Science in Focus

Hydrogen is an indirect greenhouse gas: by reacting with other compounds in the atmosphere, it may contribute to global warming in several ways.

Because hydrogen is a much smaller molecule than natural gas, it can easily leak. Even worse, despite its small size, hydrogen can affect larger materials and make them as brittle as glass.

Professor of Energy Conversion Aravind Purushothaman Vellayani is working on systems that use hydrogen to produce electricity – for large factories, for instance. But even your car or your toilet could be capable of producing electricity from hydrogen.

A sustainable way to produce hydrogen has been around for a century, but it is still much cheaper to make hydrogen from natural gas. Researchers from the UG are working on more efficient, affordable, and scalable production of green hydrogen.

Green hydrogen holds many promises. But grey hydrogen from natural gas is still much cheaper, storage of hydrogen is not trivial and as an indirect greenhouse gas is not as clean as it might look.