It is, like all hydrogen rhetoric, a fossil fuel promotion scheme.
In my entire adult life, people have been chasing after electrolyzers that can operate as cheaply as fossil fuel reformers (which still, in 2024, dominate the filthy hydrogen industry) and all efforts have failed.
The chief "benefit" of electrolyzers is marketing by the "bait and switch" fossil fuel promoters who want to greenwash fossil fuels as hydrogen.
The reality is real enough, as published in a recent scientific publication in a prominent journal:
Subsidizing Grid-Based Electrolytic Hydrogen Will Increase Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Coal Dominated Power Systems Liqun Peng, Yang Guo, Shangwei Liu, Gang He, and Denise L. Mauzerall Environmental Science & Technology 2024 58 (12), 5187-5195
The text is clear enough.
From the introductory text:
... Currently, nearly all hydrogen in China is either produced directly from fossil fuels (55% from coal gasification and 14% from steam methane reforming (SMR)) or as a byproduct of petroleum refining (28%), with only 1% coming from water electrolysis. (2) Producing 1 kg of coal- or SMR-based hydrogen emits roughly 19 and 10 kg of CO2, respectively. (3) In 2020, hydrogen production from fossil fuels in China emitted ∼322Tg of CO2, equivalent to 25% of total CO2 emissions from industrial processes, a number expected to rise with increasing hydrogen demand. (4) Industrial processes include production of nonmetallic mineral products, chemical, and metal products, as well as production and consumption of halocarbons and sulfur hexafluoride. (4)
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The bold, italics and underlining is mine.
EST: Chinese Hydrogen Production Is Making Climate Change Worse.
China leads the world in carbon emissions (albeit not on a per capita basis, that dubious distinction belongs to the US) and 25% of the industrial emissions in that country are from the production of hydrogen, which is dishonestly being represented as "green" whereas it is actually filthy, filthy, filthy.
Of course there is a reason that electrolysis remains a trivial contributor to hydrogen production: Electrolyzers thermodynamically inefficient and waste huge amounts of electrical energy, further degrading the already thermodynamically degraded form that electricity represents. Since in China, electricity remains a very dirty product, although they're leading the world in going nuclear against climate change, electrolyzers drive climate change. Electrolyzers expensive, unreliable, suffer from hysteresis, corrosion, and produce problematic side products.
Again their chief value is to allow for fossil fuel salespeople and sales bots to further their contempt for the environment by joining in greenwashing fossil fuels along with the liars talking about sequestration. (Yesterday, we had a case here where a fossil fuel salesperson started to talk about Alberta where both fossil fuel greenwashing scams operated simultaneously, sequestration and hydrogen.)
A better term for them would be electroLIARs.
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