Green hydrogen: Fast fashion could help bump up demand

A boom in its use for clean synthetic inputs might make a difference

- DAVID FICKLING is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering climate change and energy.

Rich countries have been left in the dust by China in the clean energy industries that have dominated the past decade or so: solar panels, wind turbines, lithium-ion batteries, and electric vehicles.

Still, you might have hoped they would take the lead in technologies of the future, such as clean hydrogen. Not so.

In Europe and North America, the approach—which once seemed a sort of skeleton key to clean up hard-to-decarbonize industries such as steel, chemicals, shipping and aviation—looks like a failure. In the space of a few days in July, BP, Woodside Energy Group and Fortescue pulled out of hydrogen projects in Australia and the US that had been valued in the billions. BloombergNEF now expects Europe to be producing just 1.2 million metric tonnes of a promised 10 million tonnes a year in 2030.

To the extent that there is any life in the sector, it comes from blue hydrogen, typically produced by splitting fossil gas and then pumping the waste carbon dioxide underground to drive oil out of depleted wells. Cleaner green hydrogen, made by using renewable power to split molecules of water, is barely limping along.