In early 2024, an unpublished report from the US Geological Survey (USGS) found that there is as much as five trillion tonnes of natural hydrogen underground. A fraction of those five trillion tonnes would be enough to supply all global energy needs for the foreseeable future, claimed USGS researcher Geoffery Ellis reporting to the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Denver earlier this year.
Naturally occurring hydrogen that contains no or very little greenhouse gas and can be extracted from underground reservoirs has been named ‘gold hydrogen’. Mengli Zhang, professor at the Colorado School of Mines, told the Denver audience, “a gold rush for gold hydrogen is coming”.
Until very recently it was not clear the extent of naturally occurring hydrogen, and what there was was not easily recoverable. However, a discovery of hydrogen seeping from a mine in Albania raised the possibility of a relatively pure form of the gas being available, without being mixed with methane, as was usually the case in previous finds.
Methane is a very toxic greenhouse gas, up to a hundred times more damaging than CO2. The prospect of gold hydrogen being readily and relatively cheaply available has led to the ‘gold rush’ prediction.
Venture capitalists are beginning to put significant amounts of money into exploration, and the US government is giving incentives and tax breaks to firms who will back hydrogen as a way to the promised land of cheap, plentiful, renewable energy. But so far, the fossil fuel industry and Big Oil have held back. There are major issues on the road to Eldorado, a land where it would be possible to solve the capitalist system’s present dilemma, ie realising urgent action is needed on climate change, but not being willing to pay.
Renewable hydrogen has been available for a long time by using industrial processes, in particular, electrolysis. This technique involves passing an electric current through water to separate hydrogen from oxygen. However, for manufactured green hydrogen to be truly renewable, the electricity to produce it must be from renewable sources such wind or solar power.
For naturally occurring hydrogen mixed with methane to be renewable the methane must be removed and neutralised when the gas mixture is burnt. The combustion product of methane is CO2, meaning that Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is needed. The problem is there is currently no significant CCS capacity. Huge investments would be needed to bring it on stream in the required volume. Also, it’s not clear how safe storing CO2 for indefinite periods would be.
Cars, ships and trains are already running on manufactured green hydrogen and Airbus is developing an aeroplane which will be able to do so. However, electrolysis is a very energy intensive process and therefore – in capitalist terms – expensive.
The CEO of ExxonMobil, the US oil major, said energy from manufactured green hydrogen was ten times more expensive than using oil, and therefore a non-starter. Consequently, they were not willing to invest in it. Other oil companies, however, are beginning to hedge their bets.
Geologists now think that pure hydrogen with no methane contamination could be found in iron-rich rock formations. Some optimists are predicting the chances of success are good because the amounts of natural hydrogen are so vast. They say if only a very small fraction, one percent or maybe much less, was found to be pure, this would be enough to supply all global energy needs.
Assume for the moment that they are right and such a source is discovered; would this be a game changer in the fight against global warming? This is only a theoretical and probably distant prospect now, but such a discovery would certainly be welcome and could positively transform the situation. However, any attempt to use the possibility of future supplies of abundant clean energy to delay taking action now must be resisted.
A sign of how the possibilities of hydrogen will be subverted by the capitalists is given by US president Joe Biden’s ‘green new deal’ – the 2022 ‘Inflation Reduction Act’ (IRA) (see The Truth About Biden’s Climate Policies, in the July-August edition of Socialism Today, No.279). The biggest component of this, over $100 billion, is to give tax breaks to US companies to develop hydrogen as an energy source.
There were many measures in the IRA that appeared to be positive but were immediately the subject of a fierce battle over how they would be implemented. This particularly applied to the proposed investment in green hydrogen. Contrary to the original intention of the Act, the fossil fuel interests lobbied to allow the electricity used in this process to be generated partly from coal, oil and gas. This would produce large quantities of greenhouse gases, since the electrolysis method needs large amounts of energy.
Will Ricks from Princeton University, who with colleagues studied this issue, was quoted in the Washington Post as saying this could amount to hundreds of millions of tonnes of extra emissions annually.
If allowed to ignore the clean hydrogen requirements, the industry says it would buy carbon offsets instead, for example to pay for planting trees in the Amazon. Such offsets though are now widely discredited as not delivering any reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, due to the way they are implemented, being subject to widespread evasion.
Fossil fuel interests also say that if they are subsidised to produce ‘dirty’ hydrogen now, they will clean up their act at some unspecified time in the future. Not only socialists and environmentalists are entitled to be sceptical about this claim, any reasonably objective person who looks at the fossil fuel industry’s track record must be as well. Wrangling between the government and fossil fuel lobby over this has continued for two years. But action must be taken now on renewables; no delay is possible to avoid the worst effects of climate change.
Considered geopolitically, what would happen if a large source of pure hydrogen was found. If it was in Russia, for example, would US imperialism be willing to be dependent for all its energy needs on its enemy? Or if the discovery was in the USA, would China accept being in a similar position?
To ask these questions is to answer them. In an imperialist world dominated by a few big powers it is inconceivable any of them would tolerate such a situation. Capitalist states would rather continue to pollute the planet than have their national ‘energy security’ threatened. If the hydrogen discovery was in a small, weaker capitalist country, it would immediately become the scene of a battle between the big powers for domination.
As in all other areas of the fight against climate change, the stranglehold of imperialism will choke off effective action. It needs to be overthrown.
Pete Dickinson