12 January 2023
Study: Sufficiency, sustainability, and circularity of critical materials for clean hydrogen
The report estimates that hydrogen needs to grow seven-fold to support the global energy transition, eventually accounting for 10 percent of total energy consumption by 2050. A scaleup of this magnitude will increase demand for materials, such as aluminum, copper, iridium, nickel, platinum, vanadium and zinc to support hydrogen technologies—renewable electricity technologies and the electrolyzers for renewable hydrogen, carbon storage for lowcarbon hydrogen, or fuel cells using hydrogen to power transport.
Key questions that arise in the feasibility, and potential impacts of this deployment include whether there are supply constraints in the availability of crucial materials, for either the deployment of hydrogen in general, or particular production or consumption technologies specifically; what the wider demand context may look like for key materials – and whether there are materials for which hydrogen may be competing with large scale increases in demand from other parts of the low-carbon transition; and what the wider environmental impacts, such as greenhouse gas emissions (GHG), and water footprint, may be from the mining and processing of the materials required for the widespread deployment of hydrogen.
This report examines these three questions.