A new ground-breaking paper cements the need for leak-free hydrogen hardware, as it reveals that the real global warming potential of hydrogen could be 60 times that of CO₂!

This paper, published last month on the European Geosciences Union (EGU) website by the New York-based Environmental Defense Fund, uses comprehensive ways to leverage existing data about what happens to hydrogen released into the atmosphere.

Most importantly, it looks at a shorter-term horizon than what is used as standard to determine the GWP (global warming potential) of a gas, which is normally 100 years.

It is discussed that previous ways of looking at hydrogen emissions didn’t show the true impact of this gas during the decades in which it actually influences the climate. Consequently, there has been an inaccurate perception that hydrogen’s warming effects as an indirect greenhouse gas are much smaller than they are, when in fact, they have been substantially underestimated.

The results are truly astounding: even in its greenest form (i.e. produced with water and renewable energy), hydrogen’s GWP can reach a level 60x that of CO₂ at the 7-year mark.

To make sure that the hydrogen revolution is genuinely climate-friendly, and not just a different problem in the guise of a solution, it is crucial to contain hydrogen every step of the way: production, storage, transport. This is where innovative hardware, like the products we are developing at Actuation Lab, come into play.