Companies around the world are making a “trillion-dollar bet” on a hydrogen-fueled future, said David Fickling at Bloomberg. A series of planned investments in hydrogen power from Europe, Australia, and Chile — the latest coming this week from a consortium of seven energy companies — could eliminate “roughly a quarter of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions.” The dramatic leap, though, depends on improvement in the technology for producing “green” hydrogen by splitting water molecules. Hydrogen has been advanced as a potential clean fuel source for decades, but currently “99 percent of the world’s industrial hydrogen is not green but ‘gray,’ produced from gas or coal with the carbon emissions to match.”
