“A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.”
Hydrogen money, like hydrogen, seems all around us.
Major investments are being made in hydrogen hubs — billions of dollars in government and private equity in many regions of the U.S. and Canada. One example hub effort is the Hy Stor Energy project on the Mississippi Gulf Coast to create a massive green hydrogen production and underground hydrogen storage hub.
Senator Everett Dirksen, for whom the senate office building in Washington D.C. is named, reportedly once said, “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.”
While the investments today are a significant down payment on a hydrogen future for North America, they are just that: a down payment. A complete hydrogen infrastructure for North America will involve trillions of dollars. There are no cheap easy fixes for replacing or repurposing the existing fossil fuel economy.
Hydrogen is complicated, as outlined in NACFE’s report Making Sense of Hydrogen Fuel Cell Tractors. Advertising by various vested interests seems to focus on the end use of hydrogen being clean and great for the environment, for jobs, for the economy and for society. Once the hydrogen is in your fuel cell car or truck, the vehicle can cleanly convert that stored molecular energy into electricity and move you down the road. The only byproduct is said to be water. That pristine view of end-use hydrogen is largely accurate, except perhaps that the water coming out is probably not quite that pure, containing some small contaminants as the fuel cells themselves degrade over time. Perhaps a minor detail fixed by filtering.
What the vested interests often fail to discuss is that the production of hydrogen is very energy intense. It doesn’t matter which color hydrogen you are discussing, breaking hydrogen free of other materials demands energy. That energy has to come from somewhere. That boundless source of energy to produce pure hydrogen for transportation and other new uses like steel, cement and other materials requires vastly increasing new energy production in North America.
