Green hydrogen will likely remain “prohibitively expensive” for most industries, despite global efforts to boost the fuel as a climate solution, according to a new study.
The study, published Tuesday in the journal Joule, found that storing and transporting “green” hydrogen will keep costs high. As governments focus on bringing down the cost of producing the fuel, the “delivered price” will remain much higher, researchers said.
“We just added a dose of reality to this whole [hydrogen] world that has exploded,” said Roxana Shafiee, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Center for the Environment and a co-author of the study.
Most of the world’s hydrogen is made using fossil fuels. But many countries are betting on the growth of green hydrogen, which uses renewable electricity in the energy-intensive process that splits hydrogen molecules from water.