Green hydrogen is powered by renewable energy. It generates no polluting emissions into the atmosphere and is the cleanest and most sustainable hydrogen.
The latest estimates by the International Energy Agency (IEA), published at the end of 2019, predict that global energy demand will increase by between 25 % and 30 % by 2040.
Hydrogen and energy have a long shared history of powering the first internal combustion engines over 200 years ago to becoming an integral part of the modern refining industry. It is light, storable, energy-dense, and produces no direct emissions of pollutants or greenhouse gases. But for hydrogen to make a significant contribution to clean energy transitions, it needs to be adopted in sectors where it is almost completely absent, such as transport, buildings and power generation.
The Future of Hydrogen provides an extensive and independent survey of hydrogen that lays out where things stand now; the ways in which hydrogen can help to achieve a clean, secure and affordable energy future; and how we can go about realising its potential.
Supplying hydrogen to industrial users is now a major business around the world. Demand for hydrogen, which has grown more than threefold since 1975, continues to rise, almost entirely supplied from fossil fuels, with 6% of global natural gas and 2% of global coal going to hydrogen production.
This method of obtaining green hydrogen as the IEA points out, would save the 830 million tonnes of CO2 that are emitted annually when this gas is produced using fossil fuels. Replacing all grey hydrogen in the world would require 3,000 TWh/year from new renewables — equivalent to current demand of Europe. However, there are some questions about the viability of green hydrogen because of its high production cost; reasonable doubts that will disappear as the decarbonisation of the earth progresses and, consequently, the generation of renewable energy becomes cheaper.
The longevity and versatility of hydrogen is immense; it has been used to generate electricity since the 19th century, and will soon be utilized for space travel experiences, gently lifting tourist capsules into the stratosphere.
Hydrogen has already proved its use in many industries, but it has not yet realized its full potential to support decarbonization, according to the IEA, which describes hydrogen as a key pillar of decarbonization for industry.
But given its many practical uses, there is little doubt that hydrogen will continue to support new technologies and be a vital component in getting the world to net zero emissions.
It is also estimated the green hydrogen economy could create as many as 5.4 million upstream jobs in the EU by 2050, of which about one-third of new jobs would be associated only with fuel cells. That is almost three times the number of jobs in the EU chemical industry.