Where does hydrogen fuel fall short?

Hydrogen is not without its critics. The energy consultant Kathryn Porter has just penned an article on hydrogen as a fuel for The Daily Telegraph.

Kathryn - No he hasn't. Obviously he's working on hydrogen projects and wants to talk about the benefits, but it's a pretty one-sided view. For example, he mentioned that in the past we had hydrogen going through our pipes in the old days of town gas. Well, that's not completely true. That was only going through low pressure networks locally, not through the high pressure gas grid that we have today. And it was extremely poisonous, so it is not really a good comparator.

Chris - Well, that was the carbon monoxide, wasn't it? That was poisonous to people, just to be clear with that. One of the big problems with hydrogen, as I see it, based on what Phillip Broadwith was saying is that we lose loads of it. He was saying there are losses when you make it. There are losses when you distribute it. There are losses when you use it. It's not a case of you just put hydrogen down the same pipes that you put methane down.

Kathryn - That's correct. Hydrogen has very small molecules, much smaller than methane which is the gas that we have at the moment. And so if you try and put it down the same pipes you're going to have more leakage. So it leaks sometimes through the pipes themselves if you've still got the old cast iron pipes. But particularly through joints. And then when it goes through metres and through appliances, the other issue you have is the way that you move gas through the pipeline system is through the use of compressors. Now when you have a system with methane, you have losses of about 3% through those compressors with hydrogen that are about 10 times bigger. You lose a third of your gas just from powering those compressors. So that's a huge amount of loss that you have to accept. And then as you mentioned earlier, you need a lot more gas to get the same energy output as well. So to have the same level of warmth in your home, you would need a much larger quantity of gas. So the amount that you'd have to put into the system at the start is so much bigger than a sci at the moment with methane. And then the cost would be so much higher.

Chris - In your Daily Telegraph article, you say that hydrogen's currently a backfill technology in the sense that it's our least worst option. What exactly are you getting at with that point?

Kathryn - So I think the physical characteristics of hydrogen make it, I'm almost uniquely unsuitable for a lot of the applications for which it's now being developed. And the only reason really that it's being proposed, and your previous guest mentioned this, is because it can burn in the air without producing carbon dioxide. Now interestingly, it does give off water vapour and water vapour is also a greenhouse gas. So it is just not as good as it's being made out to be. It's just not a good material for these purposes. And if somebody came up with an alternative that had better properties though, they would almost certainly jump on that instead. So there's a danger that this becomes a huge waste of effort as well because other solutions could be developed down the line. I think particular nuclear power has a much better potential to meet a lot of the applications that we're talking about. Not domestic heating other than through electrification obviously, but a lot of the industrial applications that require high temperature heat could very well be served through nuclear power.

Chris - One has to also think about the complete lifecycle, isn't it? Because as we rush towards electric cars and you throw away a perfectly good petrol or diesel car, there's the whole question of, well, how far would I have to have driven the old car before it's paid back its carbon footprint versus the same for the electric car. And the electric car has a huge carbon footprint embodied in it.

Kathryn - It does, yes. I mean, you have, some studies have suggested you need to drive 50,000 miles before you break even on the input energy. Back in 2013, a widely cited study showed that to make one electric car you emit 18 times more carbon dioxide than when you're making a conventional car. Now in the last decade, production methods have likely improved, but that's a very big gap to close. Electric cars also require a huge amount more minerals than conventional cars do. Um, and a lot of minerals that conventional cars simply don't use at all, um, which are not green and clean. You know, you look at lithium for example, the production process of lithium creates a lot of dirty water. There are actually disputes over access to water in South America because of lithium processing. And then you have other ethical concerns like the use of child labour in the Congo for mining of cobalt. So electric cars are not clean and I definitely don't think we should be replacing petrol and diesel cars that still have a useful life with an electric car. That type of wastefulness is not good for the environment.

Chris - Do I read you correctly then when the sort of message I'm hearing is, and and you're an energy consultant after all, that just using hydrogen because we can is perhaps not the best approach and that one of the best approaches might be to, to use electricity and focus on making the source of that electricity as clean and green as we can and then adapting people's end use of the electricity, heat pumps and so on, so that, that remains clean and efficient as well. Is that what you think is probably the best alternative to going down the hydrogen route?

Kathryn - It is, yes. I think that's the way we should be progressing unless we can find another material that can do the job that's being proposed for hydrogen better than hydrogen can. But at the moment that doesn't exist. We haven't really found one. And so for me, electrification and cleaning the electricity system is the best approach that we could have.