Rio Tinto’s Nigel Steward says hydrogen can be worse for the climate than gas

Besides cutting their own inherently carbon-intensive operations, Rio and its peers are having to invest in tackling “scope 3 emissions” – helping their customers’ energy transitions – even in tough sectors like steel and aluminium.And they are having to work with untested, expensive and even frontier technologies, which Dr Steward said would include work on storing carbon not by burying it but by binding it into rocks.‘Hyped’ hydrogenOn hydrogen, Dr Steward said Rio Tinto did not see it as “an energy carrier”, saying this had been “much hyped”.Rio Tinto did see a use-case for green hydrogen in making steel, iron and titanium, and in alumina refineries.But recent studies had suggested that shipped hydrogen’s global warming potential was five to 16 times greater than carbon dioxide.“If we’re going to transport it around the world as liquid hydrogen,…

Read more…