The green hydrogen hype December 13, 2020 Today's best articles Daily business briefing The smartest insight and analysis, from all perspectives, rounded up from around the web: Companies around the world are making a "trillion-dollar bet" on a hydrogen-fueled future, said David Fickling at Bloomberg. A series of planned investments in hydrogen power from Europe, Australia, and Chile â the latest coming this week from a consortium of seven energy companies â could eliminate "roughly a quarter of the world's carbon dioxide emissions." The dramatic leap, though, depends on improvement in the technology for producing "green" hydrogen by splitting water molecules. Hydrogen has been advanced as a potential clean fuel source for decades, but currently "99 percent of the world's industrial hydrogen is not green but 'gray,' produced from gas or coal with the carbon emissions to match." Green hydrogen has often been dismissed as too expensive for practical uses. In the mid-2000s, however, most economists "didn't think wind and solar could compete economically with fossil fuels," either. There's "good reason to think" green hydrogen can follow the same path to explosive growth.