Tangled Up in Blue - Air Products' Plan to Make Hydrogen So Blue It's Almost Green

RBN Energy Blogcast

None of us knows with any certainty how big a role hydrogen will ultimately play in helping the U.S. and the rest of the world decarbonize. Sure, some true believers are convinced H2 is the next big thing, but even they must acknowledge the economic and other challenges associated with scaling up the production of “green” or “blue” hydrogen. Do we really want to devote the energy from thousands of wind turbines or many square miles of solar panels to produce relatively small volumes of green H2 from water via electrolysis? And is blue hydrogen — produced by breaking natural gas into hydrogen and carbon dioxide, then capturing and sequestering the CO2 — really a solution considering efficiency losses and the fact that only about 50% of the CO2 from steam methane reforming (SMR) units is actually snared? Which brings us to Air Products & Chemicals’ newly announced final investment decision (FID) on a $4.5 billion complex in Louisiana that will use a proprietary process — and not SMR — to produce what you might call deep-blue hydrogen and capture and sequester 95% of the resulting CO2. In today’s RBN blog, we discuss the project and its implications.