The European Commission is facing calls to assess the climate impact of scores of proposed hydrogen projects after data revealed that 90 percent of them could be used to prolong the use of planet-warming natural gas. Companies operating Europe’s existing natural gas infrastructure are seeking to preserve the value of their assets by converting them […]
This is tricky, but I think it’s not all bad. At least if you can develop a reliable hydrogen infrastructure, it opens up the opportunity to convert it to green hydrogen later. Although green hydrogen sites may have different requirements that make it hard to retrofit. I don’t know.
I also don’t know that the technology is ready to make use of it on the demand side.
The problem is that separating hydrogen from water requires more energy than separating hydrogen from hydrocarbons. So if you allow the same subsidy for producing hydrogen from methane as you do for producing it from water, you’ll end up with a newly entrenched chunk of the fossil fuels industry which is very difficult to get rid of.