This $150,000 Leak Detector Will Judge How Good Hydrogen Is For Climate

Mint

21-05-2025

(Bloomberg) -- Hydrogen's potential as a game-changing climate solution is already in doubt over its high costs and lack of industrial demand. Yet one of the biggest concerns about the gas is still not fully understood: How much is hydrogen contributing to global warming?
Scientists from the US and Netherlands believe they're on the verge of giving the closest estimate yet of how much hydrogen is being inadvertently leaked from infrastructure. The results will feed into the mounting body of research on how hydrogen can be a powerful, if indirect, greenhouse gas due to a series of chemical reactions that take place in the atmosphere when it's released.
The team, which is working with four industry partners, including Shell Plc and TotalEnergies SE, is using an innovative mobile device designed to detect emissions from hydrogen facilities all along the value chain, from production sites to bus filling stations.
The unit — about the size of two stacked microwaves — works by pumping in air and drying it as it enters, before converting any hydrogen present into water vapor, allowing for relatively easy measuring. The instrument, made by Aerodyne, costs around $150,000, with only two currently in existence.
The scientists using it say it's the first viable measuring device for detecting hydrogen in real world scenarios.
Today estimates of hydrogen leakage range anywhere from less than 1% to more than 20%. The goal for the researchers is to better understand the main sources for the gas to escape and nip any problems in the bud as the nascent industry begins to scale. They want to avoid what happened with methane, which was being leaked for decades before the world decided to take meaningful action at the United Nations' COP26 climate summit in Glasgow.
Hydrogen can prolong the lifespan of methane in the atmosphere — a greenhouse gas 80 times more powerful than CO2 over a 20-year timeframe — and can promote the formation of water vapor, another potent cause of global warming, in the upper atmosphere. Taking the various chemical reactions together, hydrogen's global warming potential is around 37 times that of CO2 over a 20-year time horizon.
'For hydrogen, we're still at the beginning. We're trying to prevent hydrogen emissions from becoming a problem,' said Tianyi Sun, senior climate scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund, which is helping sponsor the project.
The study, which should be ready for peer review by the middle of next year, comes as politicians put in place the policies needed to massively scale-up the use of hydrogen, particularly in industry. The EU wants 20 million tons per year by 2030, half of which it will import from abroad, opening up enormous potential for leaks along the supply chain.
'The challenges of the hydrogen economy are becoming more evident,' said Thomas Rockmann, professor of atmospheric physics and chemistry at Utrecht University, working on the project. He started measurements at a bus refilling station in the North of the Netherlands last week. 'We have been a bit blind.'
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