The Biden administration is pumping $7 billion to kickstart development and production of CO2-free hydrogen fuel. It’s an idea that deserves to go down in flames like the Hindenburg (“Oh, the humanity!”) — unless you happen to be among the rent-seekers and corporate greenwashers cashing in on it.
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The U.S. produces and consumes a lot of hydrogen, about 11.3 million metric tons last year. That said, worldwide consumption is about 120 million metric tons, of which China alone produces about 24 million. Hydrogen is remarkably useful in many disparate areas, including petroleum refining, treating metals, producing fertilizer and other chemicals, and food processing. It is also used as rocket fuel. (Commercial balloons, including the surveillance ones we sometimes had above us in Iraq, have used helium since shortly after the Hindenburg disaster.)
The burning of hydrogen releases no pollution of any kind, merely water. So, at the very back end, it’s pollution-free. But it’s sort of all downhill after that. You see, known hydrogen deposits in the earth are quite rare. And perhaps that’s in part because, until recently, nobody was looking for it. Barring that, almost all hydrogen is manufactured, and manufacturing requires energy.
Producing hydrogen requires “separat[ing] it from the other elements in the molecules where it occurs,” the U.S. Energy Information Administration explains, and “the two most common methods for producing hydrogen are steam-methane reforming and electrolysis.” The U.S. predominately produces its hydrogen — 95 percent — with natural gas or other fossil fuels. On average, Pirelli Global reports, “10 kilos [about 10 pounds] of carbon dioxide are produced for every kilo [every pound] of hydrogen obtained.”
The ostensible goal of the Biden program is to somehow eliminate fossil fuels from the loop, replacing it with “green hydrogen.” (There are three other colors used to identify hydrogen, but I’ll spare you except for this link.) As the World Economic Forum reports, “Green hydrogen featured in a number of emissions reduction pledges at the UN Climate Conference, COP26,” which convened two years ago.
Biden’s plan will establish seven regional hubs with projects in 16 states to use experimental processes. And that would probably involve a process called electrolysis, in which two electrodes (try to not think of a certain fictional German doctor’s invention) split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen.
Simple enough idea, but with electrolysis, as well as steam-methane reforming, it takes far more energy to produce the final produce than it creates, and, of course, the amount of energy available for use is considerably less than what was in the feedstock. That’s OK for limited uses, as in making rocket fuel, but doesn’t cut it for use on a broad scale.
Could progress be made in reducing production costs? Sure. Last year, an Australian company published a somnolence-inducing paper in Nature Communications detailing a process that would be cheaper than any other form of green hydrogen production. But it’s still not competitive by any means. There are other interesting ideas, such as one from Tel Aviv University using algae. Yet again, it’s nowhere near competitive.
In any event, the energy used to create the hydrogen must certainly come from so-called carbon-free sources. And that’s fine, because we all know that wind and solar are getting cheaper and cheaper. The EPA tells us so, and the EPA would never lie to us. Except it appears the world is finally catching on that energy only produced when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing (at Goldilocks speed, not too softly and not too hard) is not the miracle it’s been presented to be — though, to be sure, they are viable if a government is willing to impose excruciating costs on its citizenry. For example, more than a fifth of Germans’ electric bills is a surcharge for using “renewable energy.”
Instructive is Sweden, long hailed as a leader in converting to carbon neutrality. One sees a 98 percent figure frequently bandied around, as in Reuters declaring, “Around 98% of electricity in Sweden is already generated from water, nuclear and wind.”
Apparently, you can lead a horse to the internet, but you can’t make him search. The great majority of Sweden’s energy does come from hydroelectric and nuclear energy (sometimes nuclear is considered “renewable,” sometimes not), but little comes from wind, even as it relies heavily on oil and a little on coal. Much of the rest is from questionable biomass, which I have debunked at length.
Yet the country that sensibly refused to lock its citizens down during the COVID panic-demic recently abandoned trying to make the full conversion to wind and solar, instead saying that it planned to build more nuclear plants. But the U.S. is busily shuttering nuclear plants that can no longer compete because of onerous safety regulations (although Biden, to his credit, has allocated a lot of money to stop or slow this) and, given environmental restraints, appears essentially tapped out on hydroelectric.
The Department of Energy rigs the numbers using something called the levelized costs of electricity (LCOE) to make it look as though, at least, onshore wind turbines are more than competitive with fossil fuels. “Land-based, utility-scale wind turbines provide one of the lowest-priced energy sources available today,” the department claims.
But rigged they are. Kathryn Porter of Britain’s Telegraph did some serious research showing that when all costs are taken into account, onshore wind, offshore wind, and solar are all fantastically more expensive than gas, coal, or nuclear power. She notes that a JP Morgan paper prepared last year for investors came to a similar conclusion, as did a study published in the Journal of Management and Stability.
Sweden didn’t make its decision lightly.
We’re left hoping that someone can make a breakthrough to make green hydrogen production vastly cheaper than it is today. And I won’t say that’s impossible. It doesn’t violate any law of physics — and, in any case, there’s actually no such thing; the alleged “laws” are not immutable and are rewritten when convenient. And, with artificial intelligence still nascent but rapidly gaining power, if it is possible to make the process cheaper, we will find a way. Alternatively, AI could make commercialized fusion a reality, and that would be the source for electrolysis energy — presuming, of course, that AI doesn’t wipe us out; a survey earlier this year found that 42 percent of CEOs believe it may do so — in the next five to 10 years. In that case, we can definitely stop caring about global warming. But if there’s a solution, it won’t come from the federal government tossing money at the problem. That’s not even the purpose. (RELATED from Michael Fumento: If AI ‘Wants’ to Destroy Us, It Can. But Why Would It?)
As with most of these taxpayer-to-company environmental schemes, there’s a serious amount of rent-seeking and greenwashing, the latter of which is when big corporations with questionable environmental records try to mislead the public regarding efforts to see the light. It’s to be expected, but there’s absolutely no reason why they can’t do so with their own money. In this case, though, they’re doing it with ours. Among recipients of the Biden largess are such names as ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Mitsubishi Power Americas.
Over a year ago, the green group Friends of the Earth released a report saying of the proposed Biden hubs, “Hydrogen is Big Oil’s Latest Greenwashing Scheme,” and making many of the points I have. And it notes that, regarding ground transportation, we already have a “green alternative” that I’m not so down on as many environmental skeptics are and that, in any case, is already in place: electric vehicles.
As I’ve noted elsewhere, they already have a niche market, and what are perceived as their biggest drawbacks, namely, limited range and slow refueling, continue to slowly improve. A friend of mine has a Lucid Air Touring with a 0–60 time of 3.4 seconds and an EPA estimated maximum range of 425 miles. In a pinch, you can add an extra 200 miles in 15 minutes.
The problem is that lithium ion is approaching its physical dead end, and both its production and its disposal are a dirty business for the environment. But every week, my news feed has one or two articles about a miracle battery technology, and, one of these weeks, one or more of these will pan out. But the best ways to retard those new technologies are exactly what governments are using now: subsidies and mandates. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Further, the grid simply can’t handle the massive influx of new electric vehicles that those laws would encourage. We have to go slowly.
Yet, ultimately, it’s all nonsense, because if the gentle reader were paying attention (and, this being a Michael Fumento article, surely he or she was — ahem!), China alone produces vastly more hydrogen than the does U.S. Further, China now contributes almost a third of the world’s so-called greenhouse gas emissions at 29.16 percent and growing, while the U.S. only contributes 11.19 percent and shrinking. India, at 7.33 percent, is passing the entire European Union and will eventually do the same to the U.S. Discussions of per-capita emissions (where many countries are higher than the U.S. anyway) or historical contributions are irrelevant.
If the world is heating up because of man-made emissions — and I’m agnostic on that issue — then current U.S. emissions will not be a measurable contributor. Hydrogen production is a small slice of immeasurable. Better to spend our money ameliorating any real effects it will have, as opposed to the incredible number of effects global warmists would have us think it’s already had and will have. (Over 700 in 2015, when the compiler stopped counting.)
But the warmists don’t care. The ulterior motive of the movement (as opposed to many misled and well-intentioned individuals) has always been to see capitalism and the benefits it confers crash and burn. Oh, the humanity!
Michael Fumento (mfumento@outlook.net) has been an attorney, author, and science journalist for over 35 years. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Sunday Times, the Atlantic, and many other fora. He has been writing on global warming since at least 1996. Yikes!
