PhD Candidate Spotlight: Examining the hydrogen economy

PhD Candidate

Julien Lafaille, PhD Candidate
Julien.lafaille@grenoble-em.com
linkedin.com/in/julienlafaille/

 

"One of my papers investigates the role(s) of renewable hydrogen (hydrogen produced exclusively from renewable energy sources, also known as green hydrogen) and the developing “hydrogen economy”. 

According to global institutions, states and industry, renewable hydrogen is a crucial component of the energy transition and is expected to decarbonize industrial activities that cannot be electrified directly – for instance, ammonia and steel production, air travel, or long distance maritime and land shipping.

Renewable hydrogen will also support the decarbonization of electric grids, which increasingly suffer from the intermittency of solar and wind generation.

Yet, the concept of using hydrogen as a global energy carrier has many critics.

Physicists and engineers point out that hydrogen’s thermodynamic properties make it a poor substitute to fossil fuels: it is one of the most challenging molecules to handle and transport, with large and unavoidable exergy losses in each conversion step of potential global supply chains.

In addition, supplying large quantities of renewable hydrogen will not be possible until enough dedicated renewable capacity is installed; this infrastructure buildup will likely require many years, whereas GHG emissions need to peak and drop rapidly to retain any reasonable chance of limiting warming to under 2C.

In a form of acknowledgment, most institutional strategies envision a period of reliance on hydrogen produced from methane reformation with carbon capture (‘blue’ hydrogen).

However, recent research suggests that blue hydrogen provides no climate benefits compared to the direct use of fossil fuels when including fugitive methane emissions in lifecycle analyses, and its inclusion in institutional strategies has been shown to be related to intense lobbying on the part of the natural gas industry, in a bid to preserve the profitability of natural gas infrastructure.

Yet, global institutions and states ignore these warnings and insist on developing the hydrogen economy.

The critical theory of technology (developed by Andrew Feenberg in particular) provides an analytical framework to understand this rather odd situation. This theory focuses on the imbrication of technology and society and argues that within a given hierarchical social system, technology design is oriented so that resulting technologies sustain and reinforce the hegemony of the dominant social classes.

Our current social system is based on capitalism, which results in a social organization based on hierarchical social classes; the capitalist class is at the helm and concentrates financial and political power. Under a capitalist organization of society, the main technical and social requirements of capitalism are merged to form a technical code, which once embodied in technologies reproduces and improves the capitalist class’ operational autonomy.

Operational autonomy is the ability of capital to free itself from external constraints, and to make strategic decisions without interference from human labor or limitations induced by the natural environment. The technical code of capitalism, of which the search for operational autonomy is an invariant, serves to embed strategies of domination within apparently neutral technical frameworks of decision.

It operates by orienting design choices toward the technical system that responds the best to capitalist interests, generally expressed within self-evident goals such as efficiency and profitability. This implies that the vast majority of technical systems forming the production infrastructure of modern society were designed to meet technical requirements – these systems need to work – but also to reproduce a capitalist model of society.

How is this theory applicable to renewable hydrogen technologies?

My research suggests that developing technologies that are both respectful of the natural world and compatible with a capitalist rationality based on the search for operational autonomy is probably impossible. Indeed, operational autonomy is achieved by reducing nature to fragmented parts apt to instrumental use, which has profoundly negative consequences on both humans and ecosystems.

Hydrogen technologies are conceived and developed within capitalism and thus face the tensions described above. These tensions then materialize in the contradictions noted by critics of the hydrogen economy. 

Hydrogen technologies are conceived and developed within capitalism and thus face the tensions described above. These tensions then materialize in the contradictions noted by critics of the hydrogen economy.

It is quite possible that technologies whose design does not include capitalists’ operational autonomy from the natural world would be helpful in mitigating the unfolding ecological collapse; the problem is that such technologies simply cannot be developed by firms (or states) operating within our current capitalist framework.

The case of the hydrogen economy suggests that technology-based responses, as long as they embed capitalism-derived social aims, will likely fail to achieve their ecological aims.

My research thus contributes to the argument that if we want to avoid a rapidly approaching ecological disaster whose consequences could well include short-term civilization collapse, we need to look beyond technological solutions, critically examine our current social model, and develop alternatives.

Bio: Julien is a 4th year PhD candidate. Prior to embarking on the PhD journey, He spent nearly 15 years in the renewable energy industry in Canada, as a technology specialist and consultant. His research now focuses on topics related to the energy transition as envisioned by states and global institutions, from a perspective informed by critical theories of technology.

Read More: Doctoral Knowledge Journal, issue #19

^{GettyImages: Parradee Kietsirikul}