Mike Barnard wrote a great piece yesterday on the hydrogen folly. As I was going through it, and building on months (or years) of reading, listening, and thoughts on this topic, I just decided that a few things could and should be put very bluntly in another short article on this topic.

Just note that these skip the whole efficiency problem, which is an underlying reason for why hydrogen isn’t sensible on a physics of economics level.

Money Grab

First of all, it’s a big money grab, as far as I can tell. Hype about hydrogen, and an idyllic hydrogen economy, and green hydrogen fields forever may seem harmless on the surface. But the hype turns into something — generous subsidies from governments around the world. The hype, combined with oil & gas lobbying, leads to a billion dollars here and another billion there to subsidize hydrogen projects. Who benefits? A lot of oil & gas companies and some small-scale enablers. Does society benefit? No, not really. In fact, if those hundreds of billions of dollars went to deployment of solar power, wind power, and electric vehicles, it could go much further in cutting […]