The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Ask Peter Zeihan: Is Hydrogen the Future of Energy?

Episode Date: September 21, 2023

Is the hydrogen economy really the future? Or Is it all a farce? I don't want to get too far ahead of myself, but it's somewhere in between...Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/ask-peter-is-hydrogen-the-future-of-energy

Everyone, Peter Zion here coming to you from the foothills of the Colorado Front Range. This is the latest in our Ask Peter series, which was born of my flight delay in California a couple weeks ago. Anywho, the question today is about hydrogen. The hydrogen economy, is it where we're going? Is it a farce? Will it save us all? Is it somewhere in between? It's somewhere in between. The whole idea is that when you burn hydrogen, you do not produce any sort of carbon. So if you can move to a 100% hydrogen energy system, then the carbon question largely goes away. And on the back end, the math of that, the science of that is totally true, but that's the back end. There's the front end. Where do you get the hydrogen?

Now, the goal is a 100% clean system where you are using solar and wind and hydropower, maybe if you're an open-minded environmentalist, maybe some nuclear, to break apart water molecules. Now, all of you have drank a lot of water in your life, and it should come as no surprise that water is one of the most stable chemical materials we have on the planet. It's one oxygen, two hydrogen atoms. They really like each other. They stick together through thick and thin, and it's really hard to split them apart. So you have to inject a massive amount of energy into the system to do that. And since with wind and solar right now, even by the most aggressive estimates, we're going to be nowhere near 100% green by 20%.

by 2050, much less replacing things like the transport system by 2050, there's never, ever going to be enough electricity generated from these sources this century in order to then be able to produce hydrogen at scale. So the utopia goal is out of reach, at least for the moment. Let me go to the other side. The far side, the bottom, is fossil fuel-sourced hydrogen. Basically, you vaporize coal or you pluck the hydrogen off of a natural gas molecule. natural gas is a carbon atom with four hydrogens around it, but then you produce a lot of CO2 as a

byproduct. So you're basically producing hydrogen, you're just burning a fossil fuel before you get to the actual energy source. And once you take into account things like transport and building out a parallel system to use the hydrogen, it's actually more carbon intensive than what we're doing now. So the only people who are doing hydrogen in this way are folks who are doing it as a test bed to see what they can do with hydrogen, and that requires some volumes, which leads us to the bridge technology, potentially the middle step. And that is to take hydrogen from an ammonia molecule. Now, an ammonia molecule is a single atom of nitrogen surrounded by hydrogen molecules.

Unlike hydrogen, which is a gas that is wildly explosive and difficult to contain because the molecules are so strong, so you couldn't use the pipelines we use currently to move hydrogen at scale. You'd have to build new ones. And they'd be much more expensive and much more. more dangerous. Amalia has none of those problems. It can be compressed without making it explosive. If it does get out in the environment, it's not going to burn in the same way, if at all. And we already have a parallel system in the world to produce it at scale because nitrogen is one of the three main nutrients that we use in our fertilizers. Now there's some challenges

here because, you know, if you're going to use nitrogen at scale, that means it's competing with other industrial uses, and one of those uses is what keeps us all alive. So you're talking about a massive industrial buildout. And in many ways, that's the problem with hydrogen overall. If we're going to switch to hydrogen, you need to have a massive buildout for the consumption side of the equation, because what we do today with oil and natural gas and the rest, you can't just slap a patch on it. You need fundamentally new infrastructure, so you're talking tens of trillions of dollars.

second, the intermediate step to massively build out and basically double and triple the size of the nitrogen production that we have globally is something that would be incredibly expensive, take decades and trillions all by its own, and then you're telling industry, and by the way, you're just a transition step, and a few decades, we won't need any of this anyway. So it's a technology that is interesting, but this is not the same as me saying it's stupid. One of my big problems with the environmental movement is we have a series of technologies that we really know already are not appropriate to the problem. Anyone who puts up a wind turbine in a still area, you know, gets made fun of, but people can put up solar panels in places that don't see the sun for months and people think they're great.

You know, that's just dumb. The problem is we're spending trillions of dollars on technologies that are not applicable to the geographies that we're in, and a lot of them are very carbon-intensive to install in the first place, so it's really questionable whether we should be doing it at all. But that's not the same as saying we shouldn't try. What we need to do is just be smarter about it. We need to make some choices.

So in the case of hydrogen, what we have discovered through the experimentation so far is that if you take ammonia and you burn a little bit of it in a fossil fuel power plant, not only do you vastly reduce your emissions, you actually generate a little bit of extra energy, pays for itself in both components. We would have never found that out.

if we hadn't experimented. My problem is that we're not experimenting. We're installing at scale technologies that are at best unproven and at worst ones that we know won't work. So I am all four trillion dollars in materials research to find better technologies and materials so that we can do this smarter

and at a lower carbon cost and lower financial cost. Until we do that, we're wasting slim resources trying to solve a problem that we know won't get fixed by the path we're on. Anyway, that's my two cents. So hydrogen, interesting. Yeah, I want to see some people tinker with that. But it is definitely not ready for prime time.

All right, that's it.