Hydrogen is not an energy source like hydrocarbon deposits or renewable energy streams that we recover through conversion technologies such as solar panels, hydroelectric plants or wind turbines. [Il] must be subject to a manufacturing process that requires a significant energy expenditure. It is therefore a manufactured product that stores energy, like an AA battery. […]
All the ways of producing hydrogen involve significant economic costs, and above all exorbitant energy losses. The best, […] when it is injected into the fossil gas distribution network as Énergir wishes, the energy loss amounts to 50% compared to the energy available before its manufacture. At worst, in the case of the production of synthetic fuels based on H2 similar to those currently used in gasoline internal combustion engines and turbojets used in aviation, energy losses can be as high as 90%. Direct electrification, when possible, always offers a better return than the detour which involves the production of hydrogen.
The advantage of hydrogen, however, is its physical resemblance to the fossil fuels that have made possible the growth we have experienced since the mid-20th century.e century: oil and gas. Like these substances, hydrogen exists in liquid or gaseous form, flows through pipes, stores in tanks and burns in engines.
Big obstacles
The purely physical challenges of a transition that would go through the massive adoption of hydrogen as an energy vector are therefore, on the one hand, the enormous energy costs of its production and, in the case of H2 called “green”, the waste of precious renewable energy to produce it. But more pernicious is the fact that most of the global potential for hydrogen lies in its production from fossil gas (H2 “gray” or H2 “blue”), a much less expensive process than the production of “green” hydrogen produced from the electrolysis of water.
The promotion of the development of a hydrogen production sector as a form of energy in Quebec is therefore linked to the way in which we envision the energy transition here and elsewhere. […]
To put it succinctly, hydrogen is one of those solutions that rely on the one hand on the conservation of current ways of producing, acting and consuming and, on the other hand, on the mobilization of institutions and practices. dominant economic forces, the very ones that are the driving forces of fossil capitalism, primarily responsible for the ongoing climate catastrophe. The main promoters of the hydrogen sector on a global scale are in fact the large companies in the fossil fuel sector, for three reasons.
First, the production of hydrogen is compatible with the continued extraction of gas fields. Even if in Quebec, we can claim to produce hydrogen that is greener than green thanks to our hydroelectricity, it would be naive to believe that our public and private investments to develop this sector will be done in a vacuum. On the contrary, they are situated in a much broader conjuncture, where players who favor fossil hydrogen predominate. […].
Secondly, the development of the hydrogen sector makes it possible to save existing fossil assets insofar as it requires the mobilization of existing infrastructures for storage, transport (pipelines, tankers) and sometimes even the combustion of fossil fuels.
Thirdly, and here the argument is decisive, the massive adoption of hydrogen would make it possible to perpetuate the metabolism of societies built around the combustion of fossil energies by quite simply transforming the nature of the fuel which would be burned. It is a chemical substitution that gives us the (false) hope that everything can change in terms of GHG emissions, without anything really changing.
Indeed, the replacement of natural gas, fuel oil and coal in high-temperature industrial processes (steel and cement manufacturing in particular) will make it possible to perpetuate economic growth based on the overconsumption of metals as well as the overproduction of cement. “Carbon-neutral” synthetic fuels based on hydrogen will help save the private automobile and its traffic jams, as well as heavy trucking, which is essentially used to ensure rapid traffic — just in time —, which makes it possible to tie overproduction to the overconsumption of goods. The machinery will find there an efficient fuel necessary for the continuation of the mining extraction boom which feeds in critical metals a transition by “green growth”.
In short, it is the world that fossil capitalism helped shape in its image in the 20e century that hydrogen claims to be able to save… while saving the assets, economic power and business model of the Shell, BP, Exxon and Suncor of this world. And too bad for the planet.
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