What Is the Future for Blue and Green Hydrogen?

August 8, 2022--Written by Paul Wiseman for Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--Over the last few weeks, we've looked into the hydrogen economy and its four main objectives for using hydrogen as fuel: transportation, grid power generation, industry, and home/office heating and cooling. To this point, only a small fraction of hydrogen--of any color--is used directly for energy. The vast majority goes toward making ammonia for such uses as fertilizer, or toward making methane, smelting iron and steel, refining petroleum, and other industrial uses.

And most of all that hydrogen--estimates center around 96%--comes from natural gas, in a process known as natural gas reformation/gasification. In this process, natural gas (CH4) reacts with high-temperature steam to separate the four parts hydrogen from the one part carbon. This is the cheapest and most efficient method, but it releases carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide in the process--exactly what the environmental, social and governance (ESG) movement is working to eliminate.