Mission critical plans with strict conditionality
A useful example of why direction from the top does not work:
It is the latest sign of a wobble over hydrogen, a so-called superfuel that has been championed as a solution to decarbonise everything from transport and heavy industry to home heating and power generation.
Across the West, politicians have pledged to meet ambitious climate targets partly through developing different sources of the fuel, such as “blue” hydrogen made from natural gas, and “green” hydrogen derived through electrolysis of water.
Collectively, they have pledged to produce millions of tonnes of hydrogen in the coming decades – despite there being no proven path to doing so commercially.
If it were possible to produce green hydrogen in volume then pipe it to every house we’d indeed have a glorious solution to climate change. Even better if we could do so economically. That’s proving between hard and impossible. The big problem is not, in fact, in the creation, it’s in the storage and transport.
Well, OK. But politics - in the grip of those mission critical with strict conditionality plans - has demanded that it be done at vast cost. Which just isn’t how technological advance happens.
The envelope of what can be done expands as technology advances - or changes if you prefer. What people want done also changes according to knowledge, fashion and sheer obstinacy. The trick is in matching what can be done with what people want done. This means constant and continual experiment.
That is, not some baby-kisser deciding what will be done, but that mess of markets of everyone trying everything until we see what works.
Now, we at times have praised the idea of green hydrogen. Largely because of some actual work in the field, one of us has worked at the, ahahaha, coal face. We as a result think it’s still a pretty neat idea. But not in the manner that politics has decided it should be dealt with. Rather, hydrogen might - note the might - be useful as a local and medium term (so, days to weeks) storage system. Electrolysis to storage to fuel cell. Akin to batteries that is. Equally, once we have green hydrogen to Fischer Tropsch it up to such things as jet fuel could make sense. This is not, really not, the same as thinking that we can pipe H2 to every house in the country to run gas stoves or water boilers.
But we also have the necessary humility here. Which is to agree that while it’s all a very neat idea we do require proof of that contention. The only way we’ll gain that proof is it everyone tries everything then we see what works and do more of it.
Markets that is. Not Ministers, bureaucrats or committees demanding vast industrial combines based on a technology that no one knows will work or not.
We’re very sceptical of political ability to do anything. But especially so of the ability to decide upon technology. As here, the system always does seem to plump for what might not, in fact, be possible at all. Whereas the correct idea is to find out what is possible and economic - at which point, of course, no urging, forcing nor subsidy is required as that proof of what is possible and economic is all that is required for general adoption.
That logic is a fundamental problem with the very idea of politics guiding all. That’s before we get to the problem of the plans being pulled from fundaments.
Tim Worstall