The Hydrogen Heating Fallacy
Why UC Irvine’s Blending Project Is a Bridge to Nowhere
SoCalGas and UC Irvine are proposing a $27 million dollar dangerous demonstration project on UC Irvine’s campus to test blending up to 20% hydrogen into existing natural gas heating infrastructure.
This boondoggle project is fundamentally flawed because it rests on the false premise that hydrogen can serve as a practical replacement for natural gas in residential and commercial heating. In reality, hydrogen is an inherently inefficient heating fuel that is drastically inferior to modern electric heat pump technology by a factor of over three in energy efficiency.
Let’s break down the essential issues around energy for heating and energy efficiency: Heating applications that use natural gas in homes, businesses, and university campuses can achieve a factor of 3 or more in energy efficiency in heating by using electric heat pump technology. Heat pumps are an existing and reliable technology being implemented everywhere, including right here in California.
How does this work? Because of their thermodynamic engine properties, electric heat pumps achieve a coefficient of performance (COP) of 3 or more. This means they can provide three units of heat energy for every unit of electrical energy consumed. That’s the thermodynamic magic of a heat pump. Burning hydrogen, by stark contrast, delivers heat at a COP of less than 1, making it over three times less efficient than heat pumps.
Because of this inefficiency, there is no credible future where hydrogen is used wide-scale for heating in residences, businesses, and university campuses.
Besides this energy inefficiency, the vast majority of hydrogen today is produced from fossil fuels via methane gas reforming, which releases carbon dioxide at a rate per unit energy that is worse than burning the natural gas directly. Pursuing hydrogen blending is thus a step backward, not forward, for sustainability even when compared to the awful, outdated ongoing use of fossil natural gas.
Moreover, even if the hydrogen is produced from clean, renewable energy like solar-produced electricity, one still loses a factor of three in COP, therefore using more than 3 times the energy in heating via hydrogen burning than by using the same solar-produced electricity in a heat pump! To reiterate, even burning renewably produced hydrogen is a factor of 3 worse choice — in energy efficiency and cost — than proven heat-pump technologies. So, this talk of a “clean hydrogen future” has nothing to do with the kinds of heating applications needed on our campus or any home or business.
Beyond gross inefficiency, hydrogen introduces significant risks to infrastructure and public safety. Its small molecular size leads to increased leakage and raises the likelihood of pipeline failure due to embrittlement of metals. Hydrogen also has a lower ignition point and higher flammability range, making leaks particularly dangerous in residential or university settings. Indeed, the American Medical Association has specifically warned that hydrogen-methane blends increase emissions of harmful nitrogen oxides, exacerbating health risks such as asthma.
Also very troublingly, this project diverts precious ratepayer funds into an effort that primarily benefits fossil fuel interests intent on prolonging the use of existing gas infrastructure. Natural gas needs to go the way of whale oil as an energy source — become history. The project represents a classic boondoggle “bridge to nowhere,” a costly distraction from the urgent electrification needed to achieve California’s climate and clean-air objectives.
The bottom line is clear: hydrogen blending for heating makes no logical or practical sense. It is inefficient, unsafe, and unsustainable. This is why both the Associated Students of UC Irvine (the undergraduate student government) and the Graduate Students Association (the graduate student government) have both passed strong resolutions opposing this project in this past academic year.
Rather than wasting resources on a fundamentally flawed technology, our state’s and campus’s priority should be accelerating the transition to renewable-powered electrification. UC Irvine and the CPUC should reject this misguided demonstration project and focus instead on proven, efficient, and truly sustainable heating solutions.
Action item: Use this link to place your own comment to the CPUC here regarding this wasteful, dangerous experiment.
Addendum: over on the UCI channel on reddit, I shared my comments to the in-person hearing, and heard back from an anonymous user who referred to SoCalGas as “We” — therefore it may be that they are speaking on behalf of the company. They said things along the lines that “hydrogen is never meant to be a replacement for natural gas” and that it is an “bridge technology.” Clearly, they acknowledge that this is a bridge to nowhere project. The claim that this is a decarbonization step is another fallacy: large-scale green hydrogen does not exist, nor is it expected to exist in any large scale form that can be included into natural gas systems. Hydrogen that does exist is from natural gas and actually is more carbon intensive than the primary natural gas. We should be electrifying everything, and shutting off natural gas rather than finding more things to burn.