Creating a Hydrogen Economy Defined By Trust, Transparency, and Better Carbon Data
The push to decarbonize global economies is gaining momentum, with hydrogen emerging as a key player for a lower carbon future. To bring this to fruition, the hydrogen market needs a solid foundation of trust and transparency in carbon intensity data.
Enter the Open Hydrogen Initiative (OHI). Earlier this year, OHI announced its new, open source toolkit for hydrogen life cycle analysis, a big step forward for hydrogen stakeholders and broader energy markets. Led by GTI Energy and S&P Global Commodity Insights, this first-of-a-kind toolkit, available to anyone, enables a standardized, data-driven approach to assess the carbon emissions of every commercially available hydrogen production technology, down to the facility-specific level. This is a big moment for clean hydrogen markets, as well as OHI’s many sponsors, partners, and observers.
During CERA Week, I sat down with one of OHI’s five foundational sponsors and key collaborators, EY. Chris Angelides, EY’s Energy Managing Director, and I discussed the prime opportunity for hydrogen in the U.S. and the role of accurate carbon data in differentiating a hydrogen product. You can watch the video here.
Little Molecule, Big Potential
Hydrogen is a little molecule with big potential. Many energy sources can produce hydrogen. Hydrogen can reduce greenhouse gas emissions from huge parts of the global economy, ranging from heat to electric power, to manufacturing and even agriculture. Many companies and governments are making hydrogen a major part of their plans to reduce emissions and mitigate climate change, for a simple reason. When hydrogen burns it produces heat and water vapor. Other hydrogen uses (like fuel cells) can produce electricity or industrial goods like steel in ways that avoid or reduce carbon emissions. Since it has no carbon footprint at the point of use, hydrogen’s greenhouse gas emissions — and its climate impact — occur entirely upstream, in the way it is produced, stored, and transported.
More Hydrogen, Less Carbon
Customers that want to use hydrogen to reduce their climate impact need to feel confident they are getting the climate benefits they are paying for. Governments need to be able to incentivize clean hydrogen without accidentally ramping up emissions-heavy production. Banks and investors that want to fund clean energy projects need to be certain that the resulting facilities will meet consumers’ requirements and be eligible for tax incentives that make the difference between profit and loss for the producer’s business model.
These kinds of assessments, comparisons, and decisions have long been a stiff technical challenge. In the absence of a standardized methodology, many institutions until now have relied on national averages to estimate the emissions associated with differing hydrogen sources. This approach misses huge variability and innovation in hydrogen production methods — at a time when policymakers are trying to incentivize and reward innovation. Hydrogen stakeholders need to be able to distinguish between supply chains that focus on producing lots of hydrogen at low cost, and those that invest in reducing emissions per unit of hydrogen.
Wider Range of Feedback, Better Toolkit
The OHI team worked hard to convene experts from industry, academia, NGO’s, and governments to be part of creating the first phase of the toolkit. A panel of eight academic experts, advised by 45 teams around the world, collaborated over the course of nearly two years to make it happen. As a result, the toolkit analyzes more than 270 different hydrogen production technologies and the systems they rely on, including hundreds of variables that affect emissions profiles. OHI initially invited industry partners to pilot the toolkit by analyzing 13 production facilities across two continents, an effort that resulted in practical, real-world feedback on the value of the toolkit.
This year, OHI embarks on a second phase that invites input from a wider pool of stakeholders — the general public. In early September, OHI will announce the kick-off of a 30-day public comment period for all users of the toolkit to use it and share feedback, flag issues or concerns, and make suggestions for how to improve it. As it is a publicly available, open source toolkit, it is our goal to continually evolve it to ensure it is a trustworthy and credible framework for enabling hydrogen market liftoff and growth. Collaboration and diverse input from hydrogen stakeholders all over the world will help us create a hydrogen economy defined by trust and transparency — driving real, global progress in mitigating the climate crisis.
I know I speak for the full OHI team when I commit us to maintaining a high standard for openness and transparency of carbon data to build the trust needed for investors, consumers, and policymakers to use the OHI toolkit to drive decisions that ensure that as the hydrogen economy grows, it really does deliver on the big potential of a small molecule.
