"Clean Coal" is a furphy, and it's looking like "Clean Hydrogen" is unattainable. In reality, practically all hydrogen made today is extracted from fossil fuels, or is made from water by electrolysis that's powered by a non-renewable source of electricity.
Some people talk about "Blue hydrogen" and claim they're cracked the secret of making it in commercial volumes at a price that's competitive with renewables, but they're not being honest with you about the cost or the quality of their product. Proponents claim that coal — such as Victoria's incredibly dirty, low-quality, high-pollutant brown coal — can be transformed into "Brown Hydrogen" or "Black Hydrogen" by capturing the carbon liberated during the hydrogen extraction process using Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS). Same goes for "Blue Hydrogen" that's extracted from fossil gas.
They're sorta correct, in the sense that you can get out hydrogen. But if you blink you'll miss seeing where the Carbon goes. By then, they'll attempt to scratch off the label to rebrand their dirty hydrogen as "Green Hydrogen".
Herein lies the scam: they're saying is can be done cleanly. The problem is that they're using CSS as part of the process. It would be nice if CCS worked at an industrial scale at any price, but it doesn't. Countless millions of dollars have been poured by governments around the world into CCS pilot-plants at fossil fuel companies. The fossil fuel companies have all pocketed the money and failed to produce results.
Scratch the surface of any hydrogen-bro, and you'll find a hydrocarbon-bro who's deliberately propping-up the unsustainable coal/gas/petrol industry or is an unwitting fool who's science-illiterate.
