The hype about hydrogen is back with a vengeance, and thus, so is Joe Romm, who just issued a revised and updated version of his 2003 book The Hype About Hydrogen. We discuss the persistent economic and technical hurdles that make widespread hydrogen adoption unrealistic, explain why most applications are better served by direct electrification, and scrutinize the massive investments and motivations behind the current hydrogen push.
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David Roberts
Hello, everyone. This is Volts for May 14, 2025, "Taming the Hydrogen Hype." I'm your host, David Roberts. The idea that hydrogen might serve as the foundation for a new energy system dates back to the 1800s, long before anyone was worried about climate change, and hydrogen hype has come and gone in cycles and waves ever since. You might recall that George W. Bush took it up in the early 2000s, promising hydrogen cars.
In the last five years, the hype has returned with a vengeance. Governments and private investors are pouring resources into the promise of clean hydrogen. Virtually every major oil and gas company has some kind of hydrogen strategy. The Inflation Reduction Act directed hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies to it.
Despite all that, the fundamental problems facing hydrogen as an energy carrier — its low volumetric density, difficulties transporting and storing it, its persistently high costs — have not gone away and have not been solved. That is why hydrogen, though it is quite commonly used as a chemical or industrial feedstock, remains, after a century of hopes and dreams, virtually invisible in the energy system.
One early voice calling foul on the hydrogen hype was famed climate blogger, author, and researcher Joe Romm, who wrote a book in 2003 called The Hype About Hydrogen. Seeing the hype return, Romm has returned to the book, substantially rewriting and expanding it for a revised edition that came out on Earth Day this year. I'm excited to dig into it with him and talk about realistic expectations for hydrogen.
With no further ado, Joe Romm, welcome back to Volts. Thanks for coming.
Joe Romm
Oh, well, thanks for having me back, Dave.
David Roberts
Let's talk hydrogen. First, just tell me, like, what is it that sort of tripped it for you, where you finally said, "I gotta go back and bulk this book up." Why return to this book at this particular moment?
Joe Romm
Well, it's like a vampire. It's hard to kill. 30 years ago, I was helping to oversee the billion-dollar Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy at the Department of Energy. And one of the things that we did was the hydrogen program and the fuel cell program, and there were some advances at the time, so I was supportive of increasing the budget. As you mentioned, about 10 years later, George Bush gave his famous speech, "That a child born today," you know, "their first car, would run on hydrogen and it would just emit water."
And I think that was like a $1.3 billion program. It was a lot of money at the time. It's sort of like Dr. Evil. But then, I proposed to Island Press that I would do a primer, because it wasn't until I started writing that and talking to people and reading the literature and doing my own calculations that I realized that there were multiple problems that were going to make it unlikely that hydrogen was going to be able to compete with electricity. And the book came out then, as you said, and I gave a lot of talks and wrote papers and then moved on to the rest of my life and all of the other things, including the real solutions.
And 20 years ago, I don't think we would have imagined all of the amazing advances in electric cars, electric batteries, electric heat pumps.
David Roberts
I would never have allowed myself to be so optimistic. Never.
Joe Romm
Yeah, I mean, I knew when we were at the DOE that eventually — and solar and wind, I should have mentioned, obviously — we knew that those would eventually be able to come down a learning curve. And so today, hydrogen makes less sense than it did 20 years ago, mostly because the competition has gotten so much better and hydrogen hasn't. Then, a year ago, this guy named Neal on LinkedIn wrote a review of my 2004 book and said, "Oh, well, this is a pretty good book. It could have been written almost today. And, you know, this guy was right that, you know, electric cars were going to beat hydrogen cars."
And I read that and I was like, "Oh, well, but it's come back." And before, I was worried about spending a billion or two. Now, as you say, it's hundreds of billions and everywhere in the world.
David Roberts
Yeah, every country. You know, I do these little pods on different countries here and there, just kind of parachuting in, seeing what's going on. Almost all of them, some part of the government is like, "This is going to be our part of the energy transition." You know, like, "This is our niche. We're going to do the hydrogen thing." And I'm like, "Well, everybody's going after that, and nobody's succeeding. Like, why is everybody so excited?"
Joe Romm
And so, yeah, I got motivated to rewrite the book. Originally, I thought I was just going to put an appendix on the end saying, "I told you so." But I ended up rewriting large parts of the book because people started talking about making hydrogen from nuclear power, or they started talking about the e-fuels, where you would take direct air capture CO2 and combine it with hydrogen from electrolyzed water that was made with renewables, and then run it through a Fischer-Tropsch plant and turn it into e-kerosene and run airplanes on it.
David Roberts
We're going to get to that. Joe, quit jumping ahead.
Joe Romm
No, I'm sorry, it's just so. I ended up writing about all these other things too, like direct air capture and carbon capture and storage. So anyway, now the interesting thing is, over the course of the last nine months when I was writing the book, a lot of sobering stuff came out. And it became clear that some of the problems that I and others had identified long ago were not just challenges, but remained quite unsolved and might be intractable, not the least of which is, "Can you make green hydrogen from renewables affordably?" And because of the events of the supply chain problem and inflation — originally, a lot of people had predicted that electrolyzers, right, electrolyzers are the key component.
You run electricity into an electrolyzer and it will split water back into oxygen and hydrogen. And I think people, maybe when they were in high school chemistry or physics, probably placed two electrodes in water and noticed that at each end of them bubbled up: one oxygen, one hydrogen. And if you captured the hydrogen, you could ignite it. But they're not terribly efficient.
David Roberts
I want to start back a few steps. First, let's start by talking about what hydrogen is used for today. What is the current hydrogen market? How much clean hydrogen would it take to replace just what we're doing now? You know, then we can go on to expanded uses. But let's just talk about sort of like, what is the situation with hydrogen now?
Joe Romm
Excellent. Yes, I do get ahead of myself. So, hydrogen, there's about 100 million tons of hydrogen used globally. The main use, number one use, I think, is making ammonia for ammonia fertilizer. Ammonia is NH3, one nitrogen, three hydrogen. So we have to do nitrogen fixation, that's what fertilizers are a big part of. So that's one of the biggest uses. The other big use is sticking hydrogen onto petrochemicals. When you're refining oil, if you add hydrogen, you can make the gasoline cleaner because hydrogen burns cleanly. And I should say, if you want to get to very basics, hydrocarbons: coal, oil, and gas, they're made up of hydrogen and carbon.
When you burn the carbon, it oxidizes, gives off heat, and turns into CO2, a greenhouse gas. And when you burn the hydrogen, it turns into water and gives off heat. So it's the clean part of the combustion. So we use the hydrogen sometimes to make gasoline cleaner, reformulated gasoline, and hydrogenation of petroleum. And we also use it for other things like methanol.
David Roberts
So, most of those are chemical feedstocks, basically, like using it as a chemical additive in an industrial process. In terms of the things people talk about doing with it — so this is a fundamental distinction that we need to make upfront, the two separate uses of hydrogen. One is as an element in an industrial process, as a feedstock, a raw material.
And the other is as an energy carrier, as a way of basically taking energy from one place to another. All the excitement is around hydrogen as an energy carrier. But today, in the world, is hydrogen used that way in any substantial way anywhere?
Joe Romm
No. And in fact, while I was doing the book in the fall, the International Energy Agency came out and said, and there's a quote I use in the book, "That under 0.1% of global hydrogen is used for these advanced purposes." So, yes, it is a feedstock. And in that sense, hydrogen is actually not a solution to climate change. It's currently a problem. Virtually all hydrogen is made from fossil fuels, principally natural gas, which is mostly methane, which is to say one carbon, CH4, one carbon and four hydrogens. And so that's responsible for 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions right now.
David Roberts
Right. So, today, hydrogen is made from fossil fuels and thus is responsible for a lot of greenhouse gases in its production. So, give us some sense of the scale of just scaling up clean hydrogen enough to replace that hydrogen, the raw material hydrogen.
Joe Romm
Absolutely. It's quite a stunning number. If you were to replace just the 100 million tons of hydrogen used as a chemical feedstock around the world with green hydrogen, which is to say, we take renewables, we run it through an electrolyzer, we split water, we end up with pollution-free hydrogen. That would require the equivalent in renewable electricity of the entire US electric grid, which is to say everything, nuclear plants, coal, oil, plus all the renewables. It's funny because someone read a draft of that book, said, "No, you made a mistake, you must mean it's just the renewables on the US grid."
No, no, it's the whole grid. So, yes, and this is one of the points I make in the book: It would be a mammoth undertaking, I think we could agree, just to do that.
David Roberts
Yes, yes. And that has to be done. I mean, sooner or later that has to be done. So there's reason — separate from all these energy carrier dreams — there's reasons to work on electrolyzing and try to drive down the cost, etcetera, because we are going to need a lot of green hydrogen just to replace dirty hydrogen in current uses.
Joe Romm
Right. And I'm going to leap on your phrase "sooner or later" because one of the points of the book, one of the points, hopefully in this conversation, is that some things are harder and more expensive to do and there tend to be niche things and we do have to do them sooner or later. But there's a lot of "sooner" stuff that is easier, which is, and this is a key point in the book, we don't have an infinite supply of renewable energy.
David Roberts
Not yet.
Joe Romm
And so, using renewable energy to make hydrogen and solve a hydrogen problem is a lot less efficient than simply using the renewable energy directly to replace fossil fuels on the grid.
David Roberts
You mean efficient in terms of greenhouse gas reductions?
Joe Romm
In terms of efficiency and cost, because you don't have to buy the electrolyzer and you don't have to throw away the 30 plus percent of energy you have to do for the electrolysis. So, if I said to you, "I want to reduce 100 million tons of CO2 cost effectively," what would be the best way to use my money and my renewables? My thing would be, you should replace fossil fuel power plants and then you should also use renewable electricity directly to power electric vehicles that replace gasoline cars or to power electric heat pumps to replace gas boilers.
Those would get you a lot more CO2 for a lot less money.
David Roberts
Well, one of the responses might be, and this is sort of kind of been my take on hydrogen for a while, which is like, "You know, why not throw a few billion at it while we're doing everything else, if it makes people happy, if it brings new constituencies along?" But there are real questions about opportunity costs. There are real questions, like if you're throwing money at that, that's money you're not throwing at something else. And so there are trade-offs we have to consider.
Joe Romm
Could I comment on that? So, there are two points. One is the opportunity cost. And when you say "throw billions," as you know, I ran a billion-dollar research, development, and demonstration program. So, I'm a very big fan of that and I agree: Let's do R&D. You know, the Inflation Reduction Act is deployment money. That's the key thing. The money that we're talking about in the world that totals hundreds of billions of dollars is "We're gonna build some steel plants that run on green hydrogen, we're going to build pipelines." "We're gonna try to make hydrogen in Namibia and somehow ship it up to Germany." Which Bloomberg did a story on and the German Government still seriously talks about.
So, you know, I don't want to say it's crazy stuff, but it's just way disproportionate to the plausibility. Let's solve some of the basic problems. And I'll throw out one more thing which can't be avoided. It's something we didn't know 20 years ago, which is when this great interest in hydrogen became clear to everyone. Several years ago, scientists used their better understanding of atmospheric chemistry to ask the question, "What is the impact of hydrogen leaks and emissions on the warming of the planet?" Because although hydrogen is not a direct greenhouse gas, it is an indirect greenhouse gas.
Because releasing hydrogen into the atmosphere changes the chemistry. And the number one thing it does is increase the lifetime and therefore duration and quantity of methane in the atmosphere. So, the global warming potential of hydrogen over a 20-year period is around 35 times that of CO2. And methane is already 80 times CO2. That's why we're all obsessed with these short-lived climate forcers I'm sure you've talked about.
David Roberts
So, hydrogen is in that bucket of short-lived climate forcers? Because the promise, you know, around methane too, the promise is like as we're working on the long-term gases, CO2, we can avert some short-term warming quickly by reducing these short-term forcing gases like methane. And so, hydrogen is one of those. So, it's again not innocent to build a hydrogen — it's not just some idle sort of like demonstration exercise. You are risking making climate change worse. You're risking, you know, exacerbating climate change.
Joe Romm
Especially because hydrogen is the leakiest gas known to humankind. It's tiny, it is very hard to detect those leaks. And we already see significant leaks in the natural gas system of methane, which has, as you know, and I'm sure you've done pods on them, you know, the leakage of methane because of its huge global warming potential over 20 years, changes the environmental benefit of methane immensely. And so, if you imagine now let's throw in a leakier gas and imagine scaling that up in volume. It's just like, well then you have to ask, is the benefit really that overwhelming to justify this kind of risk?
And the answer is no.
David Roberts
Yeah, it's amazing how much of the hydrogen dialogue these days is like tons of short-term risks and costs, all with this sort of Valhalla in the far distance that you can barely see shimmering in the distance. It's worth being suspicious about. So before we talk about the various ways of making hydrogen, which I want to get to, let's just talk about what you do when you have it. You have some hydrogen. Why is it so difficult to use and manage as an energy carrier? Let's just talk about some of the intrinsic qualities of hydrogen itself that make it difficult for that purpose.
Joe Romm
Well, sometimes they say it's got the highest energy density per unit weight, which is true, but because it's so diffuse, you have to add a lot of weight to move it around, right? If you put them in, you know, 10,000 pounds per square inch canisters, right. Most of what you're lugging around is the canister.
David Roberts
You can't, this is crucial, you can't transport it in large quantities as is because it's so diffuse, because it's gaseous. So, you have to compress it before you transport it and there is additional energy and additional weight.
Joe Romm
Or, you have to liquefy it, which is even more popular because then it gets to about half the density of water. But unfortunately, liquefying hydrogen takes you down to about below negative 400 Fahrenheit, and it uses about 40% of the energy in the hydrogen simply to liquefy it. So, you lose massive amounts of efficiency. And you get this other problem, which is it's hard to keep at that temperature. If you, for instance, want to truck it around or put it in a truck as a fuel, it's going to slosh around and it will start to evaporate and it will create internal pressure, which you have to get rid of, generally by venting.
So, that boil-off and venting problem: not solved yet.
David Roberts
And that's venting hydrogen into the atmosphere.
Joe Romm
And we're talking a lot. So, if you wanted to have these trucks, lots of liquid hydrogen trucks, as some people propose to fuel whatever it is you want, ships, planes, long-distance trucks, you're going to be venting hydrogen into the air and it could be 10% of the hydrogen that you have. It's not a trivial matter.
David Roberts
What about pipelines? Is that why everybody's converging on pipelines? What is the energetic requirement for pipeline transport?
Joe Romm
Pipelines are by far the best. That is the desired end state. And you need special pipelines because hydrogen will, in fact, embrittle typical steel. So, you've got to use specially coated pipelines. You cannot run this through a natural gas pipeline.
David Roberts
So, let's put an exclamation point on that. You cannot use existing pipes for this. It would entail building a new set of pipes and pipelines.
Joe Romm
Yes, and the other key issue here, and this is where you move into the realm — and a lot of what I focus on in the book isn't so much "Is something theoretically doable?" It's "Is it practical and scalable in the real world?" Because in order to justify the financing of a pipeline, you need a long-term offtake agreement. You need a long-term guarantee of a supply at a fixed price. And here's your problem, and this is the famous chicken and egg problem which I wrote about 20 years ago and it affects many other industries.
But you aren't going to get someone to make the investment in the hydrogen production and pipeline side, which could cost tens of billions, until someone has shown that they have a successful hydrogen-using technology that's going to compete in the marketplace and can make a guaranteed offtake agreement for 10 or more years. On the other hand, no one's going to build the factories to build this, let's say, hydrogen-consuming vehicle, a fuel cell vehicle, unless they know there's a guaranteed producer of low carbon, preferably green hydrogen, at a low cost. So someone has to gamble, someone has to take a large gamble.
David Roberts
Our governments have to come in with sort of like brute force money, which appears to be what a lot of them are doing. Like a lot of governments are trying to get past precisely this chicken and egg problem just by dumping hundreds of millions of dollars on these things to get them started.
Joe Romm
And unfortunately for governments, these things are expensive and they have taxpayers and they can't make any guarantees on either end. They can't guarantee that if you build this new steel plant for several billion dollars, that somebody could give green hydrogen at a price that anybody would be interested in. And you can't tell the green hydrogen producers, "I can guarantee you 10 years of sales needed to justify this." And so the result has been, for instance, in this country, after 20 years of trying, there are about 56 hydrogen fueling stations for cars, one of which is in Hawaii and the rest are in California.
And because they were promised a lot more sales in order to justify the sales of hydrogen — in other words, the utilization rate of these fueling stations was over-promised. No one built all those cars. And that's why in the last few years, the price of hydrogen in the state tripled, making people, as you can imagine, the owners of these cars very worried because their cars now would cost 10 times as much to fuel.
David Roberts
I don't know. I feel like if you bought a hydrogen car, your life has been nothing but regrets ever since for all kinds of reasons.
Joe Romm
Well, absolutely.
David Roberts
Well, let's talk about, I mean, what people really want to hear here, let's get nuts and bolts about the various uses of hydrogen and let's try to do this relatively quickly because there's a lot to go through. So, I'm going to start at the kind of the dumb end: Cars, I think, are the dumbest. And I know, like your original version of this book, spent a lot of time on the car question because it was a live question back then.
Joe Romm
Still is.
David Roberts
Ah, is it?
Joe Romm
There are still major auto companies introducing cars into the US market that are hydro. I'm not going to say — you and I think it's ridiculous, but it's still happening. It's not the big delusion it used to be, but it is still happening.
David Roberts
I feel like we don't even need to spend much time on why hydrogen cars are delusional. Just like you have to build a giant infrastructure, you have to hyper-pressurize the hydrogen, which makes it dangerous and difficult to move around and dangerous in the car. On and on and on. And the evidence that that's never going to happen is just look, they tried and tried and it didn't happen. It's not happening. EVs are stomping all over the place.
Joe Romm
A thousand to one sales.
David Roberts
A thousand to one sales. So, I think cars we can check off.
Joe Romm
Yes.
David Roberts
Next, dumbest is heating buildings, mixing hydrogen in with natural gas to moderately lower the carbon intensity of the natural gas in pipelines that are used for heating and cooling buildings. I think it was Michael Liebreich who compared this to pouring champagne in your municipal water supply. But this is, to me, if anything, dumber than cars.
Joe Romm
I was going to say it's not fair to —
David Roberts
But alive. More alive than the cars, as far as I can tell. Like, they're actually doing large-scale tests of this, I think, in the UK.
Joe Romm
Right. And the reason it's more alive is because it's more straightforward and because it's an existential issue if you are a gas distributor. Because if the future is, in fact, all carbon-free electricity producing, heating people's homes with better and better electric heat pumps, then where's the growth market, let alone the saving the existing market for the natural gas distribution system? But there are now, as I'm sure you may know, literally 50 studies, at least 50 published studies on why this idea makes no sense.
David Roberts
Yeah, it's funny. Like every new study that comes out, researchers are getting, you can sort of see them losing their patience. The conclusions get more strident and unequivocal. Every time I see a new study, they're like, "People, this is dumb! We told you already."
Joe Romm
And let's be clear why, among other things, already commented on the point, you can blend a little bit of hydrogen in with natural gas in an existing pipeline. Exactly how much? Not quite yet proven at scale, it is viewed that 20% is max. But people start to worry when you get above 10%.
David Roberts
And that's about the embrittlement of the steel?
Joe Romm
And of course, the problem is that hydrogen is so diffuse and the methane has four hydrogens and a carbon. So, the extra energy of throwing this diffuse hydrogen in there is even less a percentage than whatever the percentage of hydrogen is. So, you might have a 20% hydrogen blend, but it only might be, let's say, 70% of the energy content in the whole thing. And what's the point? Because you're still committing to natural gas, right? It's a microscopic benefit for a huge amount of money and a headache.
David Roberts
And if you think that replacing all existing chemical uses of hydrogen is tough, imagine trying to produce enough clean hydrogen to heat and cool the world's buildings. Like, I don't even know how to do that math. But suffice it to say, it is exponentially beyond what we can imagine producing. So, it's really just, I mean, I hesitate to be, you know, strident like this, but specifically, hydrogen for heating seems to me just a pure natural gas propaganda play. They're just completely fooling and manipulating governments about this. There's no chance this is going to work or matter.
Joe Romm
And let's remember, by the way, that electric heat pumps don't make heat the old-fashioned electrification way of running electricity through a resistor, right? They actually have a net gain in so-called coefficients of performance (COP) because they use the electricity to move heat from outside to inside.
David Roberts
And so, if you're combusting a fuel, you are physically, mathematically getting less energy out of the fuel than is contained in the fuel. You can't get a COP above one, right? Physically, whereas every heat pump has a COP above one.
Joe Romm
And people are heading towards, as you know, COPs of three, four, and now even five, right? Which is to say, you put a kilowatt hour of electricity in and you get four units of kilowatt hours of heat back. So, you know, this is, I don't want to say it's a no-brainer because there are issues involved. And that's why, by the way, there's a massive campaign to spread bad information about heat pumps throughout the world, and particularly in Europe. But yes, we know what the future is. It's not always the case that we know what the medium and long-term winner is, but we do here.
David Roberts
Right, okay. So, let's go to more challenging — those, I think, are just dumb and dismissible, cars and heating. Silly. Now, let's talk about e-fuels, which is more complicated.
Joe Romm
Well, we should say there's a lot of uses for heating. There's not just heating homes and buildings. You know, this gets to the secondary issue, which is at what point, how high a temperature can you beat burning natural gas with electricity?
David Roberts
Yes, a moving target for the last several decades.
Joe Romm
And industrial heat pumps are now getting up to pretty high temperatures, enough to already get close to 40% of industrial heat. Then, I know you've probably had a number of companies interviewed here. I think I've heard you do some —
David Roberts
Box of rocks, box of rocks!
Joe Romm
And so, this is one of those classic cases where I say something I said 20 years ago: If you can do something directly with electricity, hydrogen will never compete.
David Roberts
Yes, I mean, I think you could even say as a general takeaway from this pod, the extent to which we're going to use hydrogen is directly correlated to the extent to which electricity is going to fall short. You and I, of course, are on Team Electron and believe that electricity is going to do a lot more than anyone thinks. So, our sort of low estimation of hydrogen's contribution is basically tied to that high estimation of electricity's.
Joe Romm
Which is not based on flights of fancy, but staggering advances in batteries. Not just in the battery cost, but in the energy densities of the—
David Roberts
And the evidence of markets. I mean, it's what's happening. So, even industrial heat, I think, used to be one of those things where people are like, "Oh, it's difficult to decarbonize, you're going to need some liquid fuel." I don't think so. I think we're going to get to industrial heat purely through electricity.
Joe Romm
Certainly, 80 to 90%.
David Roberts
Something like that. So, one of the challenging areas to me then is these e-fuels you're talking about. So, the idea here is specifically with aviation and shipping. You are moving giant vehicles and thus you need an incredible amount of energy density on board. And the idea is, or the thought is, you are never going to get that energy density out of a battery. So, you need a liquid fuel and you need a carbon-free liquid fuel. And the only way we know how to do that is making these e-fuels which, as you say, is using renewable energy and then carbon captured from somewhere, either from a flue gas or from the atmosphere, and then you refine those into basically a carbon-neutral liquid fuel.
And there's a lot of work going into that, tons of startups, tons of activity and, as far as I know, no one yet has — well, actually, I've talked to a couple of guys in aviation who will be bold enough to say this — but very few people are bold enough to say that electricity is going to get good enough to do those directly. So, do you see a niche for e-fuels and, if so, what are the policy implications?
Joe Romm
Well, we're going to jump to the "sooner or later" here again. If you're talking about long-distance intercontinental air travel — let's just put that in the category of replacing hydrogen directly — a small, growing but small, 2-3% of global greenhouse gas emissions and one of the three or four hardest, so deserving of a lot of R&D but not the priority for scaling up deployment. We have a long way to go on all these other things we just talked about, which is electrifying ground transport, electrifying heating, and getting rid of the fossil fuels already producing on the grid.
We have how many years of that? We're not moving at a fast pace, let's say two decades. Right. So we're talking about things, technologies that would be good to have in the 2040s. We don't have to go to zero-emission sustainable aviation fuel for all jets today. Right. That's not the right order of things and it's certainly worth putting a lot of money into figuring the problem out. But it's not worth saying, "Oh, I know it's gotta be this. So let's bet the farm on this." And let's be clear what we're talking about with the sustainable aviation fuel which would be basically e-kerosene, the equivalent of jet fuel, something like that.
You have to have green hydrogen. So, that green hydrogen is going to need its electrolyzer, and it's going to need 100% new renewables, hourly matched. You've had Jesse Jenkins and others on. So, you got to have the renewables running that. If you use direct air capture, then that direct air capture plant also has to run on 100% new renewables, hourly matched. And whatever plant you use, this Fischer–Tropsch or some other plant that's going to combine the CO2 from the atmosphere and the hydrogen from water and back into a hydrocarbon. And I'll just say, what you are doing here is reversing entropy, right? You burned the fossil fuel in the first place.
David Roberts
You're trying to put the molecule back together.
Joe Romm
So, there are two things you're trying to do: You're trying to take a diffuse gas right in the atmosphere, 420 parts per million, right? You have to capture that. You took a solid or a liquid that was storing that hydrogen, that carbon very easily, it's got diffused. You're going to spend a lot of energy getting it back in that form. And then of course, you're splitting the water, which is, remember, water is the waste product of combustion, much as carbon dioxide is the waste product of combustion. And we're going to take two waste products and try to convert them back into the original so we can burn them again.
Okay, now if that isn't clear, clearly one of the most inefficient last things you would ever do. And you'd never do it until you had so much excess renewables that you would solve every other problem first.
David Roberts
Well, let me pause here because this is — I do think that the people working in this area are betting on abundant, trivially cheap renewable energy. But I will also say that lots of other people working in lots of other areas are also betting on abundant, trivially cheap renewable energy. Like a lot of things that we want to work are not going to work without abundant, cheap renewable energy. So, do you know what I mean? Like, I don't know if we should hold that against e-fuels specifically.
Joe Romm
Well, if what you're telling me is that there are a lot of business plans out there that assume that they're going to be using dumped excess renewables, then I would say to you, "Good luck trying to get an offtake agreement if you're trying to use the same stuff in your business plan 10 years from now." If you think that there's going to be zero-cost renewable electricity 10 years from now, that this isn't going to get bid up in price by all the electric vehicle companies who at least have a product people want to buy, right? Or the people who want industrial or smaller-scale heat pumps.
I think between data centers and electrification, there will be people bidding for that renewables. And by the way, that renewables is not predictable. That's the dumped renewables. Most of the things we're talking about, like electrolyzers, do not like to run on randomly delivered amounts of power, right? So, because they again, these are expensive devices, they have to run round the clock. And that's why this is the great, we'll get to it, I guess, the green hydrogen failure. There's a reason why literally 99% of all green hydrogen projects out there do not have guaranteed, do not have firm offtake agreements and are in the process of going bankrupt, shuttering down, or selling off to somebody else.
That's the big failure that has happened in the last six months as people have realized, as Bloomberg New Energy Finance, which in 2021 said, "Oh, we think electrolyzers are going to come down a learning curve like everyone else, 10% per year." And now, three, four years later, "Oh, actually electrolyzers went up 40 to 50% in price. So we're redoing all our numbers and we now think by 2050 they might come down 50%, if there's free trade."
David Roberts
That shouldn't be a problem.
Joe Romm
And I just want to say this generically because I know you've brought on some very sophisticated people to talk about the literature on learning curves, but everyone in their business plans assumes that their new technology will come down a learning curve. But as we know, most things actually aren't batteries or solar panels. And so, electrolyzers are mostly not composed of things that have any reason to believe are going to come down a learning curve. And the same is true of a direct air capture plant. Right. We're talking steel, cement.
David Roberts
So you don't think on either of those can be modularized and replicated and factory produced and all the other kind of things that bring that bring cost down over time?
Joe Romm
Well, the problem with this, the same problem with nuclear power, is that there are vast economies of scale for making these things bigger. That's why we built 1,000 megawatt plants. We don't have the 200 megawatt plants because it doesn't take five times as much steel and five times as much concrete and five times as many people. Right? So, most industrial things have big economies of scale, right? There's this imaginary world where, "Oh, I'm going to shrink down the cost, but the cost per unit is also going to go down." That requires magical thinking. It requires making it so small that you can make it in a factory and ship it in a shipping container.
But again, that's small. I mean, shipping containers are big, but they're not big in the world of power. And so, I talk about all this in the book. I don't want to say it's crazy, but — look, I'm a physicist. I don't want to say things are impossible. But in the history of energy, in the history of products that you buy when you go to the store, the little packages are higher cost per package, per unit. I hope that's called shrinkflation. There's a whole word for it. So, no, I do not believe that things that have big economies of scale can mysteriously have even larger economies of shrinkage that make up for the diseconomies of shrinkage.
Again, and I say this to you, Dave, we've known each other a long time. People may make some money with some products. What they're not going to do is scale up to create a solution for climate change that you and I need to spend a lot of time talking about.
David Roberts
Okay, well, let's go back to e-fuels then, because I want people to come out of this with some sense of how they are supposed to think about this. How are they supposed to think about aviation and shipping? In your framework here, we just deploy, deploy, deploy the stuff we know how to do, which are the big buckets, cars, heating, etc. Do R&D on aviation and shipping and just be content that we'll solve them later. Is that basically your idea? And what is that later, like the physics of hydrogen aren't going to change? Do you think batteries dense enough to do this are going to come along?
Joe Romm
I now believe it was in the realm of possibility that the vast majority of the air travel problem, yes, is solvable in the following sense: that clearly the energy density of batteries is getting better and better, and the upper bound is pretty large. You can google something called "structural batteries," right? And I'm not saying — they're not commercial now, but we're now talking about what could be available in the 2040s, right? So, if you would tell me now, "I know that we're not going to have vastly better batteries that could actually be put into the structure of a plane," I would say, "Well, you might be right, but you might be wrong."
And what's more, along the way, we are going to hybridize our airplanes anyway, right? We're going to, as the batteries get better, we don't have to fly the whole trip on batteries. We can just use it as, you know, let's say, take power assist in the most important places. And so, I think you can imagine vehicles that, let's say, reduce 50% of the long-distance air travel. So what I'm saying is that we're talking about a problem that in the year 2040 might still be just 2 or 3% of global emissions. So, I think until we get to 80% reductions from current levels, I wouldn't obsess about these things that are in the 2 or 3% level, which includes intercontinental shipping, because as you may know, the Chinese are deploying electric shipping along some of their longer rivers and they're doing battery swapping.
You put the batteries in a container ship. This is an important conceptual point that dawned on me over the last year, which is, yes, we haven't solved all the electrification problems, but that's because no one's been thinking about electrifying a lot of stuff because we had these fuels that were sitting right there below the ground you could just burn.
David Roberts
Yes, this is. Thank you for making this point. I make this point all the time. I make this point every time I talk to a young audience of students or whatever. It's just like, it's not like finance where there's been like millions of people come before you and there are just tiny marginal scraps left. There are like major discoveries to be had. Like no one's been thinking about this stuff for centuries and all of a sudden everyone's thinking about it. So, like, you can enter this field and make substantial contributions. Do you know what I mean?
Like, there are still low-hanging fruits around electrification. We're nowhere near where we're going to get with electrification.
Joe Romm
Yeah, there's been no incentive for our great entrepreneurs and our great scientists, innovators. And as we've seen, you've reported on as much as anybody, the amazing companies, and we both know not all those companies will succeed. But there are some very smart, serious people. And then you have things like geothermal. So, it's a very exciting time in the solution space. As long as we don't get sidetracked by the things that are considerably less plausible.
David Roberts
Well, let's talk about then the other big one, which is steel. Here again, you can do what's called "hydrogen direct reduction," which just uses hydrogen instead of a fossil fuel for that stage of production, that exists now. It's quite expensive. There's also electrochemical — you know, I've had a couple of companies on. This is like my personal dark horse thing that I'm super geeked about. I'm super geeked about electrochemistry, but that is like you can make steel with renewable energy through electrochemistry if you have abundant, cheap, renewable energy. Again, like decarbonizing steel without hydrogen is going to require abundant, cheap, renewable energy.
Joe Romm
Right. But let me make the following point. So does decarbonizing steel with hydrogen.
David Roberts
Right.
Joe Romm
There's only one way to make carbon-free hydrogen, and that is with carbon-free power. Right. And so, you know, I've been saying this for 20 years. Yes. One of the reasons people are excited about hydrogen now is because the cost of green hydrogen has come down sharply. But that's because its principal competitor has come down in price sharply. So that's the flaw there. Yes, you're right: Green hydrogen is now whatever, five to ten dollars a ton or, you know, a kilogram. Okay, that's great.
Unfortunately, that's because the green electricity, which you can use directly, got a lot cheaper. So, yeah, anybody who thinks you can make low-carbon hydrogen from natural gas and capture the CO2, that, I'm afraid to say, is a fossil fuel hype, but it's just not the real world. If you want the green hydrogen to power your thing, and if it's a steel mill, yes, you need a lot of it, then you're talking about using those same renewables you need in abundance, except you're now going to need two or three times as much.
David Roberts
Right. So, replacing existing hydrogen would take as much renewable energy as the total US grid. Replacing steel mills with hydrogen direct reduction, that's probably like another grid or two worth of renewable energy. So, do you then think of steel the same way you think about aviation and shipping, which is, let's do the things we know how to do, let's do R&D on this, let's basically work out electrification on this and not spend a bunch of proximate money on a solution that is not going to be the long-term solution?
Joe Romm
Look, the reason they went to sustainable aviation fuel is because it's a liquid fuel. I think that, you know, I know you've had guests who've had a different opinion, but I think the notion that you're actually going to use the hydrogen in a jet is implausible. Particularly if you're saying, "I'm going to liquefy it."
David Roberts
It's a fuel cell. He's going to use a fuel cell. I wanted to ask you about that. Like, what do you think about hydrogen fuel cells to get some of the density you can't yet get with batteries?
Joe Romm
Well, I will say, you know, as I did in the book and as I said 20 years ago, you know, but it's even more clear now: There has never been a profitable hydrogen fuel cell company. And there was one that turned a yearly profit, you know, a couple of years ago. And I haven't kept track of it, but they're all, I mean, you know, Plug Power.
David Roberts
What about Bloom, the Bloom box? Am I making that up? That's a thing, right?
Joe Romm
Right. But Bloom has never made — it's funded by venture funds. And I often ask people, when I'm speaking, "When do you think the first fuel cell was invented, discovered?"
David Roberts
I have no idea. I'm so ignorant about fuel cells.
Joe Romm
They'll say, "I don't know, the 40s maybe." And I say, "Well, close but wrong century. 1839." It was a reverse battery, a guy was working on basically reversing a battery. So it's been 180 years. Normally, things that are plausible get commercialized relatively soon. It could be decades. But I can tell, you know, it's not for lack of trying.
David Roberts
But as you say, we're in a new world. Fossil fuels are being taken off the table. That is going to change the relative economics of a lot of things. Why wouldn't it do that for fuel cells?
Joe Romm
Because fuel cells aren't an energy-using device, they're an energy-transforming device. So yeah, could someone build a fuel cell that makes economic sense? Perhaps the problem is the fuel cells aren't even that efficient. I mean, maybe in a high-temperature fuel cell, which people haven't cared about so much because you can't run a car on a fuel cell that takes hours to warm up. The cars use the proton exchange membrane fuel cells, which are low-temperature fuel cells and have an efficiency in the 40s. There are fuel cells at a high temperature that might be in the 50s.
But again, if someone is saying, "I'm going to build an airplane and it's going to have a fuel cell, not yet a commercial product, running on green hydrogen, not yet a commercial product, and I'm going to liquefy it and somehow get it to the airplane in every major airport in the world."
David Roberts
Well, part of this vision is that all these little mid-sized airports would basically be running their own little electrolyzers and storing their own liquid hydrogen stores, basically. There'd be little electrolyzers all over the place, I think, is part of the idea.
Joe Romm
And of course, the reason that makes no sense is because those electrolyzers would all have to run on 100% new renewables that are hourly matched. And that's the whole problem with both hydrogen and direct air capture: wherever you site it, you gotta have a lot of "excess" or low-cost renewables that nobody else wants. Right? That's why in any medium-sized city, if you have low-cost renewables, you're gonna use it directly because you're going to use them to power the cars and the power stations and the electric heat pumps and industrial heat and all the other uses we're going to come up with.
And then you're going to tell me, "I'm going to plop this electrolyzer down and it's going to be small scale," so the unit cost is going to be high, so the unit cost coming out is going to be high. So, I can't say, "Oh, this is going to be cheap green hydrogen." If I'm doing it with a small electrolyzer and I'm using some local excess. I mean, it's not going to be excess renewables. I'm going to have to build new renewables. So again, it's just as you say, there's a lot of business plans out there that assume everyone else doesn't succeed in their business plans, but they succeed in theirs.
And I'll just tell you, "Good luck." It's fine for a venture capitalist to pursue that, but if you tell me we should have massive tax credits or we should start building this out, I'll say to you, "This is ridiculous." And this is where I'll cut to the chase: We're coming up on COP 30. For 30 years, every year, the nations of the world get together to address the climate problem and guess what? Coal, oil, gas use have continually risen. So, we can't keep dawdling when we know how to get 80% of the reductions now, right?
That's the top priority. Because if we don't get those 80% now, it doesn't matter if somebody comes up with a brilliant idea to solve 2% of the problem in the 2040s.
David Roberts
Yeah, it's hard to avoid the sort of, when you, when you hear people talk about hydrogen, it's never quite stated explicitly, but part of the rationale seems to be, "Well, we need to find a way for these giant oil and gas companies to be partners in this effort and this is a way for them to be a partner in the effort. So let's do it." And I guess my alternative is, "No, they don't. Let's destroy them and burn them and urinate on the ashes." You know, that's not everyone's position, but it seems like a bad justification for spending hundreds of billions of dollars.
Joe Romm
Well, it still assumes that when you're done, you have the answer. And it's entirely possible when you're done, you just have tens of billions of dollars in stranded assets because electricity has solved the problem. Or maybe the former oil drillers who are now working for geothermal plants are making a living providing their green electricity that's actually dispatchable and near baseload. So look, the point is certain things we know now and we should bet big on them. Other things deserve some longer-term R&D and maybe toning down some of this hype about hydrogen and direct air capture and small modular reactors, all these other things I talk about in the book.
David Roberts
Oh, one other thing. There was one of the uses I wanted to ask about. One of the promising ideas around hydrogen is people have this idea, which I have mixed feelings about, that we need storage, long-term storage. Not just diurnal, not even like 50 hour, not even weekly. We need like seasonal, massive, seasonal storage. And so, you're not going to get massive quantities of storage that will sit there indefinitely with electrochemistry, I don't think. What's your take on that? You think that problem's going to be solved some other way? It's not actually going to be a problem?
Joe Romm
I think that as you know — because I've listened to, one of the reasons I know these things is I've listened to your interviews — there's not a market for long term storage. That is the problem.
David Roberts
Right. Not yet.
Joe Romm
Right. So, it's all hypothetical. If there were an actual market, then the marketplace would come up with the answers. You and I wouldn't have to speculate. You have certainly talked to people who believe they have a technology that can go months. They can't sell that, so they have to figure out the benefit that's shorter. Now, there is a staggering amount of money going into batteries, right? Because there's actually a financial incentive to get 5% better out of a battery or a new chemistry that could be longer duration. So, I think that, and I will agree with Jesse Jenkins and others who would say, I think that as things become economically viable, longer and longer storage, we will find solutions for them.
And clearly, we now have. What is it in the Middle East? Someone's got their gigawatt-scale solar. It's got a huge amount of solar and it's got 24-hour storage. As you know, I don't think we're anywhere near that point. I am bullish on enhanced geothermal, as is the Department of Energy and Jigar Shah and people who have analyzed that. It's not a done deal. I think it's far more plausible than, let's say, small modular reactors. But the point is, it doesn't make a lot of sense to place a large bet on solving a problem that you can't even make money on today.
Let's do long-term R&D. As we said, no one's had to look at long-term storage until people woke up and realized we have to go to zero emissions. It wasn't until we all had to go to zero that you had to solve every single problem. So that was the Paris Agreement, right? That was really December 2015. Followed on with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on 1.5 degrees C. Those were the things that led the world to say, "We need to go to zero" or net zero. But let's... I don't know about the net.
Let's just say you have to get really, really close to zero. In the world where you have to get really, really close to zero, you have to solve all of these niche problems too. These niche problems force you to really contort yourself. In the introduction of the book and also later in the conclusion, I talked to the guy at the International Energy Agency who co-wrote their 2019 hydrogen report and still does a lot of that work. He basically said to me, "If we didn't have to go to zero in every sector in 2050, we would probably have a lot less hydrogen in this equation."
And in fact, as he also said, and you could read the quote in the book, every advance that we've seen in the past decade has led us towards electrification and away from things like hydrogen and carbon capture and storage. So, I would say I expect very big things to appear that are near commercial now or will be commercial in five to 10 years.
David Roberts
Yeah, I sort of think of hydrogen a little bit in the same bucket. I think of direct air capture and carbon dioxide removal, which is their enormous presence in models in 2050 net zero models, is more a placeholder than it is a serious plan to do those things. It's more like, "We don't yet know how to do this electrically."
Joe Romm
And look, they were invented, the direct air capture and the bioenergy carbon capture and storage — which I've written a couple of reports for at UPenn, the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and Media, a couple of long reports — and it's basically the same thing: these were kind of invented by the modelers, not by the technology. This was not a bottom-up thing where you said, "Oh, we could use an LED light bulb and save this much." This was the top-down modeler saying this is the "then a miracle occurs" part of the blackboard equation from the Gary Larson cartoon.
So yes, I agree, and I think the "then a miracle occurs" stuff, whatever you want to say, it is 10 to 20%, it's going to shrink. That number is going to shrink every year. And it is just a mistake to say, "Let's scale up stuff now to solve this final 10% when we have 80% that we need to spend that money on today."
David Roberts
We're over time, but I just very briefly wanted to touch on the ways of making hydrogen. So, you have a whole long section on the idea of using nuclear power plants to make hydrogen. I think that all the reasons you think that is dumb derive from your general feeling that nuclear is dumb and big, expensive, and thus it's dumb for this, just like it's dumb for everything else. We don't need to go over all that.
Joe Romm
No. Well, let me just say no one has solved the cost problem on nuclear. I don't call nuclear dumb, I just call it expensive. And so, if you can't make green hydrogen from cheap solar and wind, how exactly are you going to make affordable green hydrogen from a nuclear plant? And the answer is, well, we're going to do it thermochemically. We're going to use high-temperature waste heat from the plant. Right. But that requires you to build the hydrogen production facility right next to the nuclear reactor.
David Roberts
Even like partially integrated. And like, of all the ways to, you know, they joke about all the ways to like make steam, like of all the ways to create a little heat. It seems like you could do it in a simpler way than building a giant nuclear power plant.
Joe Romm
Well, the other point is, hydrogen production is a problem in nuclear accidents. This has been studied to death by the International Atomic Energy Agency and others. Huge volumes. The Three Mile Island accident had a hydrogen bubble inside. So, you don't ever want to put — the fact that hydrogen is invisible and burns invisibly and it's very leaky and hard to detect the leak is that there's like a hundred-foot setback between a hydrogen production facility and any place where you're worried about safety or explosions. Right.
So, when the French tried to do this, they found that they had to move the hydrogen production facility a few hundred feet away from the nuclear plant, by which point the heat isn't so hot and the size of the amount of hydrogen that could be produced shrunk immensely. And so, I'm just saying that, from a safety perspective, you wouldn't want to introduce something as dangerous as a hydrogen production, massive hydrogen production facility near a nuclear plant, even if it were affordable, which it isn't.
David Roberts
Right. The other big idea is, well, a couple of other big areas. One of the other big ideas is blue hydrogen. There's a million colors. I'm not going to go through all of them. But basically, blue is the idea that you continue to make hydrogen with natural gas. Except then you attach carbon capture and storage onto your natural gas plants. This, to me, is dumb on its face, to the point that it is amazing to me that it is happening at all. And yet, there it is happening indeed. I don't know if you've caught the latest news, but you remember all the hydrogen hubs that were going to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on and the Inflation Reduction Act.
Trump is going to — his plan is to cancel the ones that are located in blue states that were going to run on renewable energy, but to keep the ones in red states that are going to run on natural gas. Even good faith hydrogen supporters have to look at that, I think, and think that it shows a little what the real game is. But like, I don't know that we need to spend a lot of time on this.
Joe Romm
Just make a couple of comments. As we know, the natural gas system has leakage of methane. And as we also know, we've tried carbon capture. By the way, no one has ever built a commercial natural gas plant with carbon capture and storage, which is quite a statement.
David Roberts
So, I know it's crazy. We've been talking and talking and talking about them.
Joe Romm
So, the notion that you're going to put a carbon capture and storage system on a, let's say, steam methane reformer — and remember, you're gonna have a parasitic loss, so you gotta burn more natural gas and therefore you're gonna have more of the leakage — you're not gonna capture 95% of the CO2, because the CO2 from the steam methane reformer, if that's the way you go, some of it comes out pure, maybe 60% or so, but some of it comes out in the flue gas. And that's the hard part, right? Because that's very diffuse and expensive.
So, the point is this: it's not likely to capture anywhere near 90%. None of those plants out there that promise 90 to 95% on average, they do like in the 70s. So, what you're going to end up with is methane leakage in the system. Excess methane burned to power the carbon capture and storage system and the leakage associated with that. Then, you're going to have the CO2 that isn't captured. And of course, you're still going to have to worry about any methane of any natural gas that leaks out. And when you do the calculation, you find it's not very green, it's certainly not carbon-free, and it's again, since hydrogen is barely worth the trouble in the first place, if it is carbon-free, it's definitely not worth the trouble if it's putting out all these greenhouse gas emissions that you were trying to prevent in the first place.
David Roberts
However, the subsidy regime that has been set up for it and the Inflation Reduction Act is so florid that they can make a lot of money doing this.
Joe Romm
They can potentially. The Inflation Reduction Act has a flaw. It has been discussed by people, and the people who worked on getting it passed tried to prevent, which is that it is a supply-side subsidy. It's a subsidy for producing it. It should have been a subsidy for, let's say, methane ammonia producers to use green hydrogen, not a subsidy for people to just randomly produce it. And as a result, it is open to exploitation. And yeah, I think the fossil fuel companies would love... And by the way, the other thing, as you may know, because it was in the paper, also the Occidental people who bought the direct air capture company, Carbon Engineering, the oil company, they've been trying to persuade the Trump administration to have an equal subsidy for using the captured CO2 for enhanced oil recovery.
David Roberts
Oh, to just layer one more subsidy on top of the multi-layer subsidy cake that's already been cooked for them.
Joe Romm
The Inflation Reduction Act does subsidize captured CO2 in the utilization case of enhanced oil recovery. It just gives you a bigger subsidy if you actually permanently bury it. But just so your listeners know, enhanced oil recovery is a profitable thing. And studies have indicated that subsidizing CO2 use for direct oil enhanced oil recovery is going to tilt the usage, as you can imagine, the first usage for just getting more oil out of the ground. Because again, what enhanced oil recovery is, we're going to use CO2 to squeeze — the inherent pressure of the oil well doesn't get all the oil out, but if you squeeze in another compressed gas, you can get a lot more oil out.
And people have been doing that for decades, but now they want to capture the CO2. So, imagine using methane, natural gas to make the hydrogen. You have all the leaks, you don't capture all the CO2. The CO2 you do capture, you use to squeeze more oil out of the ground to burn. And that's all subsidized both on the green hydrogen and maybe also on the CO2 burial end.
David Roberts
Ugh, fun stuff. I assume all of that is going to... I mean, it was like under Biden, it was a real open question how sort of grotesque and ridiculous those subsidies were going to get. I feel like now it's no longer an open question. They're going to get ridiculous, grosser, and more corrupt, more useless in climate terms.
Joe Romm
That's why my main message to anybody who works at a Natural Resource Defense Council or Environmental Defense Fund or other people who do file lawsuits — besides to read my book, Hype about Hydrogen — please, you need to launch lawsuits against this. Because if you look at the Inflation Reduction Act, it's actually supposed to go through a life cycle analysis.
David Roberts
Yes, it says in the statute, "It must lower greenhouse gases," does it not? It says that in the law. So, this is like, it's boggling to me that this is a debate. It says it in the text of the law. You have to really contort to get around that.
Joe Romm
Well, unfortunately, you can. It doesn't necessarily say that you can't hire somebody to give you the — as you know, you can twist the life cycle analysis almost any way you want, depending on who you are, who's funding it.
David Roberts
The final topic that I know a lot of people were curious about, that I want to touch on before we're done, is geologic hydrogen. This is the new hype. The idea that we've discovered, basically underground in these sort of caverns, giant quantities of gaseous hydrogen, which then we don't have to produce at all and thus could be cheap and finally bring the hydrogen energy system into reality, etcetera, etcetera. What's the deal with geologic hydrogen?
Joe Romm
Well, I do have a chapter on that discussion, a lengthy discussion of that. So, the problem is that the hydrogen doesn't — there isn't a lot, no one has discovered a lot. And what they've discovered is not very high percentage hydrogen. And typically, it's got a lot of natural gas and CO2 in it. And what's more, it can change over time. There was one place that had a high percentage of hydrogen in the beginning, and then over time it turned into a high percentage of CO2. But many of these things, the large quantities might only have 1%, 2% hydrogen, you know, and so you have two basic problems.
One, you're going to have to figure out how to capture all the other stuff or separate out the hydrogen, and it's probably going to be an intractable problem. The second is, it's not near where you use it. So, unless you discovered a massive amount of very pure underground hydrogen that you knew how long it would last, because remember, you want to build a pipeline, someone's got to say, "Oh, I understand the geology well enough to say there's going to be this pure hydrogen coming out for 10 years," right? Otherwise, guess what? No one's going to build your pipeline for you and you're going to have to use tube trucks.
And so, the other thing is, hydrogen still got all these other problems. If someone just gave you cheap green hydrogen, you could make use of it locally, but the notion that you're going to be shipping it around thousands of miles, let's say this were in a non-industrial place. So, I have a long discussion of this. I think it's safe to say that this is not — right now, this is how I phrase things, right now there is no reason whatsoever to believe that so-called geologic hydrogen is going to be a game changer or even a substantial provider of carbon-free hydrogen for the foreseeable future.
That being what matters in timescales that you and I care about.
David Roberts
Right. In the book, you wrap up the whole thesis of your book into a tidy lesson, which is roughly like: There's a good reason to research green hydrogen because we need it to replace existing uses of hydrogen, but there's just no reason to expect it's going to ever be a substantial contributor to the energy system. Is that fair? Is that a fair summary?
Joe Romm
And therefore, not a substantial contributor to the solution to climate change.
David Roberts
Right, yeah. And therefore, while we should continue researching, it's crazy to be pouring tens and hundreds of billions of dollars into trying to scale up something prematurely, basically.
Joe Romm
Exactly. There are many technologies that are very worth continuing R&D, and that's the government's job because, of course, venture capitals don't like long-term R&D. That's highly speculative. That's why their business plans, all these business plans that we talk about, all have to say, "In year five, I start making a lot of money. So, I'm going to have access to all the free green power that I need. And everything's coming down a learning curve. And by the way, all my competitors are failing at their business plans." But that's what they have to do to get the VC money.
And so, yes, that's what I'm saying, that this is suitable for the Department of Energy's long-term R&D effort. And along the way, there might be worth doing some medium-scale demonstration plants if something seems very promising. But it's not clear that there are very many things that are very promising and what's more, in the hydrogen pipeline, whereas you and I both know there are a lot of near-commercial companies, near-commercial technologies that have, I would say, a very decent chance that a substantial fraction are going to pan out by 2030 and so we can recalibrate everything. When I was blogging, I wrote a piece like 10 years ago saying, "Any technology that's commercial or near-commercial in 2020 is going to have a big advantage." Right, because I thought we were going to be scaling up like wild this decade.
David Roberts
Would have been nice.
Joe Romm
Naive optimists that we both are, but the point is still true. Anything that's on a learning curve today is going to be very hard to catch up to. Batteries have been coming down a learning curve in cost and improving in the energy density for two decades, and most people think, and the literature suggests it's going to continue for another two decades. So, good luck with your new technology that hopes to come in at a high cost and then come down a learning curve even faster to catch up. If someone wants to throw money, some venture capitalist wants to throw money at that idea, God bless them.
But those of us who want to solve climate problems, we know where we put our money.
David Roberts
Yes, generally, on electrons over molecules, I think, is the simplest way to put it. Team Electron. I'm going to get T-shirts.
Joe Romm
Team Electron.
David Roberts
All right, Joe, this has been fascinating as always. I've been wanting to sort of try to wrap my head around hydrogen, and this is a bracing opportunity to do so. So, thanks for coming on.
Joe Romm
Oh, thanks for having me, Dave. It's always great talking with you.
David Roberts
Thank you for listening to Volts. It takes a village to make this podcast work. Shout out, especially, to my super producer, Kyle McDonald, who makes me and my guests sound smart every week. And it is all supported entirely by listeners like you. So, if you value conversations like this, please consider joining our community of paid subscribers at volts.wtf. Or, leaving a nice review, or telling a friend about Volts. Or all three. Thanks so much, and I'll see you next time.
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