A solar-hydrogen economy: driving the green hydrogen industrial revolution

In this study, I depict a green hydrogen economy as a potential successor to and replacement of the fossil fuel economy in its entirety. To think like this promotes a sense of the vast scale required to resolve the problems created by fossil fuel dependence. I characterize this view as a total substitution perspective. By contrast, mainstream depictions of the green shift have typically focused on changes at the margin - substitution of renewables in place of coal-fired power generation, or battery storage as a means of evening out flows of green energy; while economists have offered carbon taxes or cap and trade schemes as 'solutions' to the global warming crisis. I argue that these are simply comparative static interventions that do not engage with the real industrial dynamics of the transition. In this study instead I go well beyond the introduction of renewables to encompass the comprehensive role to be played by green hydrogen not just in power generation but across heavy industry (steel, cement, glass and fertilizers) and in heavy, long-haul transport (battery and fuel-cell electric vehicles, trucks, trains, ships and aircraft). I depict the resulting transition to green hydrogen as encompassing the entire industrial system that is currently dependent on fossil fuels - all 12 billion tonnes of oil-equivalent per year, calling for its energy-equivalent replacement by the production of 4 billion tonnes of green hydrogen per year. We are witnessing the rise of a new giant in the world of energy. Accordingly, in place of simple comparative static economic reasoning, I deploy concepts from heterodox economics (increasing returns, circular and cumulative causation, creative destruction and chain reactions within and between clusters) to present a synoptic view of the hydrogen-propelled green transition as a systemic­ - dynamic and interactive - process. Since this transition will involve manufacturing our energy in place of drilling, mining or otherwise extracting fuels created by nature, this process has the potential to be the greatest social and economic transformation of our time. The barriers standing in the way are many, and call for superior political, economic and business strategies to overcome them. Ultimately, the green industrial transition has to succeed, as it offers the only genuine solution to the existential crisis facing our industrial civilization traced to our wanton burning of fossil fuels.