Environmental costs of green hydrogen production as energy storage for renewable energies

Green hydrogen can play an important role in the energy transition because it can be used to store renewable energies in the long term, especially if the gas infrastructure is already in place. Furthermore, environmental costs are becoming increasingly important for companies and society, so that this study examines the environmental costs of green hydrogen production and compares them with the environmental costs of steam reforming, the conventional process that produces more than 90% of the world's hydrogen. For the green hydrogen production, the renewable energy sources solar, wind, and hydro energy are taken into account. The study shows that hydrogen production from hydro energy causes less environmental costs than the production from wind and solar energy. Moreover, the environmental costs of steam reforming are in part more than twice as high as the environmental costs of hydrogen produced from wind and hydro energy, whereby only the impact category climate change could be considered for steam reforming due to a lack of information. Graphical abstract