We need to talk about Red Hydrogen!
The colourless gas hydrogen is a hot topic these days. New use of this chemical element is paving the way for achieving the climate goals. Global hydrogen development plans are ambitious and demanding.
Grey, blue, green, and turquoise hydrogen are popular ways to distinguish between different production methods. But a solution that may be important for the future lacks a colour. Hydrogen with negative carbon emissions is visible on the horizon. I call it Red Hydrogen.
Great negative ambitions
Before I go into more detail about hydrogen with red CO₂ figures, I would like to remind you that 2020 was the year several countries and companies launched their own strengthened climate goals.
The list of nations and businesses that further defined their ambitions is long. Perhaps Microsoft has the most ambitious goal? They will become carbon negative by 2030. And by 2050, the company will remove all the carbon they emitted either directly or indirectly since it was established in 1975.
Net-zero emissions
The EU has proposed a new European climate law ensuring Europe will become a climate-neutral continent by 2050.
Being climate-neutral means net-zero emissions into the atmosphere. There are several ways to get there — different technological solutions and policies. If we get started with the necessary emission reductions too late, we will have to make up for lost time with a larger share of negative emissions to achieve the Paris Agreement goals.
Negative emissions mean drawing CO₂ from the atmosphere. It can be done, for example, by installing giant fans that remove carbon dioxide from the air. The captured CO₂ must then be stored safely, safeguarding against future emissions. It may sound like science fiction, but there are already 15 facilities in operation worldwide. The technology is called DAC (Direct Air Capture).
DAC is still at an early technological stage. But it is an area I think will gain a lot of attention as we draw closer to the deadline set for achieving carbon neutrality.
Future technologies
By launching the goal of removing all carbon emissions they historically contributed to, Microsoft will have to adopt methods to achieve negative emissions. The company is taking responsibility to help develop this future technology — among other things, through the new investment fund initiative Climate Innovation Fund started in 2020. Microsoft has pledged to invest a billion dollars in future climate technology.
In other words, the green transition will require red carbon dioxide figures.
The natural factory
As mentioned, there is more than one technology to help achieve this. Nature has a powerful tool to capture CO₂ directly from the air — the tree. It is also the most efficient way to capture greenhouse gasses. The DAC-technology described earlier, with its big fans, is incredibly energy-intensive!
In nature, trees bind carbon through photosynthesis. Thus, a forest becomes a natural DAC factory. That is why extensive tree planting and forest conservation is imperative to speed up greenhouse gas reductions.
Burning trees, or other biomass, can also be an effective method to achieve negative emissions — but only if that the CO₂ emissions are captured and stored. Bioenergy with capture and storage is called BECCS (Bioenergy carbon capture and storage).
Biogas and red hydrogen
A method that is less known but with great potential for negative emissions is hydrogen production using biogas with capture and storage of CO₂ (so-called bio-CCS). Since biogas comes from residues from both plants and animals that earlier in the life cycle captured the carbon through natural processes, we can achieve negative emissions. Waste from forestry, aquaculture, and agriculture can become valuable biogas that can either be used directly or as an input to technology that converts gas into hydrogen.
The hydrogen company ZEG Power is building a production plant outside Bergen on the west coast of Norway. They developed new technology to produce hydrogen from gas with integrated carbon capture. When the starting point is natural gas, it is called blue hydrogen. It is possible to use the same technology for biogas. We will then get what we can call Red Hydrogen.
The decade of hydrogen?
In the podcast, The Bumpy Road to a Hydrogen Economy, investor Shayle Kann from Energy Impact Partners argues that the world seems to focus on one big climate technology each decade. In the 1990s, it was wind energy. In the 2000s, solar power. In the 2010s, lithium-ion batteries. And in the 2020s, it seems increasingly clear it is going to be hydrogen. If the prediction is right, it looks like the hydrogen economy will finally have its decade.
By now, most people have realized that the oil industry is a sunset industry. The horizon will be coloured from cleaner sources of energy and both blue, green and red hydrogen will light up the future!
Based on an article published in the Norwegian online business newspaper E24.no on January 25th, 2021.
