, which requires firing furnaces up to many thousands of degrees. This is what Ilissa Ocko, a senior climate scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund, calls the “no regrets” category. Ideally, that hydrogen would be produced with electrolysis. That’s expensive, but it can be worth the cost to decarbonize really tough industries.
Others have a more wide-ranging vision that would involve using hydrogen to do things like power cars or heat homes. “This is an all-of-the-above fuel,” Manchin said last year at a conference touting plans to produce “clean” hydrogen from Appalachian natural gas. But critics argue hydrogen isn’t the most obvious candidate for those kinds of jobs. Increasingly cheap and powerful batteries and solar panels make electrifying homes and vehicles a more attractive option.
Ocko points to another problem: Even if hydrogen is produced in a clean way, it can still warm the planet. “Hydrogen is the tiniest molecule in existence,” she says—which makes it extraordinarily good at escaping from the pipes that carry it. There’s been little research or monitoring of these leaks, but a picture is emerging that shows when hydrogen gas is released into the air, it reacts with hydroxyl radicals—pairs of hydrogen and oxygen atoms—to form water vapor.
“This is very parallel with what we saw with natural gas,” Ocko says. In both cases, researchers have been able to track big plumes, but not all the little leaks that add up to substantial climate-warming effects. The more peripheral the uses get—like using hydrogen to heat homes or fuel up the cars—the more difficult those leaks are to monitor. “We’re very worried about that,” she says. “There’s no way to make those systems tight.
But those tools are coming, Ocko adds. “The key difference between the natural gas story and where we are with hydrogen is that hydrogen is in its infancy,” she says. In the IRA, the incentives to spur hydrogen production are just one tool of many in the climate arsenal, with billions more going toward electrification and overhauling the grid. The coming years will be about pushing the right uses and reining in the negative consequences. “We want to get ahead of the problem,” she adds.