34:12): Yeah, I mean, you've got companies like Toyota who are, now they're recently shifting to the more of a talk on EVs, but they were flogging hydrogen for a very long time. 

Paul Martin (34:24): Yeah, they were. And that has a lot to do with who Toyota is and their position in Japanese society, with Japanese politics and with the realities of Japan. I mean, Japan and South Korea are going to be big losers in the decarbonized future. It's going to be very, very difficult for them because right now, they import substantially all of their energy by ship, and they like that. But the problem is in a decarbonized future that's gonna come to an end. It will be possible technically to do it, [but] it will not be possible economically. So when you're talking about trying to replace liquified natural gas with something derived from hydrogen, when you look at it, it doesn't matter which of the molecules you pick, whether it's methanol or ammonia or liquid, organic hydrogen carriers, blah, blah, blah. There's a long list of candidates or liquid hydrogen or any number of options. I've looked at all of them. Basically what you're talking about is taking 10 kilowatt hours of electricity and buying it, and then paying for a whole bunch of capital equipment and getting one to two kilowatt hours out the backend of your process. If your market competitors are paying one-fifth to one-tenth as much per unit of useful energy as you are, your heavy industry is basically toast. 

Honestly, I think Japan and South Korea both realize this, and that's why they're flogging hydrogen. Honestly, it's part a desire to sell people on the notion that there is a hope, you know, that there's a solution in the future and partially a delaying tactic to avoid decarbonization because there really isn't a solution for them. That's the sad fact. You have large energy-hungry populations and small land masses without sufficient capacity to generate their own renewable electricity to meet their own needs unless they have a massive shift in how much energy they use and how they use it. 

(36:29) If I saw Japan and South Korea building wind and solar with mad abandoned, you know, if there, if there were wind turbines and circling the entire entirety of the Japanese islands, and they were thinking about hydrogen for just that extra bit that they couldn't manage to do themselves, then I would give them the benefit of the doubt, but they're not doing that. They're talking about buying hydrogen from Australia, making it into ammonia, and then shipping it to Japan and burning it as a co-feed in coal-fired power plants that are 30% efficient. I mean, that is mad. That makes no sense on any level. It doesn't make sense from an energy efficiency perspective, from a decarbonization perspective, from an economic perspective, from an efficiency per perspective; it makes no sense on any level. And yet, that's what's being proposed. So to my mind, we have a term for that in the environmental field of endeavor. We refer to that as predatory delay. Right? It's putting it off, saying, oh, don't worry, someday, we'll build giant vacuum cleaners that will suck the CO2 out of the air and bury it for us, so keep burning your fossils now because in the future, we'll fix it this way. Right? It's very much like that direct air capture meme, and that's a dangerous meme, right? Because it gives people the out, it says, oh, it's okay. Don't worry. The propeller heads, the engineers and scientists will invent a way to make the problem go away in the future so we can just keep doing what we're doing now until they get around to it. That's not the way it's gonna work. 

Host (38:11): I just wanted to linger on the fact that you mentioned Australia shipping hydrogen to Japan, for example. Now, I know Australia's been talking about becoming this hydrogen exporting superpower, for example, especially with the new government that's just come in. I think one inconvenient fact is that most of the hydrogen, and you alluded to this earlier, is that most of the hydrogen, for example in Australia, is produced by gas and coal. Does this kind of also defeat the purpose? The whole point of using hydrogen is to decarbonize, right? But if you are sourcing that hydrogen from the source of the problem of climate change, for example, it doesn't really align. 

Paul Martin (39:03): So let's take this apart in two pieces. The first piece is, will Australia become an energy exporting superpower in a decarbonized future? And the answer is no and yes. It's no, in that Australia is not going to be exporting energy. Australia will be exporting embodied energy if they're smart, and if we are smart and we encourage them to do what they should. They have access to these wonderful hybrids of wind and sun that are available on the west coast where, and in the south to some degree, where every day when the sun cooks like crazy, you get tremendous solar radiation. Then, when the sun goes down, the wind blows in off the ocean. So, you get this perfectly timed trade off between wind and sun, which basically makes it possible to make hydrogen by electrolysis very cheaply.

The problem is the Australians have this fossil fuel legacy box on their head, right? Just like Canadians do, which is, we're energy exporters; how do we export this stuff as energy? Well, it's too far to run cables to run HVDC cables. This is possible, but it's kind of insane so we're probably not gonna do that. Well we've gotta make a molecule out of it and sell that. Well, great, let's do that. Let's make ammonia and sell it to replace all the black ammonia in the world. Fantastic. There you go. So it's no, and yes, they won't be exporting energy. They'll be exporting a valuable product that's very energy intensive, like ammonia. That makes sense. Or direct reduced iron, that makes perfect sense. Australians are massive exporters of iron ore. So why export all that useless oxygen? Why not do direct reduction of iron using green hydrogen that you make in Australia and export hot briquetted iron or direct reduced iron pellets to places that wanna make steel and then they feed that into their electric arc furnaces with some scrap steel, and lo and behold they have steel. Now that makes sense. Right?  Like I said, the Australian thing, it's knowing, yes, they won't be exporting a new kind of  LNG to the world. What they will be, if we're smart, exporting is products that currently are very black, that make huge amounts of greenhouse gas emissions. They'll be exporting the green versions of those to the world as a way to monetize their electricity. 

(41:43) Now, the other piece to this puzzle is the idea of converting fossils into hydrogen and burying the CO2. Now that's variously referred to as blue hydrogen or there are a few other euphemisms as well, because you can actually, instead of burying CO2, you can make carbon out of methane, you can make carbon and hydrogen out of methane, and then you can use the carbon for certain applications, or you can bury it, and they refer to that as turquoise hydrogen. These colors are the colors of euphemism. There really is only one color of hydrogen in the world, and it's blacker than black. It's 30% blacker per joule, than if you just burned the fossils that it was made from without carbon capture. But anyway, these theoretical things, blue and turquoise hydrogen. Well, the thing about blue hydrogen is that it's really rather to follow on the euphemism, it's rather blackish blue and bruise colored, in fact, and the more blackish and bruise colored it is, while it's still being considered blue, the more money they make. 

There's a big project in Canada, in Alberta, that was funded by the Canadian public and it was put together by Shell and the huge engineering procurement construction management company, Fluor. These are not incompetent people, right? These are world experts at this sort of thing. They built this giant project called Shell Quest, and what it does is it goes after the easiest 45% capture of CO2 from hydrogen production on an existing facility to make hydrogen that's used to desulphurize Athabasca bitumen before it's shipped to the United States to turn into fuels. We're paying for it, and it's burying a million tons of CO2 per year. Because it's publicly funded, all of the costs are public, and all of the performance metrics are public. It's appalling.

(43:44) First of all, they're going after only 78% capture of the easiest 55% of the CO2 that’s there, which is in the form of the CO2 that's in the syngas that comes out of the plant. The mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide that comes out of the plant. That CO2 has to be captured and removed anyway in order to monetize the hydrogen. In order to be able to use the hydrogen downstream, you have to get rid of the CO2 because it would just mess everything up. So what they're doing is they're taking it out, and they're compressing it and drying it, and they're pumping it 60 kilometers away to a perfect hole in the ground that they happen to have that's two kilometers below the ground, and they're shoving it in there. They've been doing that for five years and they've been shoving a million tons a year of CO2 into that hole. It costs 145 Canadian dollars per ton. So that's bad enough, right? Because it's being done at scale, and it's still that expensive. 

The problem is that, that's just the CO2, that's not the CO2 equivalent. That's not all the greenhouse gasses that are involved. You're starting with natural gas here, fossil gas, and when you produce it and when you transmit it, you have some leakage, which worldwide, depending on who you believe, the worldwide average is about 1.5% of the natural gas that we use is emitted as leakage in those processes. In some places, it's 7%. So that methane is very powerful as a greenhouse gas, much more powerful than, on the 20-year time horizon. It's 84 times as potent a greenhouse gas as CO2, and as a consequence of those emissions, the CO2 equivalent emissions of a hydrogen production facility go up by about 40%, versus ignoring them, which is what we normally do. When you feed that methane into the process, you end up not only getting the leakage, but you also need to use some energy to capture the CO2. So you need some heat to capture it and strip the CO2 back outta the thing that you captured it with, and then you need electricity to compress and dry and store that CO2 to shove it into the subsurface. When you put in those emissions from burning that gas, which by the way, are not captured at Quest, the capture drops from 45% in gross terms to 35% in net terms. When you add in the methane emissions, it drops to 21%.

(46:27) So we're paying this enormous amount of money to capture almost none of the CO2 emissions from this hydrogen production. That's what blue hydrogen's all about. It's a fossil-fueled shell game that's intended to distract people from the reality of the matter, which is [that] in the future, hydrogen isn't gonna save us. We have to stop burning fossils as fuels, period. Full stop. You know? The fossil fuel industry doesn't want to hear that. They don't want you to think that because that basically means that 75 to 85% of their business is gone in a decarbonized future, and that's what must happen. Hydrogen won't save them. 

Now, you can do better. You can make the capture better than Quest by a lot. There are things you can do. There are different technologies. You can use autothermal reforming, and you can heat the CCS equipment using electricity and so on. You can use natural gas that's very low in leakage from Norway, you know? But this gets more and more and more restrictive. And you can only do it in; you can do it in fewer and fewer places under very restrictive conditions that are very expensive. Very quickly, it turns into, it becomes a phantom, right? Something that, the only way that it'll actually be done is in a way that's not really clean.

Host (47:52): One thing that comes to my mind when you talk about this entire process, I mean, it's an extensive process, right? I think one thing that comes to my mind is the energy return on energy invested for hydrogen. When I hear you talk about x, y, z on how much energy it requires to not only produce the hydrogen but capture the carbon but then you've gotta think about the energy that was used to extract the coal or the gas that was used to make the hydrogen. The cost of this just sounds a bit enormous. 

Paul Martin (48:33): Yeah. I don't wanna bore people with my favorite topic, which is thermodynamics. But I have to do something. I have to talk about something a little bit to help people understand a very important point. That is, to use the terminology that Michael Liebreich, who's another guy that's very active in the hydrogen, very active critic in relation to hydrogen's role and decarbonization out there. What he said is, energy is measured in joules, right? Or BTUs or kilowatt hours, but not all joules; some joules are more equal than others, and that's true. 

Let me explain to you what I mean by that or what Michael means by that. A unit of energy in the form of heat at low-temperature, you might have one joule of heat that's being used to heat up your house, which is a very low temperature application. And you might have one joule of electricity that you can use for whatever purpose. The two of them, they're both units of energy measured in joules, but they're not worth the same. Just like I can have a Jamaican dollar and an American dollar, and they're both units of money measured in dollars, but they're not worth the same. That unit of electricity can be used to pump three joules of heat from outside into your house because it's work. Okay? It's thermodynamic work or mechanical energy, really, equivalent. This potential of a unit of energy to do work is referred to as exergy. So electricity is basically pure exergy. You can convert it to work with high efficiency. Heat can be reasonably good in exergy, or it can be terrible. It can be [a] waste. Useless.

(50:34) So there's the problem. When you make hydrogen out of electricity by electrolyzing water, what you've done is you've taken this giant step backward in value by converting pure exergy into heat or a proxy for heat. You know, a fuel that you can burn to make heat. And that's the fundamental problem with it. In terms of energy return per unit, energy invested, that's kind of a bugbear. It's a bit of a thing that's used often by the fossil fuel industry to say, well, if you could find energy laying around like we do, like we just drill holes in the ground and energy comes out, that's really efficient, right? And we get a lot of energy for every unit of energy invested, but that's actually kind of nonsense. What we should really be worried about is how much exergy we get, how much potential we get to do work per unit of exergy that we invest. 

The beauty is that even on an energy per unit, energy invested basis, and even more so on an exergy per unit, exergy invested, wind and solar are already awesome. If you feed that wind and solar to something efficient that can store it like a battery. Like, a battery in an electric vehicle is a perfect example, where the battery already exists for a purpose, you maximize the benefit of that exergy that's been put in, and you transmit that exergy very effectively to the ultimate purpose that's required, which is moving a person around in a vehicle, right? But if you do it indirectly through hydrogen, you end up with these big losses, and they just basically throw away, they grind up most of that exergy that you put in there and turn it into heat, you know? That basically means, in very direct terms, if you look [at] two vehicles, the Tesla Model 3 long-range version and the Toyota Marai mark one. Those two vehicles got almost exactly the same range. In fact, the Tesla got a little bit more range on a charge. The hydrogen vehicle used 3.2 times as much energy to do the same job, to move a person a mile. It was heavier, more expensive, and not only did it use 3.2 times as much energy, it cost over five times as much per mile driven. Because not only do you have to buy that energy, you have to pay all this capital equipment, electrolyzers and storage tanks and compressors and all that sort of stuff. So the cost per unit per mile driven is over five times as high. All in return for what? Faster refueling. So yeah, the concept's deader than the doornail.

(53:34) This is the fundamental problem with hydrogen as the fuel is this exergy problem. It's not efficient. That means that you have to gobble up giant amounts of energy just to consume it in this familiar way that we're comfortable with, which is, setting it on fire or putting it in a fuel cell in that case or in making electricity. [It] doesn't really matter. You end up in the same boat. You've converted it from exergy, which is valuable, to heat, which is less valuable, and then you're trying to convert it from heat back into exergy. Those steps are inefficient. That's the way it is. Thermodynamics sucks that way. 

Host (54:12): Paul, I realize we're coming up to the end of our time together, and it's been an absolute education for me. Thank you for that. But I just had one more thing to get your thoughts on. Given everything that we've talked about and given where the politics is right now in regard to a lot of countries pushing hydrogen. Do you think, like, as a summary, do you think that there is space for hydrogen to come into the economy, or do you think that it will be remained as this kind of periphery thing that it always has been? What are your final thoughts on all this? 

Paul Martin (54:56): Well, I would say that hydrogen's $180 billion a year business. So it may be on the periphery of people's minds, but I'll tell you, it's awfully important economically. It does things like feed half the people on earth by virtue of making ammonia from which all of the nitrogen fertilizers, nitrates and urea and all that stuff are made. So that's a pretty important thing, in objective terms, feeding half the people and their food animals on earth. Decarbonizing hydrogen is incredibly important, and we should take it very seriously. But what we should do is we should not worry about what it'll take to decarbonize the last 5% of the economy before we start working on the easy 95%. 

Let's set aside this hard-to-decarbonize sectors’ business because, honestly, when people talk about hard-to-decarbonize sectors, they usually just mean the thing I'm interested in. Oh, well, it seems hard, so it's a hard-to-decarbonize sector. Oh, okay. Well, I may not agree with you. It might actually be easy from my perspective, but let's not worry about those because there are easy-to-decarbonize sectors or easier than everything else. We should be focusing hard on those because those are gonna give us the decarbonization benefit for the lowest investment of money. Or in fact, in some cases, even for over a lifetime basis for less money than what we're doing now. Electric vehicles being one example. 

So we should focus on the easy-to-decarbonize sectors. Hydrogen's not involved in any of those. We should worry about decarbonizing hydrogen. Once we've made, say, 50% progress towards decarbonizing hydrogen, so now instead of 0% or 0.04% or whatever it is of hydrogen being green, now 50% of hydrogen that's used as hydrogen is green. Once we get to that point, maybe we can start thinking about other things to use hydrogen for, but we just gotta keep our eyes on the ball. 

(57:06) The thing that we need to do here is to stop burning fossils as fuels. And the way we're gonna do that is not by finding something else to burn. The way we're gonna do that is by answering the intelligent question, which is, we can't burn fossils anymore. How do we accomplish what we did by burning fossils without generating greenhouse gas emissions? And the answer to that question is almost never burn hydrogen as a fuel. So I had to leave people with that thought. That's what it would be.

If I was going to give advice to [the] government, which the Hydrogen Science Coalition exists in part to do, I would say that really what you need to do is you need to make emissions expensive, which we've done in Canada. We were told it would be impossible, but we have a carbon tax. It's been defended in two federal elections and against a Supreme Court challenge. It's the law of the land. It's very broadly publicly supported, and it's going to make a difference over time by making emissions expensive. And then, let the market figure out what the best way is to serve people food and variety and quality and to heat their homes and to move themselves around. Let the market figure out what the best ways are to do that, by making the emissions expensive, so the market wants to avoid those emissions. That's a necessary but insufficient criterion. Then you can come in after you've done that, you can come in with regulation as a scalpel, not as a two-handed battle acts to trim away those things that people like to do, even though they're very emissive and will continue to do if you don't just regulate them out of existence. That's what I would recommend that societies do.

(58:46) Subsidizing energy production, I don't care what it is, it's wrong-headed because what we really need to do is we need to make people value energy more and use it more intelligently, more efficiently. They should be paying more for it when it's less availabl,e when it's more expensive. They should be paying less for it when it's more available and less expensive and less emissive. As an example, my electric car charges between 11:00 PM and 7:00 AM because in Ontario, we get an exceptionally good rate for electricity at night in return for a very expensive peak electricity is between 4:00 PM and 9:00 PM. That's the sort of policy that makes sense and we should implement worldwide. Those are the sorts of things. Carbon taxes, flexible grids, time of use, pricing, all of that sort of stuff. That's the stuff we should be focusing on. We shouldn't be picking technological winners and losers, or we're still picking technological losers and hoping that by means of billions of dollars of subsidy, we can prop them up and make them winners.

Host (59:56): Paul, it's been an absolute education, as I mentioned before. Thank you so much for offering up your thoughts and your expertise on the matter. It's a really important topic. 

Paul Martin (1:00:05): You're very welcome. The last thing that I usually say in a talk like this is that I've had to say a lot of things and just kind of assert opinion as if it were fact. You should be very skeptical anytime anyone does that, including me, but take my word for it. The things that I've said here are based on my own analysis and reading and extensive communication with people who don't agree with me. You can find more about it by visiting the Hydrogen Science Coalition at h2sciencecoalition.com, or also by going to my LinkedIn profile or to spitfireresearch.com. You can find my writings, you can find the references, you can find the analysis, you can find the counter opinions of people that don't agree with me, and see who's making the best case and who's got the best facts behind them. When you do that, I think you're going to have a hard time thinking that hydrogen as a fuel is a good thing, you know, is a real decarbonization strategy. Honestly, I think you will come to that conclusion, but don't take my word for it. Come to believe it yourself by actually looking at the data and finding out what it says.