Could ‘white hydrogen’ change everything for shipping – and everybody else?

EVERY now and then, you come across something that sounds too good to be true. And generally speaking, of course, it turns out to be just that.

So when I saw an article in The Telegraph that suggests “white hydrogen” could completely change the whole energy scene with potentially centuries of relatively cheap-to-extract, carbon-free fuel, I almost did not go beyond the headline.

The introduction left me half-sceptical, half-intrigued. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes: “Every few years a disruptive technology comes out of left field and entirely changes the future of the global energy system, smashing into our consciousness like a thunderclap.”

My initial reaction: “Oh, really?”

I glanced at the date of the article, to make sure I had not inadvertently wandered into the newspaper’s archives and ended up in an old Apr 1 edition. Having eliminated the possibility of an April Fool’s prank, I was drawn into reading the piece.

Evans-Pritchard refers to a recent “exuberant rush” for white hydrogen. He says: “We are suddenly waking up to the very real possibility that vast reserves of natural hydrogen lie under our feet, and can plausibly be extracted at costs that blow away the competition, ultimately undercutting methane on pure price.”

GET BT IN YOUR INBOX DAILY

Start and end each day with the latest news stories and analyses delivered straight to your inbox.

Sign UpVIEW ALL

I freely confess that this “exuberant rush” had entirely passed me by, to the extent I felt it necessary to look up white hydrogen. I was of course aware that colours are increasingly being used to indicate the environmental credentials of fuel, especially green fuel. But white hydrogen?

I consulted the UK’s National Grid website, which advised: “White hydrogen is a naturally occurring, geological hydrogen found in underground deposits and created through fracking. There are no strategies to exploit this hydrogen at present.” This translates as “an interesting oddity not to be taken seriously, please move on”.

That response needs to be seen in the context of British Nimby-ism – short for “not in my backyard”.

Using the term fracking – referring to the explosive fracturing of deep underground layers of sediments – in the context of a new resource is a kiss of death. While the US has regained energy self-sufficiency in liquefied natural gas through fracking, the one experimental fracking borehole in the UK is likely to have concrete poured down it sometime soon, to the glee of local politicians and the green lobby.

Interestingly, the US Geological Survey (USGS) has a rather different view. In April, it published a paper that sparked the “exuberant rush” which I had completely missed. The paper reads: “A previously overlooked, potential geologic source of energy could increase the renewability and lower the carbon footprint of our nation’s energy portfolio: natural hydrogen.”

It also notes: “Although its primary use as an energy source today is in rocket fuel, hydrogen is expected to play an important role in future energy systems. It may offer a solution for reducing the carbon footprint of processes that cannot easily be electrified, such as long-distance flights and industrial heating.

“The catch is, the vast majority of hydrogen is manufactured using natural gas through a process that consumes energy and releases large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.”

As you would expect, the USGS paper was written by scientists, and so adopts a cautious tone and stresses there is much more exploratory work to be done.

USGS research geologist Geoffrey Ellis, assisted by Energy Resources Program colleague Sarah Gelman, developed a global resource model. Ellis is quoted in the USGS paper as saying: “Using a conservative range of input values, the model predicts a mean volume of hydrogen that could supply the projected global hydrogen demand for thousands of years.”

However, he also said: “We have to be very careful in interpreting this number, though. Based on what we know about the distribution of petroleum and other gases in the subsurface, most of this hydrogen is probably inaccessible.”

Nevertheless, according to the USGS paper: “The good news is, if even a small fraction of this estimated volume could be recovered, there would likely be enough hydrogen across all the global deposits to last for hundreds of years. Ellis is convinced that the amount of hydrogen in the Earth’s interior could potentially constitute a primary energy resource.”

So where does that leave us?

The first thing to say is that until economically viable commercial extraction has been proved to be possible and on a large scale, we are very much in a realm of hypothetical discussion with white hydrogen.

But that could change surprisingly quickly. Extraction and storage systems would not have to be very different from existing oil and gas technologies. The energy majors could rapidly get pilot projects underway, using what for them would be small change.

And what about the International Maritime Organization’s (IMO) decarbonisation strategy? Has it been torpedoed in the engine room? Probably not.

The good work that the IMO is undertaking right now needs to continue. And the proposed Fund and Reward bunker levy could make even more sense if it pushes ship operators towards increasingly affordable white hydrogen.

However, the potential arrival of a new relatively cheap, carbon-free marine fuel will make medium- and long-term planning more difficult, at least for a while.

It was almost inevitable that, with a wide range of alternative fuels and technologies being developed at great cost, some of that investment would be wasted. There would anyway have been winners and losers, perhaps even more so now.

Personally, as regular readers of this column will know, I have thought for some time that carbon capture would have a big part to play in taking shipping to net zero. I am beginning to wonder about that too now.