I never thought I'd be writing this, but a government entity is proposing something sensible to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Incredibly, that government entity is the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
When I say sensible, I mean technically achievable without being ruinously expensive. I don’t think there’s anything sensible about not utilizing our rich trove of fossil fuels to generate energy in order to combat a problem that’s largely in the heads of some pointy-headed academics. But, if we suspend reality to believe that lowering greenhouse gas emissions is a good thing, then the EPA’s proposal for New Source Performance Standards (NSPS) for electric generating units actually makes some sense.
As many, including this writer, have observed, the biggest problem with wind and solar power is that while they may be renewable, they’re not reliable. There’s only a certain percentage of electricity that can be delivered from these energy sources. Ideally, the best way to utilize them would be to store the energy in batteries. But batteries with the capacities needed are not and will not be available or affordable anytime soon, if ever.
Recognizing this, the EPA has proposed a method of storing the energy from solar and wind farms that’s actually doable: use the energy to make hydrogen. We know how to store hydrogen, and as a fuel, burning hydrogen produces water along with a little bit of nitrogen oxides. It produces no carbon dioxide at all.
The cheapest way to make hydrogen is to make it out of natural gas. The vast majority of hydrogen used today starts as natural gas. The problem with that process is that it generates a lot of carbon dioxide. In fact, it generates more carbon dioxide than would be generated if you just burned the natural gas in the first place.
So, the EPA has come up with a new class of hydrogen: low GHG hydrogen. There’s technical specifications that define low GHG hydrogen, but the bottom line is this: to qualify, you have to start with a renewable source of electricity—wind, solar, or hydropower. They’ve also included nuclear power, which is pretty goofy since then you’d be generating electricity to make hydrogen, which would then be used to generate electricity. However, I doubt if its inclusion will survive the outrage of the Sierra Club and other environmental NGOs.
Anyway, what you do then is take that electricity to produce hydrogen through the electrolysis of water. It’s an expensive way of producing hydrogen, which is why nobody does it, and which is why the only way it would happen on a large scale is by government mandate.
Once you’ve got the hydrogen, then the best way to get the energy out of it is to burn it in combustion turbines, which operate on the same basic principles as jet engines, just really a lot bigger in most cases. Unfortunately, modern large combustion turbines aren’t designed to fire 100 percent hydrogen. However, the EPA has determined that many can co-fire hydrogen with natural gas. In the initial phase that the EPA is proposing, combustion turbines would fire 30 percent hydrogen and 70 percent natural gas. (Down the road, the EPA would require a new class of turbines that burned 100 percent hydrogen, but that’s a ways off).
The EPA would also encourage, and the government would likely incentivize, expanded use of combined cycle power. More than 20 years ago, when we were early on in the climate change hand-wringing era, I wrote that if people were really serious about reducing greenhouse gas emissions they would be championing combined cycle power. In fact, in the late 1990s before the Sierra Club went completely over the edge they were big proponents of the combined-cycle solution.
The two most common ways of extracting energy from fossil fuels are by the expansion of gases or the generation of heat. Your automobile engine and combustion turbines rely on the former, while a boiler relies on the latter. Combined cycle plants use both and are therefore about twice as efficient as the technologies that only use one. You get twice the power, in other words, for the same amount of fuel.
Well, here we are in 2024, and somebody in the EPA has finally figured that out. The combination of co-firing hydrogen and building out more combined cycle capability would result in a massive drop in greenhouse gas emissions. It would be an actual, measurable reduction rather than the phony games we’ve played with changing our light bulbs and trying to get rid of natural gas-fired stoves.
It wouldn’t be cheap. The EPA admits it wouldn’t be cheap but, as they always do, claims there would be huge savings from avoided costs and lives saved. Whenever they trot that logic out, my eyeballs do double backflips. If the EPA actually saved as much money and as many lives as they claim, we would all be immortal and as rich as the Rockefellers.
Yet expensive isn’t the same as impossible. This plan would probably put American industry at even more of a competitive disadvantage unless we could somehow ensure that China, India, and Europe adopted the same measures. Hard to believe that would happen, but you never know.
