12 Min Read
March 19, 2025
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Dominique Arsenault is a PhD candidate in ecological economics at the Université de Technologie de Compiègne in France and a political activist and organizer. His primary research is on commons based approaches to manufacturing. Arsenault also works on the political economy of raw material extraction for the energy transition and various topics in eco-socialist theory.
On the west coast of Newfoundland, in the town of Stephenville and the surrounding area, the province has recently approved World Energy GH2’s Nujio’qonik project, a green hydrogen and ammonia plant and an associated network of wind farms. The project has been controversial. Some locals have raised concerns about the consultation process, land use, biodiversity loss, and the impact of the project on local freshwater. Others emphasize the value created through jobs and revenue, as well as the necessity of creating emissions-free energy infrastructure. This all takes place in the context of a Memorandum of Understanding between Canada and Germany, which aims to develop a hydrogen trade corridor between the two countries. Indeed, a significant portion of the hydrogen produced by this project would be converted into ammonia destined for Germany.
Although I was initially interested in the environmental conflict that swirled around this project, the hydrogen dimension quickly grew more interesting to me. Hydrogen had always seemed to belong to the realm of science fiction, a miraculously clean energy medium, combusted inside fuel-cell driven cars and propelling humanity into an energy-rich future. Why was it now being produced on the east coast of Canada and then shipped to Germany? Why were investors pouring large amounts of money into financing this project and others like it? Most importantly, what role might hydrogen have to play in energy transition?
I quickly began to understand that the local project in Newfoundland was a manifestation of a global project: the hydrogen economy. The concept of a hydrogen economy, articulated in documents by the IEA, IRENA, the Hydrogen Council, Bloomberg Financial and others, envisions a global network of “clean” hydrogen production, trade, and consumption. Hydrogen is imagined as the “missing piece” in the energy transition: the mobility and versatility of hydrogen would allow it to function as a medium connecting low carbon energy sources to multiple end uses, especially in those industries considered “hard-to-decarbonize,” such as shipping, aviation, and heavy industry like mining and steel manufacturing.
This vision of the hydrogen economy harkens back to one of its first articulations by John O’Mara Bockris (1972), who imagined floating platforms of nuclear reactors, electrolysers and desalinators out on the ocean, transforming the water beneath into hydrogen gas that would then flow outwards to fuel the economy. While the specifics on the hydrogen economy look somewhat different today, the core of Bockris’s vision, that a hydrogen economy would not imply “a pollutional limit on growth” remains the animating potential of this new energy economy. Hydrogen is an expression of quintessential green capitalist techno-optimism. But can it live up to the hype?
Those driving forward the Hydrogen economy1 argue the necessity of rapidly scaling up hydrogen capacity through increased investment and regulatory support. While this is done in the name of decarbonization, analyzing the specific plans articulated in the documents of the hydrogen economy calls into question whether or not rapidly scaling up hydrogen production would mean rapid decarbonization. What becomes clear with these documents is that the hydrogen economy is, among other things, an extension of the use of fossil fuels and their supporting infrastructure into the future.
Hydrogen can be classified into different “colours” based on its production method; the most common colour scheme is grey, blue, and green. Grey refers to hydrogen made from an unabated fossil energy source – usually natural gas, but sometimes coal. Blue also uses fossil fuels, but with the addition of carbon capture technology to reduce associated emissions. Green, on the other hand, refers to renewable-based hydrogen, where renewable energy, usually wind or solar, is converted into hydrogen gas via electrolysis, which uses electricity to split water into its constituent elements.
In most documents, when hydrogen is first mentioned it is labeled as either “clean” or “low-carbon”, and green hydrogen usually serves as the example for this product. But clean hydrogen also includes blue hydrogen, and while the involvement of fossil fuels in hydrogen production is not concealed, its mention almost always comes later in the documents than renewable energy – a subtle move of greenwashing.
On close inspection, it becomes very clear that fossil fuels would in fact play a large role in the hydrogen economy, particularly in the short term, where blue hydrogen is imagined as laying the groundwork for green hydrogen. Blue and grey hydrogen can be produced at a cheaper cost in the short run and scaling them up is seen as a way to build up a market for hydrogen that green hydrogen would eventually come to dominate. Following this plan, fossil-based hydrogen would continue to grow, with blue hydrogen replacing and going beyond the current supply of grey hydrogen. In the short term, this means an increased role for fossil fuels, specifically natural gas, in the hydrogen economy.
This would also mean a new lease on life for fossil fuel infrastructure. Producing blue hydrogen means using existing, as well as constructing new, blue hydrogen facilities and natural gas facilities, as well as scaling up the use of carbon capture and storage technology. On top of this, natural gas pipelines, LNG terminals, and gas powered energy turbines would be integrated into the technology, useful for both green and blue hydrogen. There are limitations to this: existing pipelines can only accommodate hydrogen blended with natural gas at relatively low percentages, even with retrofitting, and the IEA estimates that blending would only produce a 2% emissions reduction (IEA, 2019, p. 182). But, the goal of blending fuels is not immediate emissions reduction but rather to create a market for hydrogen, allowing green hydrogen to scale over time.
The hydrogen economy, designed to be fully integrated into the fossil fuel economy, is a way for fossil fuel companies to continue burning fossil fuels as long as it is profitable.
While old infrastructure would be retrofitted and repurposed, new infrastructure would be built to be backwards compatible with natural gas. The desire for backwards compatibility is an expression of the fossil fuel industry’s concern over stranded assets. The hydrogen economy, designed to be fully integrated into the fossil fuel economy, is a way for fossil fuel companies to continue burning fossil fuels as long as it is profitable.
Profitability is the logic that structures most strategies for developing the hydrogen industry. Beyond retrieving the value invested in the fixed capital of the fossil fuel industry, profitability also guides the planned end uses for hydrogen. While long distance shipping, aviation and heavy industry are pitched as the most ideal uses of hydrogen, these applications are at the future end of the hydrogen economy’s timeline. Earlier uses included light and medium weight transport and domestic heating. Fuel cells are currently the largest category of both research investment and patents in hydrogen technology. All this is despite the fact that direct electrification is a more efficient decarbonization pathway for both road transport and heating (Ueckerdt et al., 2021). The risk here, as Ueckerdt et al. (2021) point out, is that hydrogen can compete against direct electrification, and in the event that it fails to scale, could produce fossil fuel lock-in.
And therein lies the danger of the hydrogen economy; it guides the energy transition down a path that preserves the fossil fuel landscape, the combination of material and social systems built around fossil fuels (Carton, 2017). The role of hydrogen in this economy is to allow renewables to join the flows of this landscape. It defers larger structural transformations to the future or sidesteps them entirely; for example, by authorizing the continued use and construction of fossil fuel pipelines and forestalling their decommissioning. The use of hydrogen for automobiles also helps to reproduce the everyday geographies of car culture, acting against the reorganization of cities and transportation, which is a necessary dimension of decarbonizing the transport industry (Jaramillo & A. Hammer Strømman, 2022).
Hydrogen, seen through the lens of the fossil fuel landscape, is also about more than preserving the profitability of fossil fuels and their infrastructure. It is about preserving the mobility of industry and the spatial and logistical power of capital. As Andreas Malm (2016) argues, coal’s spatial and temporal mobility was instrumental in the exploitation of labour – the same goes for hydrogen. By providing the technological means of further separating sites of energy production from consumption, wealthy countries like Germany, the Netherlands or Japan can impose the spatial demands of energy generation on poorer, formerly colonized countries like Namibia and other North African countries. To decarbonize shipping also means to decarbonize capital’s ability to locate production in sites with low environmental and labour protections. If the limited mobility of renewables means that decarbonization would exert some kind of pressure towards localization of production, hydrogen sidesteps that constraint.
The hydrogen economy, articulated by dominant political and economic powers, seems to be a form of mitigation deterrence and a re-entrenchment of the power of the fossil fuel economy. Articulating a different vision for the role of hydrogen in a global energy transition seems necessary, and this vision should seek to renegotiate the social relations embodied by a global energy economy, while also refusing the dominance of capital’s profit-oriented logic.
This article is based on the author’s research for the Master of Science in Human Ecology: Culture, Power, Sustainability programme at Lund University. The full thesis can be found here: http://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/record/9114713
Notes
1. Generally, these are coalitions of nation states in the case of the IEA and IRENA, and initiatives from energy (primarily fossil fuel), transport and industrial companies in the case of the Hydrogen Council and the Energy Transitions Commissions.
Works cited
Bockris, John. “A Hydrogen Economy.” Science 176, no 4041 (1972): 1323, https://doi.org/doi:10.1126/science.176.4041.1323.
Carton, Wim. “Dancing to the Rhythms of the Fossil Fuel Landscape: Landscape Inertia and the Temporal Limits to Market-Based Climate Policy.” Antipode 49, no. 1(2017): 43-61, https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12262.
International Energy Agency, The Future of Hydrogen. IEA, June 2019, https://www.iea.org/reports/the-future-of-hydrogen.
Jaramillo, Paulina Jaramillo, Kahn Ribeiro, Suzana, and Newman, Peter, et al. “Transport.” IPCC 2022: Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change. Contribution of Working Group III to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGIII_FullReport.pdf.
Malm, Andreas. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (Verso, 2016).
Ueckerdt, Falko, Bauer, Christian, and Dirnaichner, Alois, et al. “Potential and risks of hydrogen-based e-fuels in climate change mitigation.” Nature Climate Change 11, no. 5 (2021): 384-393, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-021-01032-7.
