First detection of industrial hydrogen emissions using high-precision mobile measurements in ambient air

Abstract

Projections towards 2050 of the global hydrogen (H2) demand indicate an eight-fold increase in present-day hydrogen consumption. Leakage during production, transport, and consumption therefore presents a large potential for increases in the atmospheric hydrogen burden. Although not a greenhouse gas itself, hydrogen has indirect climate effects: through oxidation with the OH radical in the atmosphere the lifetime of methane increases, tropospheric ozone is produced, and the concentration of stratospheric water vapour increases. The Global Warming Potential of H2 is estimated to be 12.8 times that of CO2. Available technologies to detect hydrogen emissions have been limited to risk assessments of industrial facilities, while smaller climate-relevant emissions remain undetected. The latter requires measurement capacity at the parts-per-billion level (ppb). We developed and tested a simple and effective method to detect small hydrogen emissions from industrial installations combining active AirCore sampling with ppb-precision analysis by gas chromatography. We applied our methodology at a chemistry park in the Groningen province, the Netherlands, where several hydrogen production and storage facilities are concentrated. From a car and an unmanned aerial vehicle, we detected for the first time small but consistent industrial emissions from leakage and purging across the hydrogen value chain, which include electrolysers, a hydrogen fuelling station, and chemical production plants. Our emission estimates indicate current loss rates between 1-5% of the estimated production and storage in these facilities. This is sufficiently large to urgently flag the need for monitoring and verification of H2 emissions for the purpose of understanding our climate change trajectory in the 21st century.