“Like hydroelectricity and nuclear, fossil fuels are primary energy sources. Hydrogen is a secondary energy source; it is an energy transport mechanism and people mix up this important consideration.
You must use a primary energy source, could be solar, electricity or wind electricity to generate hydrogen. But then, once you've generated hydrogen it is a transportable fuel, and this is very useful and important.
Hydrogen can be “clean” if it comes from fossil fuels with carbon-capture and storage (CCS), or from renewables. It will probably come from both, with the majority coming from renewables. The combination of clean hydrogen and clean electricity will dramatically reduce our direct emissions, but after that it gets hard.
Everybody thinks about solar and wind and batteries as being the only thing that matters, it is not that simple. You don't get the hydrogen here, but with a renewable or zero carbon energy source now you've got hydrogen feedstock and then some of the challenges remain staggering such as Aviation fuel. What are we going to do about aviation fuel, that's a tough one?
Airbus has committed to building hydrogen fuel options; airplanes have essentially three different designs for 2035.
One category will be able to do cross country, so there will be 200 passengers up to say 4,000 kilometers (Melbourne to Perth) which is going to require high density liquid fuel, may be hydrogen. This demands way more than you can expect to get out of a battery powered or electric plane battery.
Electric airplanes will take, perhaps 100 people from Melbourne to Sydney – a distance of less than 1000 km.
Airbus can see a solution to the above, but they haven't got a solution between 4,000 and 12,000 kilometers which covers the long-distance transcontinental flights.”