Hydrogen’s potential as a climate solution

Make Me Smart Oct 31, 2023 Transcript

Note: Marketplace podcasts are meant to be heard, with emphasis, tone and audio elements a transcript can’t capture. Transcripts are generated using a combination of automated software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting it.

Kai Ryssdal 

The amazing Jay Siebold will now begin the proceedings. I don’t know where that came from. Hey  everybody, I’m Kai Ryssdal, look Jay Siebold is amazing. I’m just saying it. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all.

Kimberly Adams 

And I’m Kimberly Adams, thank you for joining us everyone. It is Tuesday, October the 31st. Happy Halloween to those who celebrate. Me, not Kai.

Kai Ryssdal 

Well, thank you for the shade at the beginning of getting the program.

Kimberly Adams 

Oh yeah, it’s, it’s Halloween. It’s spooky. So gotta keep it shady. Anyway, today is our deep dive show and we are going to talk about another hopefully not so scary thing, a climate solution. It’s hydrogen, potentially one of the most abundant elements in the universe and produces no carbon emissions when it’s burned as fuel.

Kai Ryssdal 

The Biden administration, as you may know, if you’ve read in detail all those laws which I have not done, but there are producers on this podcast who do that for us and they tell us what’s in it. Anyway, the Biden administration is making huge investments in clean hydrogen. So we’re going to talk about that a little bit, some of the risks, some of the challenges, some of the opportunities. Here to make a smart about this is Emily Pontecorvo. She’s a staff writer at Heatmap News covering the transition to clean energy. Welcome to the show.

Emily Pontecorvo 

Hey, thanks so much for having me.

Kai Ryssdal 

So, I guess we have to go to the periodic table here. Why? What is clean hydrogen? And is there such a thing as dirty hydrogen?

Emily Pontecorvo 

Yes, so most of the hydrogen that we use today is dirty hydrogen. And we really don’t use it for that many things. The kind of two main uses for hydrogen, is in fertilizer production and in oil refining. But the hydrogen that we use in those processes, it comes from natural gas. And even though like you said, hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, it’s typically part of some other molecule like methane, gas, or water. And so you have to kind of wrench it off of that other molecule. And today, we get it all from natural gas in a process that releases carbon emissions.

Kai Ryssdal 

So how do we get clean hydrogen? What’s the difference? Does it just, we pull it out of the air, figuratively speaking?

Emily Pontecorvo 

Not quite. There’s, there’s kind of two main pathways to do this. One is to kind of keep going with this conventional route, getting it from natural gas, but we can capture the emissions that are produced in the process. And then the other pathway involves electricity and water. So water, H2O, you basically zap the molecule and you can separate the molecule and your only emissions are, you know, oxygen.

Kimberly Adams 

So like we said, at the top of the show, we have the Biden administration putting like $7 billion towards the development of these clean hydrogen hubs, what does that actually look like in practice?

Emily Pontecorvo 

Yeah, I think the word hub might bring to mind this, like very concentrated zone of activity. But the hubs are more like regional ecosystems, they many of them span multiple states. And they kind of have three main elements, there are hydrogen production facilities, there’s going to be different ways to transport the hydrogen. And then there’s also different kinds of customers who will ultimately use that hydrogen. Like I was saying earlier, we don’t really use a lot of hydrogen today, other than these kind of specific cases. And the stuff that we do use is dirty. So the hubs are sort of like these laboratories of innovation, where we’re going to test out these different cleaner ways to make hydrogen and then we’re also going to test out some new uses for it. Like using it in industrial facilities that require really high heat.

Kai Ryssdal 

What about cars, right? I mean, and the only reason I know anything about this is a much longer story than we’ve got time for. But for a lot of reasons, I had to go to a planning commission meeting in my town about eight or 10 years ago. And the agenda item before my agenda was a hydrogen refueling thing at the local gas station. And, I mean, I’ve lived in this town for a very long time, and I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of cars I’ve seen pull up to that hydrogen fueling stations. So can we do transportation with hydrogen? What else can we do that’s gonna make a difference?

Emily Pontecorvo 

Yeah, you know, this is this is one of the debates about hydrogen is what are we going to use it for? And I think You know, listeners might remember that for a long time, there was this conversation around hydrogen cars. And what we saw is that batteries kind of won that battle. They’re just cheaper and more efficient. And, you know, Tesla kind of won the day there. But we still might use it in other forms of transportation, like, you think about really heavy-duty trucks, long haul trucking, or airplanes or marine shipping big cargo ships, where batteries might play a role there. But for a lot of those, it might just, you know, it might be more efficient to use a fuel.

Kimberly Adams 

But I guess why can’t we use it more? If it is such a clean fuel?

Emily Pontecorvo 

Yeah, the thing is that it so it’s this sort of like flexible, like many people call it a Swiss Army knife of decarbonization, because it’s kind of like, you can just swap it in for fossil fuels and all these different uses. But the problem of thinking of it that way, is that it takes so much energy to make hydrogen, that you really only want to use it in cases where you don’t really have any other options. So you know, for instance, like we could use it to power a car, a sedan, or you could use it to burn in your boiler at home to produce heat. But there are other options that are cheaper and more efficient for those things like, you know, just like electric cars, and electric heat pumps. And so then you have these other parts of the economy where we just don’t really have those other solutions, like in a steel plant. We use coal today for these like chemical reactions that we need to produce steel, and hydrogen is one of the leading kind of options to replace that.

Kai Ryssdal 

Imagine a graph or a chart of renewable fuels. Right. And you got you got solar, you got wind, you’ve got, it’s not renewable. Don’t at me everybody, you got nuclear that’s got to be in there. Right, relatively speaking, what’s the size of the bar that represents hydrogen as opposed to like solar or wind?

Emily Pontecorvo 

Do you mean for like, way in the future?

Kai Ryssdal 

I mean, like today, because today, it’s like, bubkis. Right. So in 10 years, what’s it gonna be?

Emily Pontecorvo 

Gosh, I mean, I don’t know. I think I think that’s the main question we’re seeking to find out.

Kai Ryssdal 

That’s fair. I don’t know, is always a good answer. You know, totally.

Emily Pontecorvo 

I mean, you know, one of the things about this industry is that you have some people who think that we’ll use it for for so many different things, and other people who say, No, we need to use it in these various sort of precise ways. And so, you know, which, which of those theories will sort of win out. I think, is how we’ll answer that question.

Kimberly Adams 

There are I mean, not everyone loves the idea of using more hydrogen. And, you know, especially since we get so much of it from fossil fuels, I mean, what, how big is the pushback against this in terms of really integrating it into our, you know, clean energy future?

Emily Pontecorvo 

Yeah, it’s, you know, there’s really risks at every step of the way with hydrogen. And I think that’s why we have this pushback. It’s, you know, hydrogen itself in the greenhouse gas. So first of all, we just need to make sure we don’t leak it into the atmosphere. But as we talked about, there’s risks with how we make it and how kind of carbon intensive that process is, with how we use it, because it requires so much energy to produce. And, you know, there’s also like, if we’re making hydrogen from water and electricity, that’s a lot of water that will be required in that process. So I know that people out in the west in places like New Mexico are really worried about the water use from the process.

Kai Ryssdal 

Where is the United States globally? Well, let me let me ask a better question. What’s the global situation with this? Are there other countries or places where hydrogen is used more? Or are we globally just trying to figure out our way through this newish technology?

Emily Pontecorvo 

Yeah, the EU, the European Union and the United Kingdom have been a few steps ahead on this, they’ve kind of already been setting up demonstration plants using hydrogen in new ways and producing it in new ways. And in the European Union, they’ve actually already kind of gone through a process where they’ve created really defined rules around what clean hydrogen actually means, like, how do we know that this stuff is clean? And so I think right now, there’s a debate in the US about whether we want to kind of imitate those same rules and adapt them so that hydrogen kind of clean hydrogen means the same thing in different places.

Kimberly Adams 

Is all this investment from the Biden administration enough to really make this technology cost competitive?

Emily Pontecorvo 

It’s a hard question. I think right now you hear some energy companies that are starting to invest in hydrogen say they need more support. And they’re kind of asking for more relaxed rules around what clean hydrogen is, because they’re saying, you know, with very tough rules, they won’t be able to make it cost competitively. There’s other analyses from academics and from kind of environmental groups that find that, you know, these subsidies that we have today really are enough to make this competitive with with fossil fuels.

Kai Ryssdal 

So what’s the biggest drawback with hydrogen do you think?

Emily Pontecorvo 

Hmm, that’s a tough one. Because like I said, there’s sort of like, these risks at every step of the process. But at the end of the day, I, you know, it’s very clear, I think, to me, it’s very clear that we need a way to make clean hydrogen, if only just to decarbonize like, the processes that we already use it for today. Like, if you think about fertilizer, we’re gonna need to keep making fertilizer for years to come to feed a growing world. And if we can make enough clean hydrogen to decarbonize that process that will be, you know, a big step.

Kai Ryssdal

Right, Emily Pontecorvo is a staff writer at Heatmap News, where she covers and has clearly gone in depth on it, because I learned a bunch of stuff, the transition to clean energy, Emily, thanks a lot, really appreciate it.

Emily Pontecorvo 

Thank you.

Kai Ryssdal

Man, complicated.

Kimberly Adams 

It is, I actually even though I did my own story on this, this, this conversation kind of amplifies that. I still don’t know how I feel about this, at the end of all of it, you know, but I suppose there’s no perfect solution, but you end up needing a mix of everything.

Kai Ryssdal 

I think that’s a huge point. Actually, there is no perfect solution, right? It’s gonna take it’s gonna take a menu item, of a menu, or rather a menu, not just one item, of solutions to get us out of the jam that fossil fuels has gotten us to have gotten us into, you know.

Kimberly Adams 

And a menu, like just I’m trying to stick with this metaphor, a menu with a lot of different foods, and different portion sizes. And not all of them are the best nutritional value.

Kai Ryssdal 

I like that. No that makes sense. I’ll go with that. I’ll go with it.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah, yeah. Okay. Well, let us know what you think and your own metaphor for our climate solutions, or, specifically, what do you think of hydrogen as a climate solution? Or maybe if you are one of the few people who had one of those hydrogen cars, I’d love to hear how that went. Our number is 508-827-6278, also known as 508-U-B-SMART, or you can email us at makemesmart@marketplace.org. We will be right back.

Kai Ryssdal 

We’re back. You want to know why I’m chuckling? Well, you’re gonna have to check out your social because we’re going to put the video up there for Halloween. That’s all I’m saying.

Kimberly Adams 

Oh, yes. So I don’t know why, but my script is going crazy.

Kai Ryssdal 

We blank. So we’re just going to wing it and assume that we, As the trained audio professionals that we are, can muddle our way through this. So first of all, do some new news. What’s your news?

Kimberly Adams 

My news item is that CVS and Walgreens, it they are having yet another round of walkouts by their pharmacy staff. And this has been, you know, sort of the other labor story of the summer that I haven’t quite been able to kind of get my finger on. But it’s something that I think most of us have seen where the pharmacies are they have shorter hours, everything is kind of very sparse. But on the other hand, the you know, we’ve paid so much attention to sort of these labor unions and the UAW strikes and what big labor is doing, but not so much attention to these pharmacy strikes, because a lot of them are not unionized. They are very educated. And some of the stories that I’ve you know, done about this, there’s a very narrow pipeline, tons and tons of jobs. But on the other hand, it’s, it’s a really, it’s a grind for these folks. It’s really a grind, and they say that their companies are not staffing appropriately, the wages aren’t good, and that the companies need to improve working conditions. And this affects everybody, because if you have to go get a prescription, this makes it harder.

Kai Ryssdal 

Yeah, for sure. For sure. Okay, here’s mine. It’s a little bit of a recap, if you will, with a with a potentially tragic note at the end. Senator Tommy Tuberville, the senior senator from Alabama who listeners to this podcast will know has been blocking military promotions and advancement for about 300 general and flag officers for the past like four months now. He’s still doing it. And here’s one reason why it matters. The Commandant of the Marine Corps, General Eric Smith, who was confirmed about four weeks ago, maybe five. Finally, after after the Senate did some maneuvering. He had what appears to have been a heart attack two days ago. And while correlation is not causality, General Smith has been working two jobs because the Assistant Commandant of the Marine Corps, who does a a huge part of the leadership of that branch of the military is vacant, because Senator Tuberville has not deemed it appropriate to fill that slot. So now, the number three guy in headquarters Marine Corps is running the place while the number one guy recovers from what seems to have been a heart attack. And we just need to acknowledge that people are working extra hard because Senator Tuberville refuses to budge. That’s what I got.

Kimberly Adams 

They still haven’t found a way around that? They I thought there was something in progress to?

Kai Ryssdal 

They’re talking about another senatorial maneuver for Admiral Franchetti, who’s going to be the CNO. And the guy who’s going to replace the general who’s now the Chairman of Joint Chiefs, the Air Force guy whose name escapes me anyway, so yeah, there’s two more waiting, and then be behind them. There’s 300 more who actually for as important as the heads of the service are, right. It’s actually the ones in the two stars who actually get things done out in, oh, my god, I can’t believe I’m gonna say this, the battlespace? Sorry.

Kimberly Adams

Well, there’s so many of them. So all of these holdups are happening as we increase the number of I hesitate to use the word fronts because I know that we’re not like troops on the ground officially in many of these places, but we are engaged deeply engaged in multiple conflicts and everybody’s keeping an eye on Taiwan as well or trying to with strained resources. And we need these folks. Yeah.

Kai Ryssdal 

Yep. So generals General Smith is is recovering. The latest I know. Alright.

Kimberly Adams 

Alright, so that is it for the news. Let us move on to the mailbag.

Mailbag

Hi Kai and Kimberly. This is Godfrey from San Francisco. Jessie from Charleston, South Carolina. And I have a follow up question. It has me thinking and feeling a lot of things.

Kai Ryssdal 

Alright, so today was episode two of our climate solutions podcasts. The first one we did was on nuclear power and energy in the United States. We asked you what you thought. And here’s one of your responses.

Christopher

Hey, this is Christopher in Minneapolis, Minnesota. One thing I wish that had been discussed was nuclear waste and what happens to that? And what happens with the decommissioned nuclear plants? I feel like that’s going to be a big question. If we build all these plants and in 50, 80 years, they’re no longer producing. So thanks for making me smart.

Kai Ryssdal 

Yep, totally fair point.

Kimberly Adams 

Very good point, we should have asked about that. I wonder, and maybe we can get a follow up from our guest about, you know, as the technology has improved, has the solution for storage of nuclear waste improved? And obviously, there’s a history of that waste being stored in communities that didn’t have much say about where it went. But in terms of the decommissioned nuclear plants, I also wonder if there’s a way to bring those, like, it turned them into something else, because since as the guest was telling us a lot of these nuclear plants are smaller than they used to be. Maybe they do have either a longer lifespan or different uses. And but I get the older ones, you know, are problematic. Okay, let’s hear one more Tim called in to tell us about his recent vacation.

Tim

On my first vacation to place that Kimberley might be familiar with, St. Louis. I had a wonderful time went to the Arts Museum, the history museum, the Blues Museum, and I was walking down to the arch when I passed the economy Museum of the St. Louis Fed Yeah, buddy. So of course, I had to go in and hit the gold bar. Kimberly, I can’t believe you haven’t gotten Kai to go there. Thanks to my NMS marketplace listening. I knew what they were talking about they throughout acronyms like FOMC thanks always for making us smart.

Kai Ryssdal 

My work here is done. My work is done. That’s awesome.

Kimberly Adams 

I have to say I actually have not been to the economy Museum at the St. Louis Fed, but I’m going home for for Thanksgiving, maybe I should pop over on my vacation.

Kai Ryssdal 

Right. Before we go as we always do this week’s answer to the Make Me Smart question. What is something you thought you knew, but later found out you were wrong about Here you go.

Tim

This is Tim from Austin. What I thought I knew that was later wrong about all stems from the Tradle game, I did not know just how pervasive petroleum products are, as an export from countries both large and small. I always knew that certain countries and regions heavily relied on petroleum products for exports, places like the OPEC nations throughout Africa, South America, Russia, the US and so forth. The Bahamas, having refined petroleum as their number one export was something that very much surprised me to find out many of these smaller island nations have petroleum products as their primary export. Thanks for making me smarter through playing games.

Kai Ryssdal 

So here’s Yeah, interesting. Here’s the trick with Tradle, the thing you got to look at when you see so trade, I think we talked about this on the pod, right? Tradle was the game like Wordle except for trade, right? And they give you, they give you a country, they don’t tell you what the country is, but they give you its total exports. And then they break it down by sector. And the catch is, you got to look at total dollar value of exports. And that’ll tell you some clue as to where they are. So if it’s like a, you know, trillion dollar economy, and the biggest export is oil, well, then you’re looking at like Saudi Arabia or one of those guys. But if it’s a, you know, a $200 million economy or a $100 million economy and the biggest export is refined petroleum, well, then you start looking at the smaller ones. Yesterday was Turkmenistan, which is not a big economy but had petroleum gas as its biggest export. So that’s how I finally came up with that answer in three, by the way, for those of you who did Tradle yesterday, sorry, spoiler alert, also, sorry, spoiler alert.

Kimberly Adams 

I don’t think I would have gotten that in three. I wonder though, just because it’s cheaper to import import? Like I’m trying to think about why that is it because the oil rigs in the you know, Gulf of Mexico are looking for local refining in the area about the Bahamas and things I’m trying to understand this a little bit better.

Kai Ryssdal 

It’s about value added, right. If you get in crude oil, and you add value, remember it’s the dollar amount thing and trade off, you add value and then you can export the refined petroleum product, then that’s that’s your value add in the supply chain. I don’t know this specific refinery situation in Bahamas, but probably a lot of the pipelines somehow wind up and a lot of the tankers probably sign it somehow wind up going through they’re on their way to places outside the Gulf of Mexico, right? Because it’s you look at a map and that’s where it is outside the Gulf of Mexico.

Kimberly Adams 

Why don’t you like Halloween?

Kai Ryssdal 

I want to like be, well, so two things. And this, this goes back to when I was a little kid I was like four and we were living in England. And my mom dressed me up as a police officer an English Bobby and we went to a birthday party or so now must be the Halloween party, or whatever the hell they celebrate over there fancy dress party or whatever it was. And for whatever reason, it just turned me off the whole dress up thing, and I literally have not since then dressed up. So that’s the one thing. And then also there’s the scary part, which I think we’ve documented previously.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah, we’ve talked about that. Thank you. Are you handing out candy today?

Kai Ryssdal 

We are going I’ve told you about my brother in law, right? My brother-in-law is in the imagineering business. And so he does his house to the bleeping nines for Halloween. So every year, we just go over there and it makes it, it makes it easier on us and the kids love it. And you know, whatever. No, of course, now all the kids are grown. But yeah, so that’s where we’re going. And my brother in law’s and he to this day, he’s my age, which is to say, a very young man, very, very young man. He to this day, relishes Halloween and gives out candy to the kids, and it’s a great treat for him. So that’s good. I just go watch him. Have fun. And that’s it.

Kimberly Adams 

Oh, that’s sweet. There go. I want everyone to appreciate my commitment to the cause today, if you’re not listening, the costume sorry, if you’re not looking at this on social media later and you’re listening, the costume is Medusa. There’s a lot of fake snakes in my hair. And I put on snake nails, which they’re really long and they got little snakes on them and stuff like that and snake skin. And man I do not understand how people exist with nails this long in their everyday lives. Like I was trying to write a message in the Slack channel. I’m trying to use the pads of my fingers. I ended up using my knuckle too because I couldn’t actually write with these things. Wow. So

Kai Ryssdal 

Wow. Commitment to the cause. Commitment to the cause.

Kimberly Adams 

Commitment to the cause. Anyway, if you are committed to the cause of answering our Make Me Smart question, which you should be because it’s a lot of fun. Why not? Let us know what is something you thought you knew but later found out you’re wrong about? Or if you want to recommend somebody who you think should come on the show and answer the question because you know, they may be cool. Our number is 508-827-6278 also known as 508-U-B-SMART.

Kai Ryssdal 

Make Me Smart is produced by Courtney Bergsieker. Ellen Rolfes writes our newsletter, today’s program, I started early sorry today’s program was engineered by Jay Siebold. The fade threw me off Jay, Bekah Wineman is gonna mix it down later. Niloufar Shahbandi is gonna mix it down later.

Kimberly Adams 

Maybe Bekah will fix it. Ben Tolliday and Daniel Ramirez composed our theme music. Our senior producer is Marissa Cabrera. Bridget Bodnar is the director of podcasts. And Francesca Levy is the executive director of Digital. Marketplace’s Vice President and General Manager is Neal Scarbrough.

Kai Ryssdal 

So are you going to parties tonight is that the deal? Are you just bopping around?

Kimberly Adams 

A single party just, one party and I will also walk around looking like this, yes.