> If it is produced from e.g. methane (the blue version), then we are burning more methane than we would have if we had been using the methane directly Yes, bu

> If it is produced from e.g. methane (the blue version), then we are burning more methane than we would have if we had been using the methane directly Yes, but since we're capturing the CO2, that's fine. There's also turquoise hydrogen [1] - produced from natural gas by pyrolysis, capturing solid carbon, without ever producing CO2. This is equivalent to blue hydrogen, but the technology looks a lot more promising to me, because solid carbon is easier to sequester than CO2. The big problem with natural gas is the losses of the gas itself during production and transport. This is only 1-3% of the gas produced, but methane is a very powerful greenhouse gas, so even that amount is significant. If that could be substantially reduced, turquoise hydrogen looks pretty good to me. Something i haven't been able to find out is how much the loss rate varies. Maybe it's 2% on average because losses from old Russian gas wells are 5% and losses from modern North Sea gas wells are 0.1%. That would also change the picture. > we are wasting electricity that could have been used directly in BEVs It's vital to understand what hydrogen would be used for. The most important use i can see is substituting for natural gas in legacy domestic heating. There are over 20 million gas boilers in homes in the UK. We are slowly replacing them with heat pumps, electric heating, and better insulation, but it will take decades to replace them all. If we could replace natural gas in the supply with hydrogen [2], we could cut emissions much sooner - even faster than waiting for electric cars to displace petrol ones. [1] https://spectra.mhi.com/achieving-net-zero-what-is-turquoise-hydrogen https://spectra.mhi.com/achieving-net-zero-what-is-turquoise... [2] https://www.hy4heat.info/ https://www.hy4heat.info/