The role of apparel in climate action: How the fast fashion industry could become a catalyst for green hydrogen

In Europe and North America, the approach—which once seemed a sort of skeleton key to clean up hard-to-decarbonize industries such as steel, chemicals, shipping and aviation—looks like a failure. In the space of a few days in July, BP, Woodside Energy Group and Fortescue pulled out of hydrogen projects in Australia and the US that had been valued in the billions. BloombergNEF now expects Europe to be producing just 1.2 million metric tonnes of a promised 10 million tonnes a year in 2030.

To the extent that there is any life in the sector, it comes from blue hydrogen, typically produced by splitting fossil gas and then pumping the waste carbon dioxide underground to drive oil out of depleted wells. Cleaner green hydrogen, made by using renewable power to split molecules of water, is barely limping along.

China, however, is a significant exception. It accounts for over half of the roughly 506,000 metric tonnes of green hydrogen production capacity in operation globally right now. A further 2.86 million tonnes is under construction worldwide, with 45% of the total in China.

Hardly a week goes by without another project going into operation. A pipeline that broke ground last month will be able to carry gas from a renewables-rich area northwest of Beijing to the industrial city of Tangshan, more than 700km away. Another was approved in July to move hydrogen from wind farms in Inner Mongolia to a chemicals plant in Beijing. In total, more than 500 hydrogen projects have been launched this year, and the sector will be a target for growth under the next five-year plan starting in 2026.

It would be nice to say that all this activity was going to decarbonize the many areas of heavy industry that still dominate China’s carbon footprint. Don’t count on it, however.

A more likely outcome is that much of it ends up in $15 pantsuits and $10 trainers on Shein and Temu [e-com sites]. That’s because the primary use of hydrogen at the moment is in the refining and chemicals industries, where it is used to clean out impurities and produce raw materials for plastics and polymers. Such plants consume about 43% of the 100 million tonnes currently produced.

Almost all of that is from grey hydrogen, which is the most polluting form, made from unabated fossil gas, coal and refinery products.

The unstoppable rise of electric vehicles is likely to make these plants even more hungry for it, though you need a quick chemistry lesson to understand why.

The petroleum that emerges from oil and gas wells is a mix of myriad molecular chains of hydrogen and carbon. Oil refineries sort and split all these molecules to maximize quantities of the medium-length chains used in petrol and diesel, and also the shorter ones used by the petrochemicals industry.

As electric cars and trucks take more and more market share, we’ll end up with an ever-growing surplus of petrol and diesel, but the global consumption of plastics is likely to keep growing far longer. That means refineries are going to need to crack more and more medium-chain molecules into shorter-chain ones. Doing that is going to require extra hydrogen.

Turning the world’s green hydrogen into takeaway boxes and water bottles feels like a disappointing outcome, relative to a future where hydrogen is used to achieve the really dramatic greenhouse gas emission reductions we need in the production of steel, cement, fertilizer and the like.

It shouldn’t, however. On current form, dirty grey hydrogen is likely to be cheaper than the blue and green variants until 2050 at least, according to BloombergNEF.

If we want green hydrogen to ever reach the scale and price reductions needed to change that picture, it’s first going to have to be adopted en masse by the biggest consumer of hydrogen, the petrochemicals industry. If dislocations in the refining business caused by the decline of the internal combustion engine help speed up that process, so much the better.

In short, any hope for the future of green hydrogen goes through China and its petrochemicals industry.

The foamy plastic insole in your trainers might not sound like much of a climate solution—but if it can help turn clean hydrogen from a pipe dream into a viable industry on the strength of mass-market consumer demand, it might be the best hope we’ve got. ©Bloomberg

The author is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering climate change and energy.