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NZ is touting a green hydrogen economy, but it will face big environmental & cultural hurdles

UC academics Andy Nicol and David Dempsey join Ludmila Adam and Kēpa Morgan to dig deeper into New Zealand’s green hydrogen future, raising cultural and technical issues to be addressed, in an article on The Conversation.

But to provide a buffer against the volatility of overseas markets, Aotearoa would need to be as energy independent as possible. Ideally, this would mean consuming only green hydrogen produced here, using abundant renewable hydro, wind and solar resources.

A hydrogen economy is good in theory, but to make the switch at the scale of Aotearoa’s climate ambitions would require about 150 petajoules of hydrogen each year, according to one estimate. That’s about a quarter of our current energy use.

Hydrogen is produced in a process known as hydrolysis – the splitting of water into hydrogen and oxygen gas, using electricity. To produce a quarter of Aotearoa’s energy consumption, hydrolysis would consume an enormous amount of water, about 13 million tonnes each year, the equivalent of a month’s worth of Auckland’s water demand.

Freshwater has enormous significance to iwi and hapū. However, their views on hydrolysis as a consumptive use of water are not widely understood. If cultural complexity is ignored, hydrogen infrastructure or processes may fail to achieve an appropriate fit within Aotearoa New Zealand society and the technology could be orphaned.

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