Hello and welcome to the March issue of gasworld magazine.I don't know about you,but I keep seeing the term'hopium'or,to be more accurate,#hopium,as this is largely found on the social media channels we're all so familiar with today-and that doesn't just mean it's something from the wide open forum of Twitter.It's the terminology for irrational or unwarranted optimism;false hope,essentially.More than that,it's an apparent'addiction'to those false hopes.A great many in the wider energy sector and particularly the all-electric niche,at least from what I have seen,are taking great pleasure in playing on this term and making the most of simultaneously fusing'h'for hydrogen and hopium.It's become a hashtag for deriding the notion of the hydrogen economy and those that believe in it.There exist echo chambers of scientific arguments and strongly worded statements.Claims that hydrogen is painted into bright colours(blue,green,pink)to make it seems a workable technology;claims it is energy-negative and economically too costly;that regardless of the method of production,more energy is required to produce and compress the hydrogen product than it can later generate;that it is not a source of energy but merely a carrier,and not a particularly productive one at that.Central to many or all of these claims is the argument that green hydrogen is a flawed fantasy and the notion of blue hydrogen is merely a ruse by the oil and gas elite to preserve and prolong our fossil fuel domination long into the future.
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