As the planet warms, we continue to seek ways to produce energy that are climate friendly. Renewables like solar and wind or batteries get most of the attention, but what about hydrogen?

Wait, isn’t hydrogen a greenhouse gas? Indirectly it is, but hydrogen technologies are being explored.

StateImpact Pennsylvania’s Rachel McDevitt reported on hydrogen this week and joined us on The Spark Friday, who said clean hydrogen is what is being promoted as an energy source,"Clean hydrogen is the idea that we can make hydrogen. So it's hard. So it's already existing right out there in the atmosphere, but it's hard to bring that and create a fuel from it. So you usually make it out of something else. So when you can make that without additional greenhouse gas emissions, then it's clean. If you make hydrogen by splitting water molecules apart, separating that oxygen and hydrogen and you use renewable electricity to do that, that has no emissions and that's considered green hydrogen. There's a whole rainbow of colors to describe different ways to make hydrogen. Pink. Hydrogen is when you use nuclear energy to split water and take the hydrogen and separate the oxygen out. So clean, according to the Biden administration and advocates for lowering those emissions would be any process that has net zero emissions."

How could hydrogen potenially be used,"Hydrogen is viewed as a solution to these areas that are really hard to break away from fossil fuels that are really energy intense, like heavy transportation, heavy industry, steelmaking, flying, aviation. So industries like that, it's seen there are some companies that are experimenting with using hydrogen for power plants to replacing that as a fuel source there. So any place that's really hard to decarbonize or remove from fossil fuels, that's where people are hoping to use hydrogen."