By Kennedy Maize
“But we all know there is no such thing as a free lunch. Hydrogen problems are real. It is so light it is difficult, meaning expensive, to store. That’s a problem for transportation uses.”
Hydrogen, 1H, the primary and most common element in the universe, consists of one proton, one electron, and no neutrons. It’s in first place on the periodic chart of the elements. In common, gaseous form, H2, it is colorless, odorless, and highly combustible. It is the fuel of the sun.
For many years, some energy mavens have touted hydrogen, an energy carrier, as the perfect fuel form for a greener earth. When combusted in pure oxygen, it produces only water and a lot of energy. When burned in air, it emits only small amounts of oxides of nitrogen. As a fuel, it is carbon free.
In air, the combustion temperature is around 2,379°C (4,314°F). A natural gas flame hits around 1,950°C. The intense heat is one reason hydrogen is valuable in industrial applications like welding and cutting metals.
Challenges
Hydrogen is an ideal element for fuel cells, which use an electrochemical process to release the electrons, producing an electric current. But we all know there is no such thing as a free lunch. Hydrogen problems are real. It is so light it is difficult, meaning expensive, to store. That’s a problem for transportation uses.
Hydrogen is not widely available naturally, generally requiring it to be produced by breaking down more available sources such as methane (CH4) in natural gas, or from water (H2O). That introduces a host of expensive problems.
Despite the perceived advantages of elemental hydrogen in an energy economy, its tale is a matter of great expectations often crashing against rocky realizations, perhaps beginning with the May 1937 explosion of the German commercial dirigible Hindenburg over Lakehurst, N.J., killing 36 passengers and crew.
Commercial Setback
The quest to commercialize hydrogen, government-enabled, [1] was set back earlier this summer. Pennsylvania-based Air Products (NYSE:APD), a major industrial gases company, announced it was pulling the plug on its long-troubled Louisiana Clean Energy Project, taking a pre-tax financial hit of up to $2.9 billion.
The project in Ascension Parish aimed at producing “blue” hydrogen and “blue” ammonia, meaning gases produced from breaking down natural gas while capturing and storing the associated carbon dioxide. That distinguishes it from “green” hydrogen, produced by splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen.
The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis wrote that the Louisiana project was founded when the “hype around blue hydrogen exploded in 2022, with the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act and the allocation of $7 billion in funding to regional Hydrogen Hubs.” The analysis said, “The decision is a huge win for taxpayers, who could have been on the hook for billions of dollars in subsidies, as well as Louisiana communities, which would have borne the environmental cost of such a facility.”
The project initially pencilled out as profitable based on assumptions about the value of carbon capture and storage tax credits from the Biden administration that were speculative at best and, most likely, hallucinatory. IEEFA commented, “By 2025, cheap natural gas and generous production subsidies were no longer enough to get a project to move ahead.”
Pick Your Type
Hydrogen is colorful, based on how it’s obtained. It’s time to introduce the hydrogen color chart.
Hydrogen boosters have most recently touted green and blue hydrogen, although green has largely vanished as an acceptable hue in the Trump administration, unless we are talking about cash. There is no “gold” hydrogen, which might merit some attention at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Prototype Examples
There are successful uses of hydrogen in transportation. Hydrogen Insight online magazine reports that a hydrogen-fueled bus in Spain “with the longest ever range — more than 1,000km on a single tank — has been in operation on various routes in and around the Spanish capital, Madrid, since June, the manufacturer has announced.”
The venerable Spanish bus and coach maker Irizar built the vehicle that is in Madrid service. According to the company, the Madrid coach “incorporates a 190-kW Bosch hydrogen fuel cell and an electric propulsion system designed for medium- and long-distance operations, enabling refueling times of around 10–15 minutes and a range exceeding 1,000 km. It maintains performance and commercial attributes equivalent to those of diesel vehicles.”
Spain is a hotbed of hydrogen energy research and development. According to the fuel cell-oriented web publication FCW, researchers from València’s Institute of Chemical Technology (ITQ) and the Institute of Information and Communication Technologies (ITACA) are working on “materials that improve the production of hydrogen from water from microwave radiation,” producing green hydrogen.
White Hydrogen Supply?
There are also hints that naturally-occurring hydrogen may be more plentiful than once thought. Recent drilling in Canada’s Ontario province by University of Toronto and University of Ottawa scientists found promising amounts of hydrogen. Science Daily reports the geologists “studied the Canadian Shield, a vast region of some of the oldest rock formations on the planet. For the first time, they directly measured hydrogen escaping from these billion-year-old rocks, tracked how it builds up over time, and mapped where the gas is concentrated.
“The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could help determine whether naturally occurring, or ‘white,’ hydrogen can become a practical and economical energy source.”
In January, 2025, the U.S. Geological Survey wrote:
Although naturally occurring hydrogen has been encountered in a wide variety of subsurface environments, millions of oil and gas wells have failed to detect more than trace concentrations of hydrogen…. This led many geoscientists to conclude that economic accumulations of hydrogen in the subsurface are non-existent… It is clear now that geoscientists were premature in concluding that economic accumulations of natural hydrogen could not exist in the subsurface.
Conclusion
Could the promise of enormous, clean energy from hydrogen become real? Not now; special government favor is keeping it in play. Someday? Perhaps. Hydrogen in its different colors is technologically feasible and thus a backstop energy for the future.
[1] Seven regional H2Hubs, created in response to the federal government’s $7 billion investment, are
- ARCHES: California Hydrogen Hub focused on renewable energy and heavy-duty mobility.
- ARCH2: Appalachian Regional Clean Hydrogen Hub spanning West Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.
- HyVelocity H2Hub: Gulf Coast hub leveraging legacy infrastructure in Texas.
- MACH2: Mid-Atlantic Clean Hydrogen Hub across Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey.
- MachH2: Midwest Alliance for Clean Hydrogen in Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan.
- PNW H2: Pacific Northwest hub in Washington, Oregon, and Montana.
- Heartland Hydrogen Hub: Spanning Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota
Recent setbacks with the above in-process projects all but ensure that the original goal of 76 “green” hydrogen projects, part of the Biden-era goal of Net Zero by 2050, will not be reached.
Kennedy Maize is a Washington, D.C.-based journalist who has covered energy and environmental topics for nearly a half-century. This post, edited here, originally appeared at The Quad Report. Maize’s previous reposts at MasterResource are here.
Hydrogen is nothing else than a fancy word for:
a) deluded greentard pipedream
b) technological paper tiger
c) economically unfeasable BS
d) all of the above
hey let’s pair up AI and hydrogen, I’m shure it will blow your mind
And subsidy harvesting.
Yes, basically it is money on the table.
That’s for bloody sure!!
And this demonstrates the utter stupidity of the concept:
To produce 1 tonne of hydrogen through the electrolysis of water requires 52.5MWh of electrical energy. And then, taking into account real-world efficiencies, using that of 1 tonne of hydrogen will generate 15MWh AT BEST. Therefore . . . ENERGY INVESTED is 3.5 x GREATER than ENERGY RETURNED . . . which is brilliant, really.
And for this to have any twisted credibility in our idiotic virtue-signalling world, the electrical supply for the electrolysis of water to produce hydrogen would obviously have to come from wind and solar generating facilities, thus producing “green hydrogen”.
But over the last 12 months in the UK, wind and solar combined generation provided 12.97GW, this from a wind and solar combined installed capacity of 58.83GW, which means they operated at a combined Capacity Factor – efficiency – of 22.05% (the least efficient form of grid-scale generation available to us).
So, if you want to deliver 1GW of electricity from wind and solar generating facilities at the current mix, with a Capacity Factor of 22.05%, those facilities will have to have an installed capacity of 4.5GW, thus demonstrating an unavoidable Overbuild Factor of 4.5.
In summary:
To make hydrogen by electrolysis requires 3.5x the energy that will be gained from using that hydrogen, and to generate the electrical energy needed for that electrolysis, the installed capacity of wind and solar generating facilities will have to be 4.5x greater than the electricity actually needed.
You get the picture, I hope – generating electricity through wind and solar, and using that electricity to make hydrogen . . . is an exercise in downright disgustingly idiotic profligacy . . . that the government – and it doesn’t matter which crowd of idiots are the government – will expect you and I to pay for.
Not mentioned in the article is the difficulty of dealing with hydrogen. It is difficult to compress and pump through pipelines requiring much more energy than natural gas. It is difficult to contain and “leaks” through some metals and nearly all gasketed connections. It is difficult to liquify requiring its temperature to be reduced to about 20 degrees above absolute zero. Natural gas liquifies at about 100C above absolute zero which is considerably easier to reach and is why liquid natural gas (LNG) is common in commerce these days. It carries less energy per cubic foot of gas than methane so would require larger diameter pipes, few gasketed closures and other changes compared to existing natural gas pipelines. Industries that need hydrogen gas to make their product deal with these problems but as an energy carrier, hydrogen is very very expensive to deal with and therefore unlikely to ever become common for such service.
Back in the 60s town gas containing about 50% hydrogen was supplied to every house in the UK, leakage was not a major problem. However, when it was later replaced with natural gas leakage became a problem and the piping had to be upgraded nationwide. Natural gas did allow about twice as much energy to be delivered via the same sized pipe.
Town gas, also called coal gas, contained a lot of methane and various carbon-based impurities some of which collected on the inside of transmission pipes ultimately clogging them. It also contained several percent of carbon monoxide which made it handy for committing suicide (stick your head in the oven) as Sylvia Plath did. Hydrogen leaked from coal gas piping as well but was not significant energy issue since most of the energy content of the gas was methane and other volatile hydrocarbons creating a nice bright light in town lights, hence Town Gas. However, hydrogen leakage caused numerous explosions within user buildings throughout the 100-200 years it was used. This is because of another disadvantage hydrogen as fuel, it has an explosive range in air between 4% and 75%. This compares to that of natural gas of 5% to 15% and as you likely know, we see too many natural gas house explosions as it is.
While hydrogen has a broad range between its combustion limits because of its very rapid diffusion rates leaked hydrogen tends to not fall within the combustion limits. Methane is more of an explosion risk because its diffusion rate is much lower so that it tends to form explosion mixtures more readily.
I know that gas appliances that used town gas had to be converted to use natural gas, not sure about the replacing of the main pipes into the house. I don’t remember large scale roadworks taking place in the town where I lived, which was the first place in the country to convert to natural gas in early 1967, when I was in year 6 at school.
Phil, the main problem with the switch from town gas to natural gas was in the joints of the older pipes which were made of some natural fiber (we call it “kemp” in Dutch) and needed to remain more or less wet. Town was was wet enough, but natural gas was dry or dried and many older joints started to leak, until they added some water vapor to the gas…
Yes Ferdinand that’s what happened, as a result there was a national program to fix it because of the unexpected increase in explosions after the change over, they lined the existing iron pipes with plastic initially.
if I remember correctly after 60 years, there was a piece on a science programme on BBC, possibly Tomorrow’s World, or a news programme about the use of plastic liners being used. I definitely recall the addition of a town gas like odour being mentioned. One positive from the switchover was the removal of the ever present smell from the town gasworks, which combined with the smell from the breweries and the Marmite factory defined the town!
Yes, the local coal based gasworks did smell! Mercaptans were added to natural gas to allow the detection of leaking gas. That originated after an explosion at a school in Texas in 1937 that killed nearly 300 pupils and teachers. It was the result of an undetected leak of natural gas in the basement.
There are some related problems that rarely get addressed: https://www.yahoo.com/news/science/articles/nobodys-talking-weak-hydrogen-economy-220000093.html
I’m surprised that Spain has a successful hydrogen bus. I remember the UK was thinking about hydrogen buses and I labeled them Hinden busses at the time. Definitely bad ideas. If I remember correctly Honda developed hydrogen powered cars in California. The problem was refueling stations few and far between. The cars were available for low $ leases if I remember correctly. The whole thing fizzled out quickly. Of course California continues to persist in the delusion of climate change and will continue to try one outlandish scheme after another. Of course the taxpayer suffer!
Ballard Power was building hydrogen buses 40 years ago along with many other projects.
As far as I know they were all long term failures. Subsidised by government and major manufacturers.
“Hindenbusses”. Love that. Then imagine Hindenplanes, Hindentrains, and Hindencars.
Oh, the insanity!
Forgot Hindenboats.
Since the subject is transportation, how about Hindenboots?
They would definitely keep the feet warm in winter.
I think you mean moderately successful.
But at what cost? Each bus is €800k, and each refuelling station is €12m.
Hydrogen production, compression, and storage are extra.
Diesel is still the cheapest upfront and overall.
Aberdeen ‘invested’ about £14million in a fleet of 25 hydrogen buses. They were ditched after only a couple of years because of problems with the refuelling infrastructure.
Toyota, Hyundai, and Honda sell hydrogen fuel cell cars. The lack of fueling stations keeps the sales low to none. Cost and liability will kill fuel cell cars.
Texas DMV reports to the legislature the number of alternatively fueled vehicles. In 2025, Texas had almost 27 million registered vehicle. Of those, 12 were hydrogen fuel cell powered. Hydrogen is dangerous, expensive to produce, expensive to store and transfer. Another subsidy farm for “greens”.
“Wow, this hydrogen-powered heating system is cool. No carbon emissions”.
Sure, with a sister plant on the wrong side of town burning old tires and stray cats to make the hydrogen.
I highly doubt hydrogen will ever have much use other than in industry, due to its high combustion temperature. It certainly will never be useful for transportation, being both expensive and dangerous.
Hydrogen is great for heating up quartz and metals to make things. Transportation? Not so much. Embrittlement and leakage problems much too difficult to compete with other fuels.
It’s almost as if hydrogen had just been discovered – how else can it be explained that this wonder stuff did not revolutionise our energy supply decades ago?
Isn’t increased water vapour in the atmosphere from naughty fossil-fuel generated CO2 raising air temperature and raising evaporation rate causing global warming rather than the alleged effect of CO2 itself?
So if hydrogen burnt in air gives mostly water vapour, by avoiding CO2 producing fossil fuels aren’t we just cutting out the middle-man, as it were with no change in outcome?
Yes.
In the Foote and Tyndall experiments, air with 2% (0.5 to 5%, unquantified) H2O had the same thermal results as 100% CO2.
“It’s almost as if hydrogen had just been discovered – how else can it be explained that this wonder stuff did not revolutionise our energy supply decades ago?”
It did, in the early 19th century!
And yet they got rid of it as soon as an alternative was available.
They replaced it when it was discovered that the country was sitting on a huge reserve of cheaper natural gas. The natural gas will need to be replaced as reserves are depleted.
All that’s needed is to develop ‘Water Capture and Storage’ technology to keep the pesky stuff out of the atmosphere. Generous government grants will no doubt be available.
Hydrogen: Not Market Ready
____________________________________________
Nor will it ever be for all the reasons stated here and in the “Related Posts” section below.
We had five buses on hydrogen driving around Antwerp for some years, tanking “white” hydrogen for free at the chlorine electrolysis plant of Solvay, where hydrogen is a byproduct at the other pole of the electrolysis.
Last year they stopped their use after some 10 years of service, because battery driven buses drive much cheaper than (even free) hydrogen, where the platinum of the fuel cells needs to be replaced about once a year…
A project to start a “blue” (?) hydrogen plant in Antwerp by the US firm “Plug Power” (anybody heard of that firm?) was blown off yesterday because of economically not feasible, even when heavily subsidized…
The battery driven busses in the US have been failures particularly in the northern states. Not only is the range limited but the downtime for repairs is a huge problem. Of course the Biden admin promoted these and the manufacturer produced faulty equipment. The company Proterra declared bankruptcy in 2023. 96 million $ down the drain of course not govt $ but taxpayers again on the hook. Of course all govt $ is taxpayer $.
How about we just look at vehicle sales trends to get an idea of the “success” of the three brands of hydrogen-powered cars available in the consumer market:
1) Toyota sold a total of 210 Toyota Mirai hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles in the United States over the course of 2025. This was a 58% decline from 2024, when 499 units were sold.
2) Hyundai sold only 5 Hyundai Nexo in 2025 in the United States.
3) Honda “sold” roughly several hundred units of the Honda CR-V e:FCEV in 2025. This hydrogen-powered vehicle has a market limited to California, and is available exclusively via lease due to hydrogen fueling infrastructure limits.
Pretty soon now the stockholders in each of these companies will shout out “Enough of this virtue signalling . . . it’s killing us!”
Late in 2025 (Oct. 9th ?) Congress failed to pass a federal spending bill, Thus, the Department of Energy announced it was slashing roughly $7.6 billion in already awarded grants. The Pacific Northwest Hydrogen Hub* {PNW H2} was among 223 projects to have funding slashed, after Energy staff found they “did not meet the economic, national security or energy security standards necessary to justify continued investment.” In an Oct. 2 announcement, Energy Secretary Chris Wright stated, “On day one, the Energy Department began the critical task of reviewing billions of dollars in financial awards, many rushed through in the final months of the Biden administration with inadequate documentation.”
*A site [Malaga, WA] 23 miles NE of me was on that list. I recall they pushed some dirt around before cancelation.
I wrote all this nonsense up (and more) in essay ‘Hydrogen Hype’ in ebook Blowing Smoke over a decade ago. Failures were inevitable. Do the math, and the Toyota Prius is more ‘environmentally clean’ than any conceivable hydrogen powered vehicle—ignoring all the noted hydrogen problems.
“For many years, some energy mavens have touted hydrogen, an energy carrier, as the perfect fuel form for a greener earth.”
I’m not sure what an energy maven is, but I can guess.
Having recently written an extensive critique on the misuse of hydrogen in applications where electrification can make much better use of renewable energy sources, I suggest that there are relatively few advocates for hydrogen among serious advocates for a low carbon future.
“the May 1937 explosion of the German commercial dirigible Hindenburg over Lakehurst, N.J.”
Yes, hydrogen made for a very destructive catastrophe.
But it was not hydrogen that caused the fire.
Current speculation is an electrostatic discharge ignited a small amount of H2 leakage but it could have directly ignited the cotton fabric skin.
The cotton fabric was highly flammable.
The cloth caught fire and the hydrogen did its thing.
Just a nit. The Hindenburg did not exactly explode in the conventional sense.
It burst into a massive fireball.
Close enough to an explosion, however, but without shrapnel.
The whole airship was consumed in approximately 34 seconds.
Oh, it might be worth noting that some 36 human lives were also “consumed” in the Hindenburg disaster: 13 passengers, 22 crew members from the airship, and one ground crew worker.
Just a nit. /sarc
Since the article addressed the 336 fatalities, I did not see the need to complicate the combustion aspect with those otherwise significant details.
Have to keep it simple in case Warren comes in. 😉
“336”!
Get the government out of the hydrogen business, if hydrogen is viable we will all find out soon enough.
A guy named Ballard in Vancouver BC has been trying to find traction with hydrogen fuel for several decades.
Did work with some automobile companies.
Appears to be having some success with fuel cells for transportation, where central refuelling is practical.
Fuel Cell Technology: Powering the Future
Earlier in the Vancouver BC area had success with fuel cells using other fuel, in niches like very small submarines.
Home – International Submarine Engineering
(It may have expertise in robotics.)
In Europe some RVs have a fuel cell to provide electricity when parked, you buy a jug of special liquid – some kind of alcohol I think, high purity.
OTOH systems to change gasoline to something sent into a fuel cell have not been successful AFAIK. (Would have to be pure whereas aviation and automotive fuels have additives. Perhaps ‘naptha’ (‘white gas’) for pressurized farm lanterns and camping stoves and lanterns. Kerosene used in farm lanterns and house lamps may be fairly pure for clean burning (they use a wick that draws the fuel upward to the burning surface). )
Those EU RV fuel cells are most likely methanol. They do work, but relatively low 40% efficiency. Impractical for regular vehicle propulsion. And more expensive than a small RV gasoline or propane genset (RVs in the US often have significant propane storage for cooking and hot water). My daughter’s family new RV camping trailer is propane. My fiancé and her former ‘intimate’ decade older rich travel companion were big into the self propelled RV scene for over a decade—also propane, as their big RV was diesel engine powered.
Reminds me of of a guy name Bob.
What? Burning hydrogen creates oxygen dihydride, widely used as a commercial solvent. One lungful is fatal.
Also the most copious and powerful so-called “greenhouse gas” known.
On the other hand, without sufficient oxygen dihydride, plants and mammals die – humans only last about 72 hours or so without it.
The answer is to burn hydrocarbons to produce heat, water, and carbon dioxide. Heat and water are vital for human existence, and carbon dioxide is food for the plants needed to nourish humans.
Win-win – too easy!
CH4 rather than H2 as an industrial fuel, please.
Just think about the stoichiometry.
2 H2 + 1 O2 = 2 H2O. But Earth already has lots of water.
1 CH4 + 2 O2 = 2 H2O + 1 CO2 for new plant food. There is a providential reason nature turned photosynthetic long ago sequestered marine collagen into methane in now frackable marine shales. For us to now reutilize. Frack on!
Just one minor (?) observation:
Nature, like mankind, seldom employs exactly stoichiometric chemical reactions.
Hence, from natural sources of hydrogen, oxygen and methane, nature produces natural ozone, methyl hydroperoxide (CH3OOH), formaldehyde (HCHO), and Carbon Monoxide (CO). Reference: https://www.envchemgroup.com/climate-change-methane-and-ozone.html
Could you imagine the conflagration that could arise if a hydrogen powered vehicle rear ended an EV or hybrid vehicle? Hydrogen plus lithium (plus petrol in a hybrid).
Thanks for the new nightmare inspiration. 😉
Yes, don’t spray water on the Lithium hydride that would be produced! Why do you think that would be any worse than a collision with a gasoline powered car?
I always find it interesting that it is seldom mentioned that it takes twice as much energy to create hydrogen than the hydrogen produced will generate.
My understanding is that creating hydrogen (either monatomic or diatomic) requires something like the Big Bang.
However, I might be wrong on this.
The chemistry and thermodynamics of hydrogen make it only a dream (fantasy) for commercial use.
The only thing going for commercial hydrogen is political pressure and the use of taxpayer funds also known as someone else’s money. When other peoples money is not available, hydrogen disappears into a though project.
Margaret Thatcher famously stated, “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”
One can make similar statements about Net Zero energy funding including hydrogen.