“Green” hydrogen power has become something of a minor meme industry. Hydrogen power (or “fuel cells”) is used to burn elemental hydrogen with elemental oxygen producing only water as a waste product. This industry has long been the fantasy of those who want to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and prevent the accumulation of carbon in our atmosphere, the problem is that the most economical way of producing elemental hydrogen does neither. Hydrogen is usually produced from natural gas, but “green hydrogen,” could theoretically be created by splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen. Recently I read a story of a company seeking out tax breaks to produce green hydrogen from water, but the company isn’t interested in installing solar or wind power and using that for their purposes, they want to simply buy power from the grid and use it directly. The problem is that most of America’s grid isn’t actually powered by green power but by fossil fuels. This so called “green hydrogen” would simply use the electricity from fossil fuels to produce hydrogen, with no analysis done as to whether this would produce more or less greenhouse gases than producing hydrogen from natural gas instead. In this case then, green hydrogen may not be so green.