Electrolytic (green) hydrogen

technology

Hydrogen made by splitting water with electricity rather than by reforming natural gas, and the most over-claimed and under-delivered technology in the transition — which does not make it unimportant, only badly targeted. The world already consumes something in the region of ninety to a hundred million tonnes of hydrogen a year, almost all of it made from unabated fossil fuels for ammonia fertiliser and oil refining, emitting several hundred million tonnes of carbon dioxide in the process. Replacing that existing demand is the clearest case for electrolysis and requires no new market. Beyond it, hydrogen is a good answer where nothing else works — direct reduction of iron, high-temperature process heat, possibly shipping fuel as an ammonia precursor — and a poor one where electricity works directly, because the round trip through electrolysis, compression or liquefaction, distribution and reconversion throws away most of the energy. The arithmetic that governs everything is that an electrolyser system consumes on the order of fifty kilowatt-hours of electricity per kilogram of hydrogen, whose lower heating value is about thirty-three kilowatt-hours; so the cost of hydrogen is mostly the cost of electricity, and cheap hydrogen means very cheap electricity running many hours a year. The 2023–2025 record was one of announcement followed by cancellation, with only a small minority of announced 2030 capacity reaching a final investment decision on the IEA's tracking. Not a place.

A technology is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.