ALTERNATIVE FUEL RAINBOW
GOLDEN HYDROGEN POT WAITING
Green, blue, gray, brown, black. Colorless hydrogen is assigned a color to denote how it is produced and its degree of climate neutrality. It’s long been used for things like refining petroleum, treating metals, producing fertilizer and processing food. It’s only become familiar to most of us as it moves toward more mainstream uses like fuel.
Then there’s white hydrogen, occurring naturally or produced without a carbon footprint. It’s our best bet in light of predictions hydrogen will meet about a quarter of the world’s energy needs by 2050.
The White Hydrogen Coalition, led by Founder and CEO Robert Serec, is on a mission to decarbonize energy production and use.
What sets WHC apart is similar to how other innovators are finding success, coming to the solutions space not with a product to sell but a determination to build a solution to a problem. This time, though, it’s not as a manufacturer, but as a facilitator.
The goal is fast, mainstream, global adoption of LTC and similar processes to transform plastic and bio waste into truly clean energy like syngas, electricity and hydrogen.
That’s not pie in the sky.
WHC has established a blockchain-based platform and cryptocurrency, WH2C that aligns with the principles of a circular economy.
It describes the platform as a merger of the real world and blockchain, where energy producers, distributors and traders in the B2B and B2C landscape can engage in local or global transactions of clean energy sources. Blockchain provides transparency. Native currency allows for active support and investment in energy startups that have met specific criteria. Members can be part of pre-ordering, use tokens to trade energy produced by WHC-backed initiatives, and even propose their own projects. Token activity can be viewed at the Etherscan and Snowtrace AVAX networks. Minimum buy-in is only $50.
Crowdfunding is a platform option that works for projects like municipally owned energy plants. WHC uses it to fund its operations and its own work in the field. Last year a demo LTC plant was built, and to date, €10 million has been raised, with a goal for another eight.
But let’s back up a little, because white hydrogen has been hitting the news lately with coverage of discoveries of underground hydrogen deposits around the world – some found on purpose, some by accident, like a 46 million-tonne reservoir in France. This is white hydrogen, although an entirely different approach from that of the coalition.
It’s exciting because it is not a fossil fuel that takes millions of years to form. It’s carbon-free and constantly replenished by a water-mineral reaction, which makes it renewable. Underground reservoirs are eyed as bottomless wells of clean hydrogen. In Spain, for instance, Helios Aragón intends to start drilling later this year.
There are plenty of experts telling us why hydrogen will be difficult to use as a mainstream fuel source, not to mention the impacts of extraction. But it's early days, and it bears exploring further down that road.
