Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates encouraged oil and gas companies to get involved in the production of green hydrogen as their skillsets are a great fit for the emerging industry, at CeraWeek yesterday.

“Green hydrogen may need to play a very gigantic role, and a lot of the skillsets involved there are from the oil and gas industry,” he said.

He also said that sequestering carbon—a key component of creating blue hydrogen—was also a challenge that could benefit from oil and gas industry expertise.

He suggested that oil and gas firms were well placed to create green hydrogen from alternative methods, beyond electrolysing water.

“Green hydrogen is more in [the oil and gas companies’] skillset so some of them should get involved in these things. We need that ability to do complex engineering”

“There is a lot of interesting stuff about green hydrogen, where you take [meta]morphic rocks and you may be able to mine for it, or do generation there,” said Gates. “And the pipelines that we have got for natural gas… can you put a sleeve in and use those to move clean hydrogen around?”

Gates, in his capacity as founder of Breakthrough Energy, which financially supports innovation, has devised a categorisation system for green energy technologies.

Green hydrogen falls in the third and final ‘large scale deployment’ bracket. Within this, it considered for Breakthrough Energy Catalyst funding, which applies to a “first-of-its-kind programme to demonstrate how we can finance, produce, and buy the new solutions that will underpin a low-carbon economy” according to the organisation.

Price problem

Gates noted that, while green hydrogen has many applications, its viability in each of them depends on how cheaply it can be produced. “If you can get super-cheap green hydrogen, then for a lot of industrial processes—like making fertiliser or the direct reduction of steel—that is a huge deal,” said Gates.

However, he cautioned that cost would remain an issue and it may never be cheap enough for some mooted applications. “You can compute that to be at breakeven for steelmaking, hydrogen would have to be mind-blowingly cheap. And there is a minimum amount of energy used so, whether you start with water or CH₄ [methane], and you are not going to get below that [cost]. It is exciting, but it might not emerge.”

Gates said that he did not have high hopes for using hydrogen in aviation, saying there were just a “few wild-eyed people working on that”. However, he did not specify whether the was referring to 100pc hydrogen fuel—which many have dismissed due to packaging constraints of large, pressurised fuel tanks—or also to blending into conventional kerosene.

Gates added that the oil and gas industry has a lot to contribute to the energy transition. “There are skillsets that those companies can bring. Can they help us with biofuels? Can they help us with electro-fuels? Some really are saying [during the] next 30 years we are going to be radically different and are upping their R&D budgets and getting involved, even in some of the electricity generation side projects.

“But green hydrogen is more in their skillset so some of them should get involved in these things. We need that ability to do complex engineering.”

He added that there is also an opportunity for oil and gas firms from the nuclear industry. Heavy engineering firms could “take nuclear waste and bury it ridiculously deep so that people know that for millions of years you do not have to worry about it—way deeper than Yucca Mountain [Nuclear Waste Depository]—in so-called deep boreholes”.

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Author: Alastair O’Dell<BR>Senior Editor