Why hydrogen is no route to renewables

The Ergosphere:

"Why hydrogen is no route to renewables

All the attention in the nation appears to be on hydrogen as the ideal medium for energy in a renewable economy. It has a lot going for it, in particular the fact that it can be produced from nothing more than water and energy. But this comes at a high (and hidden) price, especially for production from renewable energy; it is far from obvious that the use of hydrogen is worth the additional costs. The consequence is that we should downgrade hydrogen research, and cease deployment efforts immediately.

Hydrogen is certainly a wonderful molecule. It's the lightest element and has a very high energy/mass ratio. It's also the foundation of many chemical synthesis processes, both artificial and natural; when plants make sugar, they begin by splitting a water molecule to make hydrogen. There are even some ways to persuade plants to yield hydrogen directly. And when hydrogen is required, nothing else will do. You need hydrogen to make ammonia (for nitrogen fertilizer) or synthesize hydrocarbons.

We can learn a lot from plants (biomimicry has yielded a lot of good concepts), but there are limits to how far this can go and still be useful. It's one thing to borrow inventions and techniques from nature when they are well-suited to the task at hand, and quite another thing to cut the engineering problem to fit the Procrustean bed of a biological prototype. I intend to show that the 'hydrogen economy', and particularly the hydrogen fuel-cell car, is a poor way to accomplish this."...

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