Viewpoint
http://pubs.acs.org/journal/aelccp
Does the Green Hydrogen Economy Have a
Water Problem?
Cite This: ACS Energy Lett. 2021, 6, 3167−3169
ACCESS Metrics & More
See https://pubs.acs.org/sharingguidelines for options on how to legitimately share published articles.
I n 1766, Henry Cavendish discovered a lightweight gas
which, when burned in air, turned into water. In 1787,
Antoine Lavoisier named this new gas “hydrogen”, a
combination of the roots hydro and genesquite literally
Downloaded via UNIV OF EXETER on May 24, 2023 at 18:39:59 (UTC).
“water-former”.1 Not long after, scientists discovered that by
adding electricity to water, hydrogen can be produced by the
reverse reaction. Today, hydrogen is used as a feedstock for
chemical synthesis, but other applications have become
realities including energy storage and transportation fuels. If
the hydrogen is generated from renewable electricity, it
releases no greenhouse gas emissions, meaning that it can be
a key player in the battle against climate change.
To develop a “green hydrogen economy” where emissions-
free hydrogen is widely used in daily life, innovators are using
electrochemical water electrolysis to generate hydrogen from
two simple ingredients: electricity and water. As renewable
electricity prices drop and improvements in electrolyzer
efficiency are achieved, some critics have begun to ask a
question about the second ingredient: is there enough water to
support a hydrogen economy? Some argue that the answer is
no, due to perceived significant water demand throughout the
entire production process, including the use of water as a
feedstock and a cooling agent for thermoelectric methods of
producing hydrogen such as steam methane reforming
(SMR).2 Yet the objective of the green hydrogen economy is
to derive energy completely from renewable sources which do
not use water for cooling or fossil fuel processes. Therefore, it
is critical to include only water that is directly used for water
electrolysis when considering the impact of hydrogen
production on global water reserves. In the analysis that
follows, we find that by isolating the water used for the
electrolysis step, there is a negligible impact of the amount of
water consumed for hydrogen production compared to the
amount of water available.
1. Water Requirement of Electrolysis. In our previous
work, we considered the total future need for hydrogen in all
applicable sectors including chemical synthesis, transportation,
buildings and heating, and energy storage. The calculated
hydrogen demand in the distant renewable future is 2.3 Gt per
year.3 In our vision, hydrogen will be produced by water
electrolysis powered by renewable energy. Such a vision can
reduce the carbon emissions from the energy sector by up to
10.2 Gt annually from future emissions projections compared
to the International Panel on Climate Change’s worst-case
RCP8.5 scenario.3
© 2021 American Chemical Society
3167
Read Online
Article Recommendations
Before moving to further develop the hydrogen economy, it
is important to determine the feasibility of the amount of water
2.3 Gt of hydrogen will require each year. Several authors2,4
have expressed their concerns about water for hydrogen,
stating that obtaining water for the economy will be too
expensive or demanding on the water and energy require-
ments. Here, we calculate the amount of water needed for the
predicted hydrogen economy, including total water that is
withdrawn and consumed for electrolysis. Withdrawals are
water that is directly returned to the body of water from which
it was extracted. Any water that is converted into another
unusable form or is not returned to the original body of water
will be considered to be consumed.
Based on the reaction stoichiometry, for every kg of
hydrogen produced, 9 kg of water must be consumed.
Therefore, 2.3 Gt of hydrogen requires 20.5 Gt, or 20.5 billion
m3, per year of freshwater, which accounts for only 1.5 ppm of
Earth’s available freshwater. Most applications for hydrogen
require it to be combusted or pumped through a fuel cell,
which converts hydrogen gas into electricity and water, but
while most water can be recovered, it is not generally returned
to the original body of water and will be treated as consumed.
The only sector in which the use of hydrogen does not
regenerate the entirety of the water feedstock by fuel cell or
combustion is chemical synthesis, which will account for 540
Mt of hydrogen, using at most 4.8 billion m3 or 0.3 ppm of
global freshwater annually.3
When compared to other projections for the water demand
of hydrogen production,2 the freshwater requirements above
are quite low. This is due to our assumption that all hydrogen
in the future will be produced using renewable energy sources
such as wind and solar, which have little to no water
consumption. When fossil fuels are used for primary energy
production and power generation, the water requirement is
quite significant. In 2014, 251 billion m3 of freshwater were
withdrawn for power generation and energy production from
fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas, and 31 billion m3
were consumed as the water was used for cooling, mining,
Received: July 3, 2021
Accepted: August 5, 2021
Published: August 17, 2021
https://doi.org/10.1021/acsenergylett.1c01375
ACS Energy Lett. 2021, 6, 3167−3169
ACS Energy Letters http://pubs.acs.org/journal/aelccp
Figure 1. Comparison of the global freshwater withdrawal and consumption of three different sectors: fossil fuel energy production and
power generation, agriculture, and the implementation of a global hydrogen economy. Note that the bar chart is on a log scale.3,5
hydraulic fracturing, and refining.5 In comparison, even though
the 20.5 billion m3 of water withdrawn for hydrogen
production by electrolysis must be consumed, this is still
33% less than the current fossil fuel energy-related uses (Figure
1). Furthermore, electrolysis will render fossil fuel energy
sources obsolete as the energy sector is able to move more
toward renewable technologies, saving 10 billion m3 of
freshwater that would have been consumed by energy-related
uses of fossil fuels. Thus, it is apparent that using hydrogen as a
method to reach a renewable energy society will lead to drastic
water savings, not expenditures.
The water consumption of electrolysis is especially minimal
relative to other sectors such as the irrigated agricultural sector,
which is responsible for 70% of the world’s total freshwater
withdrawals, or over 2700 billion m3 annually.5 Of this, around
1100 billion m3 of water are consumed each year5over 50
times as much water as a future hydrogen economy would
require (Figure 1). Nonetheless, even with adjacent sectors
using far more water than even the most ambitious prediction
for hydrogen, concerns about freshwater scarcity6,7 call for
reductions in water extractions at all available angles.
Therefore, proposing a solution which allows for hydrogen
to tap into Earth’s extensive saltwater resources can further
decrease hydrogen’s water footprint.
2. Desalination of Saltwater. Accessible freshwater
makes up just less than 1% of the planet’s water,8,9 and it is
best to avoid creating any additional burden on freshwater
usage, especially in areas where drinking water is difficult to
attain. However, almost all the remaining 99%, or about 1.4
billion km3, is seawater, which can be purified through
desalination processes before being used as an electrolysis
feedstock. The leading desalination technology today is reverse
osmosis (RO), which uses an applied pressure and a
semipermeable membrane to reject ions present in the water,
3168
Viewpoint
consuming less energy than other desalination methods such as
distillation.10
However, some water that is fed to the RO process cannot
be utilized, and the recovery defines the percentage of usable
clean water that is produced by the process out of the total
amount of feedwater. Current state-of-the-art RO plants, such
as the Ashkelon plant in Israel, can achieve recoveries of up to
50%,8 meaning that twice the amount of water desired at the
outlet must be fed into the process, for a total of 41 billion m3
of seawater withdrawn annually for hydrogen production. This
is around 30 ppb of the world’s available supply of seawater
each year, a negligible amount compared to the resources
available, and the water that cannot be recovered is returned to
the same body of water, so that it is not consumed.
It is important to note that adding a desalination process
increases the energy requirement of the life cycle of electrolytic
hydrogen production, but this too is negligible in comparison
to powering the electrolyzer itself. Overall, RO requires 3.5−5
kWh of energy for each cubic meter of clean water produced.10
For a global hydrogen demand of 2.3 Gt, this yields an
additional 0.26−0.37 EJ of annual energy required to perform
RO for water electrolysisi.e., 0.06−0.13% of the minimum
energy required to produce the hydrogen by electrochemical
water splitting. From an economic viewpoint, desalination by
RO would add an energy cost of $0.53−1.50 per m3 of clean
water produced,8 which would add no more than $0.01 to the
cost of hydrogen production per kg. This is in agreement with
an analysis by Khan et al. which found that desalination would
comprise 0.1% of the energy requirement of electrolysis and
add $0.02 to the cost of hydrogen per kg.11 Therefore, even if
desalination processes were integrated into hydrogen produc-
tion, DOE targets12 to produce hydrogen for less than $2.00
per kg would still be within reach.
Green hydrogen production will consume 1.5 ppm of Earth’s
freshwater or 30 ppb of saltwater each year, an amount smaller
https://doi.org/10.1021/acsenergylett.1c01375
ACS Energy Lett. 2021, 6, 3167−3169
ACS Energy Letters http://pubs.acs.org/journal/aelccp Viewpoint

than what is currently consumed by fossil fuel-based energy
production and power generation. If desalination by RO is
utilized, the additional energy requirement would be less than
0.2% of the minimum energy required to produce the
hydrogen by electrolysis, and the energy cost would add
approximately $0.01 to the price of hydrogen per kg. These
numbers suggest that water supply will not be the limitation for
electrolyzers, and we should instead continue to focus on
technological improvements for the energy efficiency of
electrolyzers, which is currently the limiting factor and has
the potential for significant advancements. While the concern
about the “water problem” is much more prevalent in the
journalistic community than among scientists, journalism can
have a significant influence on the acceptance of hydrogen as a
growing market. It is therefore essential that we rigorously
characterize the true water requirement of electrolysis
technology, without the influence of water needs for the
current non-renewable infrastructure, to get a clear idea of the
impact hydrogen can have on a renewable energy future.
Rebecca R. Beswick
Alexandra M. Oliveira
Yushan Yan orcid.org/0000-0001-6616-4575
(8) Greenlee, L. F.; Lawler, D. F.; Freeman, B. D.; Marrot, B.;
Moulin, P. Reverse Osmosis Desalination: Water Sources, Technol-
ogy, and Today’s Challenges. Water Res. 2009, 43 (9), 2317−2348.
(9) Miller, J. E. Review of Water Resources and Desalination
Technologies, SAND 2003-0800; Sandia National Laboratories:
Albuquerque, NM, March 2003; DOI: 10.2172/809106.
(10) Cherif, H.; Belhadj, J. Environmental Life Cycle Analysis of
Water Desalination Processes. Sustainable Desalination Handbook;
Elsevier, 2018; pp 527−559.
(11) Khan, M. A.; Al-Attas, T. A.; Roy, S.; Rahman, M. M.;
Ghaffour, N.; Thangadurai, V.; Larter, S.; Hu, J.; Ajayan, P.; Kibria,
M. G. Seawater Electrolysis for Hydrogen Production: A Solution
Looking for a Problem? Energy Environ. Sci. 2021, 9, 1−16.
(12) Peterson, D.; Vickers, J.; Desantis, D. Hydrogen Production Cost
From PEM Electrolysis - 2019, Record 19009; U.S. Department of
Energy, Feb 3, 2020.

■ AUTHOR INFORMATION

Complete contact information is available at:

https://pubs.acs.org/10.1021/acsenergylett.1c01375
Author Contributions
†
R.R.B. and A.M.O. contributed equally.
Notes
Views expressed in this Viewpoint are those of the authors and
not necessarily the views of the ACS.
The authors declare the following competing financial
interest(s): Yushan Yan is the Founder and CEO of Versogen
which is a University of Delaware startup dedicated to anion
exchange membranes and green hydrogen production using
anion exchange membrane electrolyzers.

■ ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This research did not receive any specific grant from funding
agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
A.M.O. is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research
Fellow (NSF DGE-1940700).

■ REFERENCES
(1) Zuttel, A.; Schlapbach, L.; Borgschulte, A. History of Hydrogen.
Hydrogen as a Future Energy Carrier; Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co.
KGaA: Weinheim, 2008; pp 7−21.
(2) Webber, M. E. The Water Intensity of the Transitional
Hydrogen Economy. Environ. Res. Lett. 2007, 2 (3), 229−269.
(3) Oliveira, A. M.; Beswick, R. R.; Yan, Y. A Green Hydrogen
Economy for a Renewable Energy Society. Curr. Opin. Chem. Eng.
2021, 33, 100701.
(4) Bossel, U. Does a Hydrogen Economy Make Sense? Proc. IEEE
2006, 94 (10), 1826−1837.
(5) International Energy Agency. Water-Energy Nexus, Excerpt from
the World Energy Outlook 2016; IEA Publications: Paris, 2016.
(6) Dieter, C. A.; Maupin, M. A.; Caldwell, R. R.; Harris, M. A.;
Ivahnenko, T. I.; Lovelace, J. K.; Barber, N. L.; Linsey, K. Estimated
Use of Water in the United States in 2015, Circular 1441; U.S.
Geological Survey: Reston, VA, 2018; DOI: 10.3133/cir1441
(7) Morrison, J.; Morikawa, M.; Murphy, M.; Schulte, P. Water
Scarcity & Climate Change: Growing Risks for Businesses and Investors;
Ceres: Boston, MA, February 2009.

3169 https://doi.org/10.1021/acsenergylett.1c01375
ACS Energy Lett. 2021, 6, 3167−3169