How Clean Is Hydrogen? Platts, Others Seek to Give Fuel a Score

(Bloomberg) -- The hydrogen economy could soon get a scorecard, a way to measure just how climate-friendly the fuel really is. 

And the results could shape markets worldwide.

S&P Global Platts, the energy and commodities pricing service, has teamed up with a national lab and a nonprofit research group to create a tool for measuring the carbon intensity of different sources of hydrogen, showing the global-warming impact of each. The tool, a version of which could be ready in 18 months, won’t just look at how the hydrogen is made — whether it’s stripped from water or natural gas, and which energy source is used to power its production. Instead, it will evaluate individual hydrogen production plants, giving each facility a score it can show to customers and investors. That’s the plan, at least, for what participants are calling the Open Hydrogen Initiative, or OHI.

“It’s our strong belief that hydrogen will be a key fuel in the future,” Jonty Rushforth, senior director of energy transition pricing at Platts, said in an interview. “If hydrogen is a fuel that would be used primarily because of its environmental attributes, it’s absolutely crucial from a market perspective that those attributes are known and agreed upon across the market.”

Platts, research organization GTI and the National Energy Technology Laboratory plan to consult with hydrogen production companies, financial institutions, utility companies and others to devise the system. Creating such a system now, the partners say, can provide a crucial piece of groundwork for a future hydrogen economy, helping guide decisions by government officials and private investors worldwide.

“We don’t need five standards globally — we need one that’s effective,” said Paula Gant, GTI’s senior vice president of strategy and innovation.

While often touted as a clean fuel, hydrogen’s climate impact depends on how it’s made. So-called “green hydrogen” uses renewable power to split hydrogen from water, a process that produces no greenhouse gases. “Blue hydrogen” comes from natural gas, with carbon emissions captured and stored rather than vented into the atmosphere. There is an entire color wheel of methods — brown, pink, turquoise — useful for conversation but not for assessing real carbon intensity. 

Hence the need for a standard that hydrogen economy participants can agree upon and use. The OHI Initiative aims for its work and its finished product to be open-sourced, so anyone can see how it works and trust the results. 

“We’re doing this with the world watching, and they can see under the hood,” Gant said. 

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