Turquoise hydrogen for the win

Forget the Hindenburg. British Airways already has.

Listening to Michael Fenton on Climate Chat this past Sunday, I had to think twice about penning a piece about something as complicated as replacing a fossil economy with green hydrogen.

“Weather could blow down the whole city and they [TV news] wouldn’t tell you it is being caused by burning coal, oil and gas…. The public does not know what Net Zero is. It barely knows what carbon is. Few people even know what an emission is. A minority of Americans know what you mean when you say fossil fuels.”

As far back as the 1960s, I recall people talking in publications like Popular Mechanics about the hydrogen economy. It always had an air of science fiction. Conventional wisdom was that the Hindenburg Disaster (the transatlantic airship that exploded in 1937) had poisoned the public mind towards hydrogen.

The whole notion of a hydrogen economy traces to 1923, when the British scientist J.B.S. Haldane, became concerned for the eventual exhaustion of Britain's coal. He proposed hydrogen with long-term storage, produced by a network of wind turbines.

Our heavy-duty trucks will be manufactured almost entirely
from H2-based steel by 2030

— Scania

With growing concern for climate today, daring carmakers have begun selling hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. Toyota, Hyundai and manufacturers in China have all announced ambitious plans to scale. IMC, the largest company in the US hauling containers from ports to warehouses, has ordered 50 Nikola fuel-cell trucks for its operations in California, Arizona and Nevada.

• From the late 2020s, hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles emerge as the preferred solution [for road freight].

• Jet turbine planes, burning hydrogen as a fuel, start to appear on medium-haul routes in the 2040s.

• In the mid-2030s, the maritime industry settles firmly on the hydrogen-based solution, working in close cooperation with shipbuilders, fuel suppliers and key bunkering ports. Almost all ships constructed after this time have fuel systems that use either hydrogen or ammonia.

— Shell Sky 2050 Report

IMC is concerned about the tough California laws mentioned in our previous post. These also apply to ports and harbors, where all new drayage trucks registered from 2024 onward must be zero-emission vehicles, California will phase out all fossil-fuel trucks from ports by 2035. IMC purchased six enormous battery-electric trucks from Volvo in September 2022, and installed charge points capable of serving a fleet of 30, but ran into problems. CEO Joel Henry told Memphis daily newspaper The Commercial Appeal:

The main challenge with battery [electric vehicles] is that you can only get four to six hours of productivity out of the truck in a 12-to-14-hour period if they are under load. The problem is that it isn’t sustainable for trucking companies, which can operate diesel tractors for about 20 to 24 hours a day.

The 300-mile (483km) round trips between ports and warehouses IMC trucks haul are beyond the reach of these battery-electric vehicles. The next solution: hydrogen. The order with Nikola is worth more than $22 million, or above $440,000 per truck.

Both Guangzhou-based Hybot and Daimler-Benz have introduced trucks with claimed 1000 km (620 mi) range. Daimler’s model runs on cryogenic liquid hydrogen—which contains 50% more energy by volume than gaseous hydrogen at 700 bar, but is not dispensed at any public H2 filling station. The Hybot only requires 8 kg of H2 per 100km when traveling at high speed, with a full cargo load of 55 tons and the hot water generated as a by-product of electricity production is used in the shower room and sink at the back of the driver’s cab—great for long-distance runs. In “high-speed autonomous driving” mode, the driver can also catch some Z’s without losing time (although I am not recommending it).

Whether Nicola will be around to service the trucks is another uncertainty. The company has accumulated around $2.9 billion in startup losses and has sold exactly 35 vehicles from September through January. Its founder and former CEO has been sentenced to four years in prison for securities fraud. When the company went public he cashed in $100 million in Nikola stock to buy a plane and a private estate in the Turks and Caicos and issued $8.5 million in stock options—later found worthless—as part payment for a ranch in Utah.

Twin-Charged Hydrogen Inline-Six Ferrari

According to Korean research company SNE Research, 14,451 hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (FCEVs) were sold worldwide in 2023, 2,968 of those in the USA. That compares to 26 million plug-in electric vehicles. But H2V sales collapsed by 72% in the fourth quarter, and that likely had little to do with consumer demand. They were just too hard to refuel. There are 55 refueling stations in California, a state that extends 997 miles in driving distance from Oregon to Mexico. Hydrogen gas is very light and compressing it can be energy intensive.

Meanwhile, the UK Civil Aviation Authority, with its Hydrogen Challenge Sandbox, has been clearing the way for H2-powered commercial aviation. Director of Airworthiness & Certification at ZeroAvia, Paul Harper, said, “With the ever-increasing optimism around hydrogen as the fuel of the future for aviation, it is critical that there is good knowledge sharing between the regulator and industry in this nascent area.”

Forget the Hindenburg. British Airways already has.

Color Codes

Most hydrogen produced today is gray hydrogen, made by separating methane (CH4) through steam methane reforming (SMR)—CH4+2H2O=CO2+O2+6H2—which accounts for 1.8% of global greenhouse gas emissions. All of those save oxygen—methane, water vapor, and hydrogen itself—are greenhouse gases to varying degrees.

Brown or black hydrogen is produced from fossil hydrocarbons such as lignite (brown) or bituminous coal (black) using coal gasification.

Blue hydrogen uses SMR with carbon capture and storage (CCS) to intercept the greenhouse gases before they escape.

Gold, white, or geological hydrogen is made by iron reacting with water in the deep crust. There is no methane involved.

Green hydrogen replaces fossil methane with biogenic methane and uses renewable energy and electrolysis to separate it. Green H2 accounts for 1 percent of all hydrogen today. The other 99%, almost all Gray H2, is put into use by fossil industry oil refining and in the manufacture of ammonia for fertilizers and methanol. Ironically, Britain is using some of its last remaining coal and oil to make hydrogen.

Yellow hydrogen is a subset of green, produced solely by solar power.

In the 1970s, when nuclear power was all the rage and worries about cancer, birth defects and basement atomic bombs built by non-state actors were hushed up, suppressed, and ridiculed (oh, wait, that was the 2020s), the idea was floated that nukes could be used to make “green” hydrogen. That was a classic version of greenwash. Nuke hydrogen is now called red, pink or purple and generally means splitting fossil gas by steam or electrolysis.

Currently there are no real alternatives to gray hydrogen for producing fertilizer. That may change, because production costs of low- and zero-carbon green hydrogen are improving. The black swan, however, may be turquoise hydrogen.

Turquoise hydrogen.

Another way of making hydrogen is to thermally split methane with renewable energy. Hydrogen made this way is referred as turquoise hydrogen. This led me to Hago Energetics, a modest shared workspace in an industrial park on the northern outskirts of Los Angeles. I have known Wilson Hago for several years because of his work with biochar. His newest venture applies biochar to producing turquoise hydrogen.

Wilson Hago at his laboratory.

His invention is a device that taps fugitive methane sources before they leave their source—landfills, leaking fossil drill holes, or methane pipelines, for instance. This is a greenhouse gas that would otherwise escape to the atmosphere (hence “fugitive”). He passes methane through hot biochar to convert it to hydrogen.

I have for some years been skeptical of green and blue H2 for a reason that seems to have eluded others. I guess my views are tempered by my experience with nuclear power. In 1976 the USNRC published an environmental statement on the Mixed Oxide Fuel Cycle (GESMO), Nureg-0002, that explored the cancer and birth defects consequences of recycling spent uranium after it had been used in power reactors. Ignoring the immense potential for placing both dirty bombs and atomic weapons into the hands of idiots, GESMO revealed the horrific death toll to civilian populations located near fuel reprocessing, milling and fabrication plants and to their descendants ad infinitum. GESMO, along with National Lab medical researchers like Art Tamplin and John Gofman, killed the idea of recycled plutonium, at least until DoE’s latest useful idiots like Bill Gates, James Hansen and Tomas Pueyo revived it.

My logic was that hydrogen, scaled to a fuel economy at the level of present-day fossil fuels, would leak so many free radical hydrogen atoms to the atmosphere that decay curves for methane, a greenhouse gas 20 to 150 times more potent than carbon dioxide (depending on when you assay it), would stretch out over longer periods, further accelerating climate weirding and making it more intransigent.

Hago has voided that argument because his hydrogen was coming from sources that, left on their own, would go to the atmosphere and have that outsized climate impact. By capturing and reforming those sources into hydrogen fuel—the end pollution from which is merely water and oxygen—he is saving us from leaking methane and its accelerated warming. Hydrogen is also a greenhouse gas, but not as potent as methane and steps can be take to contain it as much as possible.

At this writing, MethaneSAT has successfully separated from the SpaceX Falcon9 rocket and by the time you are reading this will have booted up its computer and 'detumbled,’ using its actuators to stabilize the spacecraft. It will have begun to measure methane emissions from point sources around the globe and relay that data to NASA.

Sources of fugitive methane, once identified, can be fitted with Hago devices. The Hago process uses and recycles biochar, providing innumerable upstream and downstream benefits—economic, social and environmental. Biochar is the safest, most profitable, and shovel-ready of all the technologies for restoring Earth’s climate now available.

The hydrogen economy already works at small scale. That can be a bridge to a renewables-powered future. Whether hydrogen can eventually grow to the scale of the present global fossil-fueled economy is a separate question. I tend to think that scale is unlikely for a variety of reasons.

In the meantime, I would bet on Hago Energetics.

Santa Cruz Metro in California tested an electric bus, but it struggled with the hilly terrain. “We couldn’t get the bus to get over the hill at 50 mph, and once it got there, it didn’t have enough charge to get back,” Santa Cruz Metro director Mike Rotkin told local online news outlet Lookout Santa Cruz. Meanwhile Tokyo had a fleet of H2 buses at the 2020 Olympics. Cologne, Germany will have 160 H2 buses in service in 2024. Last month, for $87 million, the board of Santa Cruz Metro announced plans to have 48 single-deck buses and nine longer, articulated vehicles on the road within 18 months. The advantages are undeniable: a range of 200-350 miles (483-563km) versus 175-200 miles for electric; they can be fully “charged” in about 15 minutes, compared to several hours for battery buses; they are lighter and therefore less taxing on roads and bridges; and they will still work if a natural disaster cuts off the electricity.

The best part? They may be turquoise-powered from fugitive methane from the Santa Cruz landfill and co-produce biochar to help feed the city, including the bus riders.

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There is a growing recognition that a viable path forward is towards a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

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