Many looking to advance hydrogen production in Canada are moving away from the use of hydrogen colours. Canada’s Minister of Energy and Natural Resources Jonathan Wilkinson is in that camp.

Colour coding is used as a shorthand to indicate hydrogen production methods.

When asked by DOB Energy how the federal government thinks about hydrogen colours during a media availability in Calgary, he rejected the notion of a prioritization and said various types are connected to different opportunities.

“To be honest with you, having been in the hydrogen business for a long time, I hate the colours,” he replied. “I prefer to talk about the carbon intensity of the hydrogen.”

Wilkinson is a former chief executive officer of QuestAir Technologies.

“I would say that they have different opportunities for different … sources of hydrogen,” the minister continued.

He pointed to Canada’s East Coast, for example, where the focus is on renewables-based hydrogen, sometimes dubbed green.

“That’s in large measure because Europe and Germany, in particular, really want renewables-based hydrogen,” he added. “They’re not very interested in having hydrogen that is derived from fossil fuels.”

Wilkinson noted that renewables-based hydrogen is currently more expensive than producing it through natural gas.

“Here in Western Canada, developing hydrogen from natural gas, as long as you’re actually capturing the vast majority of the CO2 and sequestering it, actually offers a very low carbon and relatively inexpensive pathway to being able to actually decarbonize industry in Canada, but also to ship to South Korea and Japan, who are actually quite interested in that kind of hydrogen, in a way that Germany is not.”

Wilkinson also touched on so-called turquoise hydrogen, which is achieved through a method called methane pyrolysis. In this process, hydrogen is extracted and carbon is pulled out as a solid.

“That’s actually a very interesting pathway from my perspective, if you can actually make it work from an economic perspective and a technical perspective,” he said.

A benefit, he noted, is instead of importing ammonia as the hydrogen carrier, countries can import natural gas.

“And you can do the processing in [for example] Japan or South Korea,” Wilkinson said. “You can’t do that with other types of technologies because Japan doesn’t have pore space to be able to sequester the CO2.”

He continued: “I think they all have opportunity. We are working with the Government of Alberta now on issues around [the] transportation of ammonia, but I certainly do think that some of the pyrolysis-type technologies that are being developed in Alberta and in British Columbia are really, really interesting.”