Environment & Energy

...a filthy fuel.

None of this reality prevents the fossil fuel industry from posting slick advertisements here showing filthy hydrogen buses and similar toys.

I'm an old man, with decades spent in the scientific literature, and now, as was the case 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, 40 years ago, and 50 years ago, soothsaying about hydrogen someday becoming a clean fuel relies on tiresome rhetoric that was old at the turn of the century, and is 25 years older now. Hydrogen hype is always involved with not understanding the basic laws of science, in particular, the laws of thermodynamics.

I'm hardly a credulous creep confusing soothsaying with reality.

The reality is that hydrogen has never been, is not, and never will be a source of primary energy on this planet, and therefore, it is a scheme to waste energy, since the 2nd law of thermodynamics is not undermined by cheap slick marketing videos.

It follows from all of this, that anyone who is reporting on hydrogen devices now, as was the case 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, 40 years ago, and 50 years ago, is selling fossil fuels, and thus working to accelerate the ongoing destruction of the planetary atmosphere.

Electrolysis is a thermodynamic, economic and environmental nightmare and pretending that "Nature.com" is endorsing something because it publishes a paper merely demonstrates extreme scientific illiteracy, which is unsurprising, as marketing people, including those attempting to rebrand fossil fuels, have no interest in science as science, but instead make tortured "appeal to authority" arguments.

It's fucking stupid. PNAS once published a paper by the asshole Mark Z. Jacobsen saying that so called "renewable energy" could power the whole world. It also published a refutation of his tortured argument, causing the asshole to sue the same journal that published the refutation.

So called "renewable energy" remains a trivial, expensive and useless form of energy irrespective of bullshit from Mark Z. Jacobsen, and it is mainly used here as a fig leaf to obscure just how filthy Chinese hydrogen is.

The word "capacity" is particularly abused with respect to energy discussions, since the value of capacity is tied to its availability. So called "renewable energy" excluding hydroelectricity which is obtained by destroying river systems, is notoriously unreliable and exhibits low capacity utilization meaning that for approximately 70% of the time, wind and solar represent stranded assets that produce nothing but complacency and wishful thinking.

The results of complacency and wishful thinking are in: The planet is burning up.

It's 2025, forty-nine years after the first issue of the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy published its first issue in 1976. Hydrogen was a dirty product obtained by exergy destruction of dangerous fossil fuels in 1976, in 1985, in 1995, in 2005, in 2015, and remains as much in 2025. I do understand why the fossil fuel industry funds hydrogen hype. It protects their product, and in fact, helps increase sales of their product, since the production of hydrogen wastes energy.

Subsidizing Grid-Based Electrolytic Hydrogen Will Increase Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Coal Dominated Power Systems Liqun Peng, Yang Guo, Shangwei Liu, Gang He, and Denise L. Mauzerall Environmental Science & Technology 2024 58 (12), 5187-5195.

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The bold, italics and underlining is mine.

Bashing hydrogen under these conditions is a moral imperative, and frankly, as a scientist, I am proud to pile on this absurd filthy scam that is making things worse, not better.