Credits on life support
A certain number of years ago (five), I was involved in a marketing campaign for a certain foreign government agency focusing on energy and mining. I’m withholding names because I can’t remember what the term of my NDA was and if there was one, and I can’t be bothered to check. Anyway, I did some editorial work for the campaign and that work involved fact-checking a promotional text produced by a major energy company, which at the time projected that the green hydrogen market would be worth over $80 billion by 2026.
This, of course, hasn’t happened, with the green hydrogen market recently projected to be worth a bit over $18 billion this year. But, the projectors from Grand View Research said, that market is going to be growing at an annual rate of over 30% in the future, topping $115 billion by 2033. Sure.
Green hydrogen is one of the industries that national and international energy policies were supposed to, as is now trendy to say, turbocharge as part of energy transition plans. There are many such unfortunate industries but the one industry to tie them all and in the light of net zero bind them, was carbon credits.
Arguably even more important than wind and solar — and intimately related to them — carbon credits were supposed to set everyone on an emission reduction path by mitigating the pain of direct emission cuts that cost an arm and a leg, instead offering a hand-and-foot price tag — for a time. Let’s talk carbon credits.
