Environment & Energy

NNadir

(36,425 posts)

7. Really? "White Hydrogen" is going to matter? We'll drill the fuck of the planet and use it all up to be green?

Sun Aug 17, 2025, 08:39 AM

Aug 17

I've been listening to "green hydrogen" bullshit my entire adult life, and I'm an old man.

Right now it is a contributor to extreme global heating, representing between 1% to 3% of the dangerous fossil fuel waste dumped into the planet each year.

I covered this elsewhere many times, for example here, with respect to China:

Subsidizing Grid-Based Electrolytic Hydrogen Will Increase Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Coal Dominated Power Systems Liqun Peng, Yang Guo, Shangwei Liu, Gang He, and Denise L. Mauzerall Environmental Science & Technology 2024 58 (12), 5187-5195

The text is clear enough.

From the introductory text:

... Currently, nearly all hydrogen in China is either produced directly from fossil fuels (55% from coal gasification and 14% from steam methane reforming (SMR)) or as a byproduct of petroleum refining (28%), with only 1% coming from water electrolysis. (2) Producing 1 kg of coal- or SMR-based hydrogen emits roughly 19 and 10 kg of CO2, respectively. (3) In 2020, hydrogen production from fossil fuels in China emitted approximately 322Tg of CO2, equivalent to 25% of total CO2 emissions from industrial processes, a number expected to rise with increasing hydrogen demand. (4) Industrial processes include production of nonmetallic mineral products, chemical, and metal products, as well as production and consumption of halocarbons and sulfur hexafluoride. (4)

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The bold, italics and underlining is mine.

EST: Chinese Hydrogen Production Is Making Climate Change Worse.

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Hydrogen Engine or Hydrogen Fuel Cell? Why Not Both? Volvo Trucks takes us inside its two-pronged development strategy [View all] Caribbeans Aug 16 OP

Have you every searched "white hydrogen"? multigraincracker Aug 16 #1

Yeah. This bullshit is also hyped here by the fossil fuel industry, drill baby drill. It's garbage thinking. NNadir Aug 17 #3

Why not neither? Hydrogen is overwhelmingly made from fossil fuels with exergy destruction of those fuels. NNadir Aug 17 #2

The beauty of science is that it changes with new information. multigraincracker Aug 17 #4

Really? "White Hydrogen" is going to matter? We'll drill the fuck of the planet and use it all up to be green? NNadir Aug 17 #7

Not everyone sees it as a fossil fuel. multigraincracker Aug 17 #5

Yeah. I know. The marketing of hydrogen as "clean energy" has been a disastrously successful scheme. NNadir Aug 17 #6

Making hydrogen may require it. Finding a natural source may require less stress on the atmosphere. multigraincracker Aug 17 #8

I'm not sanguine about eliminating 6 billion humans so we can all live in a hydrogen nirvana. NNadir Aug 17 #9

How theories change over time. multigraincracker Aug 17 #10