A few remarks in this post arising from an episode of Nate Hagen’s always interesting ‘Great Simplification’ podcast, in this instance with chemical engineer and hydrogen expert Paul Martin.
A key message I took from Martin’s remarks is that hydrogen has various important uses as an industrial chemical – principally for agricultural fertiliser – but is pretty much a non-starter as the currency of a future green industrial energy economy, for various reasons connected with its energetic, physical and chemical properties.
While hydrogen is being talked up as a potential solution for decarbonizing industry, in Martin’s view it’s less a decarbonization solution than a decarbonization problem , partly because of its climate forcing effects in the atmosphere and partly because almost all of it in human use is derived from fossil fuels. A lot of future hope is pinned on using low-carbon electricity to make ‘green’ hydrogen as the medium for various industrial and energetic processes, but Martin says it almost never makes sense to
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