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The Extraordinary Green Promise Of A Tiny Molecule

Hydrogen produced by renewable energy makes it possible to fully transition to a global green economy. So what’s stopping us from going all in?

Alex Valentina for Noema Magazine
ESSAYCLIMATE CRISIS
BY HOLLY JEAN BUCK
JUNE 13, 2023
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ALABAMA, New York — Two vast steel spheres sit in a field here in the northwestern corner of New York State, not far from the shores of Lake Ontario. Sixty feet tall, perfectly round and held off the ground on sturdy pylons, they represent “liquid hope,” according to the local TV station. When complete, they will hold a million tons of hydrogen.

The spheres look mysterious sitting by themselves behind a chain-link fence, surrounded by abandoned row-crop lots and pockets of woods. This part of the state is more like northern Ohio or Pennsylvania than the posh and developed regions like Hudson Valley or New York City. There are Dollar General stores and Tim Hortons drive-throughs, yards with ride-on mowers, and handmade signs for meat raffles line the straight, flat roads. Long trains double-stacked with shipping containers rumble away to other places. The smell of manure wafts on the breeze.

The talk in Alabama’s single bar is about hunting wild turkeys. It could be many places in America. Yet the spheres in the quiet field are a manifestation of a global dream: a future fueled not by fossil fuels, but by hydrogen.

Heat pumps and electric vehicles, trains and subways — these things are easily powered by electricity (ideally produced by renewable sources like solar and wind power). But there are some things that are harder to power by electricity, like ships, steel mills and fertilizer plants, which require heat at very high temperatures or energy-dense fuels.

Together, shipping, steel and fertilizer production make up around 12% of global emissions, so converting them to run on renewably generated electricity rather than fossil fuels is critical for transitioning to a green economy.

Hydrogen is the lightest of all the elements and the most abundant in the universe; nearly three-quarters of the mass of the universe is hydrogen. On Earth, it’s rarely found by itself. Instead, it’s mostly combined with oxygen in water, plants and animals. Water — two hydrogen atoms, one of oxygen — can be split through a process called electrolysis, which involves running an electric current through it, separating the hydrogen and oxygen. This happens in a machine called an electrolyzer. If the electricity used to power this process is renewable, the hydrogen is considered “green.” Take the hydrogen you get out of the electrolyzer and use it in the kind of fuel cell that a hydrogen-propelled truck on the highway might have, and all you get is power and water — no emissions, no pollution. In Greek, hydrogen means “water-former.”

Hydrogen also helps with a second challenge: energy storage. Sunlight captured by solar panels can be turned into hydrogen and stored as a gas or liquid in tanks or underground caverns and saved for darker times, or transported via truck or pipeline to places that get less sun.
https://www.noemamag.com/the-extraordinary-green-promise-of-a-tiny-molecule/