Climate Change (General Discussion) I'm not a hydrogen booster. Namibia is planning a hydrogen production facility driven by wind and solar. If steel and lime can be made with electricity, then use that instead of making a fuel with electricity first. I don't see H being a major form of energy. — BC
Yes, the white hydrogen seems very feasible as part of a larger energy mixture. The green hydrogen they're pursuing in the Netherlands doesn't look too good to me. I was working at the Ministry of Finance when they were discussing it and challenged subsidising it. Over the years, I've learned a lot from my dad who was engineer and manager at Shell his entire career. It fell on deaf ears (because what would a lawyer know about economics and chemistry, right?) but I see much of the worries I had voiced again in the media nowadays but the ship seems to have already sailed.
I would expect that the developments of batteries still have lots of potential that make it inefficient to store potential in hydrogen as well. There's sand batteries in Finland and Toyota claiming a recent breakthrough in solid state batteries halving costs, that are just two recent examples I've heard of that sound promising.
Of course, there might be an industrial need for H2 to make ammonia and fertiliser if we stop making H2 from CH4 but I'm not sure we would want to have a large hydrolysis plant compete with our regular need for energy, basically increasing prices. Because I'm pretty certain once the plant is there and they "discover" it's not viable to only run it when there's overcapacity that the government will allow them to buy electricity in the market even when there's undercapacity, causing prices to explode for regular people.