Climate consequences of hydrogen emissions

Abstract

Abstract. Given the urgency to decarbonize global energy systems, governments and industry are moving ahead with efforts to increase deployment of hydrogen technologies, infrastructure, and applications at an unprecedented pace, including USD billions in national incentives and direct investments. While zero- and low-carbon hydrogen hold great promise to help solve some of the world's most pressing energy challenges, hydrogen is also an indirect greenhouse gas whose warming impact is both widely overlooked and underestimated. This is largely because hydrogen's atmospheric warming effects are short-lived – lasting only a couple decades – but standard methods for characterizing climate impacts of gases consider only the long-term effect from a one-time pulse of emissions. For gases whose impacts are short-lived, like hydrogen, this long-term framing masks a much stronger warming potency in the near to medium term. This is of concern because hydrogen is a small molecule known to easily leak into the atmosphere, and the total amount of emissions (e.g., leakage, venting, and purging) from existing hydrogen systems is unknown. Therefore, the effectiveness of hydrogen as a decarbonization strategy, especially over timescales of several decades, remains unclear. This paper evaluates the climate consequences of hydrogen emissions over all timescales by employing already published data to assess its potency as a climate forcer, evaluate the net warming impacts from replacing fossil fuel technologies with their clean hydrogen alternatives, and estimate temperature responses to projected levels of hydrogen demand. We use the standard global warming potential metric, given its acceptance to stakeholders, and incorporate newly published equations that more fully capture hydrogen's several indirect effects, but we consider the effects of constant rather than pulse emissions over multiple time horizons. We account for a plausible range of hydrogen emission rates and include methane emissions when hydrogen is produced via natural gas with carbon capture, usage, and storage (CCUS) (“blue” hydrogen) as opposed to renewables and water (“green” hydrogen). For the first time, we show the strong timescale dependence when evaluating the climate change mitigation potential of clean hydrogen alternatives, with the emission rate determining the scale of climate benefits or disbenefits. For example, green hydrogen applications with higher-end emission rates (10 %) may only cut climate impacts from fossil fuel technologies in half over the first 2 decades, which is far from the common perception that green hydrogen energy systems are climate neutral. However, over a 100-year period, climate impacts could be reduced by around 80 %. On the other hand, lower-end emissions (1 %) could yield limited impacts on the climate over all timescales. For blue hydrogen, associated methane emissions can make hydrogen applications worse for the climate than fossil fuel technologies for several decades if emissions are high for both gases; however, blue hydrogen yields climate benefits over a 100-year period. While more work is needed to evaluate the warming impact of hydrogen emissions for specific end-use cases and value-chain pathways, it is clear that hydrogen emissions matter for the climate and warrant further attention from scientists, industry, and governments. This is critical to informing where and how to deploy hydrogen effectively in the emerging decarbonized global economy.