Miracle Hydrogen Fuel Can Actually Make Climate Change Worse

tech.hindustantimes.com:

A world desperate for a climate-friendly fuel is pinning its hopes on hydrogen, seeing it as a way to power factories, buildings, ships and planes without pumping carbon dioxide into the sky.

But now scientists are warning that hydrogen leaked into the atmosphere can contribute to climate change much like carbon. Depending on how it’s made, distributed and used, it could even make warming worse over the next few decades, even if carbon poses the bigger long-term threat. Any future hydrogen-based economy, they say, must be designed from the start to keep leaks of the gas to a minimum, or it risks adding to the very problem it’s supposed to solve. Some ideas now being tested, like shipping hydrogen in pipelines built to hold natural gas or burning it in individual homes, could cause an unacceptable level of leaks.

“The potency is a lot stronger than people realize,” said Ilissa Ocko, a climate scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund, a non-profit group. “We’re putting this on everyone’s radar now not to say ‘no’ to hydrogen but to think about how we deploy it.”

Hydrogen doesn’t trap heat directly, the way CO₂ does. Instead, when leaked it sets off a series of chemical reactions that warm the air, acting as an indirect greenhouse gas. And though it cycles out of the atmosphere far faster than carbon dioxide, which lingers for centuries, it can do more damage than CO₂ in the short term. Over 20 years, it has 33 times the global warming potential of an equal amount of carbon dioxide, according to a recent UK government report. Over hundreds of years, carbon is more dangerous, due to its longevity.

Hydrogen’s warming potential was never a problem before, as its use was largely limited to oil refineries and chemical or