The Bauer Et Al “Blue” Hydrogen LCA Paper Isn’t Useful In The Real World (Part 1 of 2)
As hydrogen hype is ramping up again, this time very clearly due to the fossil fuel industry putting its very large, well-funded thumb on the scales of public perception and policy-making, a pair of academic papers on the climate merits of “blue” hydrogen have been published recently. The first was by Howarth and Jacobson, and found that “blue” hydrogen had full lifecycle emissions that made it a non-starter as a climate solution. The second, by a host of authors — 16 of them, which is an unusually large number for an academic paper in this field, and more in keeping with a pile-on letter with signatories — finds that “blue” hydrogen can be a good low-carbon addition to the solution set.
The Howarth, Jacobson, et al paper will be assessed in a separate article, but this pair of pieces will assess the merits of the hyper-authored paper favoring “blue” hydrogen, On the climate impacts of blue hydrogen production, in the journal ChemRxiv. Note that this journal is in the same vein as other journals appearing at present, in that it publishes non-peer reviewed material, a very acceptable practice for important fields with long peer-review cycles but one that comes with a proviso.
“These are preliminary reports which have not been peer-reviewed. They should not be regarded as conclusive, guide clinical practice/health related behaviour, or be reported in news media as established information.”
As such, this article is an assessment of something that is very early in the review cycle, and some comments may become stale as the paper moves through to final publication. As a non-peer reviewed early publication journal, it doesn’t have an impact factor. By comparison, the Howarth Jacobson paper is peer-reviewed and published in Wiley’s open access journal Energy Science & Engineering, which has an impact factor of 4.07. This is not in any way dismiss the paper, but to acknowledge that it is somewhat less reliable by this measure at this time. I refer to papers in similar early publication journals regularly, most notably Cornell’s arXiv on machine learning, where peer review cycles can take two years.
The paper appears to have been in the works for a while with a subset of the authors, then the Howarth and Jacobson paper was published, and this paper was rushed to early publication in reaction, presumably with the addition of authors who wanted to make their disagreement with Jacobson known as well. This is reminiscent of the 20 author critique of Jacobson et al’s 2015 published study on 100% renewables by 2050 for the USA, a critique I found without particular merit, but in this case the publication is parallel to Jacobson’s, not directly critiquing it. My observation at the time was that everyone was agreeing that up to 80% was fully achievable with renewables, but that the last 20% would be too hard or expensive. My further observation is that last 20% is now often the last 10% according to many. I suspect Jacobson will be proven right, and further that his vision is by far the fastest and cheapest one to get electricity decarbonized by 80% t0 90%, so if other technologies prove necessary for the last bit, they can wait.
That the authors are reacting to the Howarth-Jacobson paper is clear from the abstract by the way, where they say “However, recent research raises questions about the effective climate impacts of blue hydrogen from a life cycle perspective.” This is not to denigrate the authors. Like the authors of the previous critique, they have a different belief about what will be necessary to decarbonize the world, and so this is, in my opinion, something of a tempest in a teapot. Except that it isn’t. The credibility of “blue” hydrogen is essential for the fossil fuel industry to maintain its current level of policy and opinion pressure for adoption of fossil-fuel sourced hydrogen in a much larger way than any current use of the molecule.
And so, to the contents of the paper. The approach to this will be to quote key elements from the paper and respond to them.
“Hydrogen is foreseen to be an important energy vector in (and after) the transition to net-zero Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emission economies.”
This is an overstatement at best. Hydrogen as an energy vector is being promoted heavily by the fossil fuel industry, but fails multiple tests associated with economics, efficiency and effectiveness after decades of attempts. Hydrogen will be required as a chemical feedstock in industry, but is unlikely to be widely used in transportation, storage or heating. There are much better alternatives for the vast majority of use cases.
For those who missed it, I recently published a three part series with a contrarian but I think more accurate perspective on the future of hydrogen demand, one which saw global hydrogen demand falling, not rising. This is version 1.0 and intended to provide the basis for a fuller discussion. And to be clear, it’s a singular non-academic analyst’s perspective and in no way peer reviewed or intended to be peer reviewed, much like Liebreich’s excellent and useful hydrogen ladder. There are large error bars and it’s an opinion, not a prediction. But it is an opinion based on what is necessary across multiple domains for us to actually take action on climate, the laws of thermodynamics and basic economics. My perspective that hydrogen demand will be falling is a large part of the reason I don’t think that “blue” hydrogen is even necessary. Perpetuating and expensively remediating the significant negative externalities of the fossil fuel industry isn’t required to nearly the degree that the fossil fuel industry is trying to convince people it is.
If an updated version of the paper is produced that the authors might make this a more accurate statement, but note that it is not the direct point of the paper. It is, however, indicative of their assumptions, something which becomes clearer and clearer through the paper.
“The reductions in carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2-eq.) emissions per unit of hydrogen production were in the order of 50-85% when compared to standard NG-based hydrogen production without CCS”
There are two concerns with it. The first is that the goal cannot be 50% or even 85%. The goal is 100%. In connection with the expectation of a very large role for hydrogen in energy, 50–85% simply perpetuates the damage of climate change.
Later in the paper, the authors find that in the best cases with high monitoring and maintenance, it can exceed 90%. Further, they say that technologies that are in prototype today but not scaled could achieve 100%. It’s important to recognize that the authors make it clear that only in the best case scenarios with the absolute best practices and technology that is currently unproven will “blue” hydrogen be compatible with climate change requirements.
Magnitude of challenge vs tiny scale of CO2 use today by author
The second concerns CCS. Having reviewed all major CCS implementations and most proposed technologies, publishing regularly on the subject for several years, there is no way that CCS can or will scale to the magnitude of the emissions. At present, the total global CCUS market is 230 million tons of CO2 annually. 90 million tons of that is for enhanced oil recovery, and as the CO2 being ‘sequestered’ is first pumped from underground where it was already sequestered, is strongly negative for climate change. Meanwhile, the current scale of annual emissions is in the 40 billion tons range, and the total excess atmospheric CO2 is over a thousand billion tons. In order to stabilize the climate, we have to get to net zero and start drawing down the thousand billion tons.
This concludes the first half of the assessment of the “blue” hydrogen life-cycle assessment. As a reminder, this is non-peer reviewed draft apparently rushed to publication, and so comments in this article may not reflect the final published version of the paper. That said, given the assumptions and provenance, it’s unlikely to be substantially altered unless other reviewers find substantive errors in the modeling. I don’t dispute the LCA work that the authors have done, but am merely pointing out that their arguments about “blue” hydrogen’s value have little merit in the actual world we inhabit.
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Hyundai Motors is recalling 145,235 EVs and other “electrified” vehicles in the US, citing concerns about a loss of driving power, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said on Friday.
The NHTSA announced this morning that the recall affects selected IONIQ 5 and IONIQ 6 EVs, as well as certain luxury Genesis models, including the GV60, GV70, and G80 electrified variants, from the 2022-2025 model years, Reuters reported.
It looks like the issue stems from “the integrated charging control units in these vehicles, which may become damaged and fail to charge the 12-volt battery. This malfunction could lead to a complete loss of drive power, posing safety risks for drivers,” the NHTSA stated.
If you’re an owner of one of these Hyundai models dating 2022-2025, stay tuned. Hyundai has not yet provided a timeline as to when affected vehicles will be repaired.
To make that happen, the company’s dealers will inspect and replace the charging unit and its fuse if necessary, NHTSA said. Free of charge, of course.
Importantly, no crashes, injuries, fatalities, or fires due to this issue have been reported in the US, Hyundai reported.
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Tesla announced that ‘Actually Smart Summon,’ its autonomous driving feature that enables moving its vehicles without anyone inside over short distances, is now being launched in Europe and the Middle East.
The automaker’s Full Self-Driving suite of features has been limited in those markets due to regulations and Tesla’s focus on making them work in North America first.
Actually Smart Summon is the vision-only version of Tesla’s “smart summon” feature, which was released years ago on Tesla vehicles with ultrasonic sensors.
When Tesla transitioned away from ultrasonic sensors, Smart Summon was one of the missing features that Tesla had yet to adapt to the vision-only (cameras and neural nets) system.
CEO Elon Musk said that it would be coming in 2022, but it finally came only a few months ago, in 2024.
However, that’s only in North America where Tesla focuses its Full Self-Driving (FSD) development, the feature package that includes Actually Smart Summon, also referred to as ‘ASS’.
Most of Tesla’s other markets, including Europe, don’t have the same capabilities under the Full Self-Driving package. That’s partly due to regulations, but Tesla also focuses on making the features work on North American roads first.
Now, Tesla has announced that its Actually Smart Summon feature is launching in Europe and the Middle East:
The feature can only be used on private roads, like parking lots and driveways. Most people have used it to bring their vehicles parked in a large parking lot to them as they exit a store or restaurant. However, the vehicle moves quite slowly under the feature and the owner needs to keep an eye on it at all time and be ready to cancel the summon as Tesla doesn’t take any responsibility for accidents caused by using Actually Smart Summon., like all other FSD features.
Therefore, most people I know who have the feature, myself included, tried once or try to see or impress some friends who have never seen a car move without anyone inside and then stopped using it.
The feature’s main useful use-case is for people with extremely tight parking spots. It enables them to exit the vehicle before it is in its final parking spot and then move the car in and out remotely.
However, that has been the case for years with the regular Smart Summon, as you generally don’t need the vehicle to handle complex parking lots. You mostly need it to move a few feet forward or backward.
But a recent update has broken this feature for some people. We recently reported on a very unfortunate situation that resulted in a Tesla owner having to get out of his car through his trunk.
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US Automakers are planning to ask Mr. Trump to retain President Biden’s EPA exhaust rules, in the face of signs that Mr. Trump might try to reverse them. If the rules are reversed, it would cost Americans hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of deaths per year.
Interestingly, this is the opposite of what big auto did the last time a reality TV show came to the White House – signaling that they have perhaps learned their lesson this time ’round.
First, some history.
In the middle of the 20th century, the effects of human activity on the atmosphere became readily apparent. Certain cities – with Los Angeles among the forefront – were choked by smog, and it was soon found out that vehicle pollution was the primary reason for this smog.
Since Los Angeles was one of the most smog-choked cities, California led the way on clean air regulation, creating the California Air Resources Board in 1967 (under then-Governor Ronald Reagan).
The federal government gave California special dispensation to set stricter regulations than the rest of the country, in recognition that it had a unique smog problem in its primary metropolis. California has retained this dispensation, in the form of a “waiver,” since then. And other states can follow California’s rules, but only if they copy all of the rules exactly.
Thus, there have been two separate sets of clean air regulation in this country since then – the federal rules, and then the “CARB states” which follow California’s rules.
In 2012 that finally changed, when President Obama’s EPA negotiated with California to finally harmonize these standards and also implement higher fuel efficiency nationwide. This would have been a huge boon for both industry and consumers, saving money and giving regulatory certainty to the auto industry.
But then, in 2016, the candidate who got the 2nd most votes in the presidential election was headed for the White House. And automakers responded by immediately lobbying to torpedo these standards, even before inauguration.
Now, you might think that asking a profoundly ignorant individual, who ended up staffing the EPA with bought-and-sold science deniers (huh, that would never happen again would it?), to change rules which had already been set through years of negotiation and lobbying was not a great idea. And you’d be right.
Not long after automakers had the dumb idea to ask an idiot to fix something that wasn’t broken, that idiot went and broke things further, fracturing the agreement between California and the federal government and ensuring less regulatory certainty for automakers.
After realizing their blunder (which they could have avoided by, y’know, thinking at all about it beforehand), big auto relented and asked the government to please not implement the rollbacks automakers had asked for. Some companies even forged their own agreement with California.
But it was too late, and we are now back in the era of disparate regulatory regimes – something which John Bozzella, head of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation (formerly called Global Automakers), keeps complaining about these days, despite having lobbied for exactly this in the first place.
The US EPA and California are still not fully harmonized, but both released recent new standards which do have somewhat similar targets. If a manufacturer builds towards one set of rules, they’ll probably not be too far off from meeting the other.
So in the end, we did get better emissions regulations and California has continued to push forward with clean air regulations, thus signaling a failure on the part of Mr. Trump to cause the long term harm to Americans that he and his oil industry solicitors so desperately seem to desire.
The most recent EPA standards, finalized in March (after being softened at the auto industry’s request), do not mandate any particular powertrain, but rather require steep emissions cuts – and EVs are the easiest way to achieve lower emissions.
Notably, Tesla lobbied in favor of making this last set of standards stronger, and they also lobbied against ruining the Obama/CA standards in 2016 – being one of very few automakers who were on the correct side of that discussion.
Despite that the President Biden EPA’s rules do not mandate any particular powertrain, Mr. Trump, in his usual ignorance, has said that he will end the nonexistent EV mandate. And now that he has received more votes than his opponent for the first time (after three tries, and despite committing treason in 2021 for which there is a clear legal remedy), it looks like the upcoming EPA might be directed to end these emissions cuts and fuel/health cost savings for Americans.
But in this instance, it sounds like the automakers might actually do the right thing for once, and ask the government not to do any rollbacks, and instead let them continue on with the plans without disruption from a convicted felon who seems determined to cede a US EV manufacturing boom back to China.
Detroit’s Big Three automakers – GM, Ford and Stellantis – are all reportedly trying to figure out how to ensure that these rules stay in place. The mentality is that constantly changing regulations are not beneficial for companies – particularly in the auto realm, where models take on the order of 7 years to plan and execute. Long-term planning is important for the hundreds of billions in manufacturing investment that EVs have attracted in the US during Biden’s EV push.
These attitudes are notable, given that this is not what automakers did in 2016/2017. That time, they compulsively pushed for fewer regulations, and now they are asking for regulations to remain in place.
It’s further notable that Tesla CEO Elon Musk, whose company lobbied strongly in favor of emissions cuts and makes more use of the federal EV tax credit than any other company, is now allied with the very entity that’s looking to harm EVs. It seems that we have entered opposite world.
So it remains to be seen where we will go from here – on the one hand, doctors, nurses, scientists, environmental groups, many businesses, people who recognize that they have lungs which they would like to continue using, and so on, generally support the strongest regulation possible. Now, automakers have been added to the pile asking for strong regulations.
On the other hand, a former reality TV host – tagged along with by the CEO of the company that has sold more electric cars than any other – seem determined to kill electric cars, despite the harm that would cause to Americans’ pocketbooks and health insurance premiums. And that famously vindictive character may be even more spurred towards this harmful course of action after failing in his efforts the first time.
Who ya got?
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