Hello hydrogen! You took your time getting here

In 1975, the BBC’s flagship science programme Horizon featured a short item that wondered, ‘In the future, we could be looking to new forms of transport powered by non-polluting fuels’—and featured a car that some students in LA had modified that ran on this potential wonder fuel, showing a bearded weirdie confidently holding a paper cup up to a pretty belchy windpipe to capture its only waste product: H₂O.

Yes, hydrogen. Remember that? The easy way to decarbonise everything from the way we made and powered cars to fuelling ocean tankers to bashing out steel? Doesn’t seem to have quite happened yet, has it?

Though it’s tempting to write it off with the same kind of gag we make about another fabled future magical power source, nuclear fusion, which is always 25 years in the future no matter what year you make the prediction, hydrogen failed to live up to the hype, but from industrial breakthroughs to heavy transport and energy storage, a definite “hydrogen economy” is quietly taking shape.

The great white hydro hope

To see why we should still care, let’s do the ultra-fast historical montage (cue ‘March of Time’ music and carousels of newspaper headlines) (but let’s skip forward a bit from 1975).

2010 to 2018 or so was the hype era when both governments and corporations were confident hydrogen was the imminent, ultimate clean energy carrier. We’d have hydrogen all around us, from hydrogen-powered cars, buses, trucks and even trains (hydrail!); major oil & gas players like Shell and BP, invested heavily; and we all expected a hydrogen economy within a decade.

Given as one doesn’t see that many people rehydrating from their exhaust pipes (and we hope the lad didn’t suffer any long-term effects from that), this hasn’t happened. And a lot goes back to the chemistry. It’s not an energy source, but an energy carrier; you have to make the stuff first, which in practical terms means you will end up with the cheap ‘grey’ stuff (easy to make from natural gas, but emits CO₂), the ‘blue’ version (expensive, but less polluting, and needs a carbon capture plan) and, at the top of the scale, nice ‘green’ hydro, which you can get from water via electrolysis, renewable electricity if you want, but which is pricey and hard to make at scale.

Believe it or not, there are loads of types of hydrogen, including purple and turquoise, but let’s not get too distracted. The point is making non-GHG stuff is a cost-pollution equation that needs solving in its own right.

In 2023, green hydrogen production was approximately 146 kilotonnes per year (kt/y), so a mere 0.15% of the total 97,000 kt/y hydrogen market; yes, this is growing and may be up to 14% by some estimates, but from such a low base this will, shall we say, take a while.

Then there’s the storage and transport; as NASA’s Artemis wranglers will be only too happy to tell you, the stuff’s low-density and leaks easily, requiring high pressure or very cold liquefaction. Beyond that, out in the wild pipelines and fuelling infrastructure are limited, so it’s not been easy to move from PPT to commercial reality here.

It also looks that in the race for hydrogen-powered cars, unless there’s some kind of breakthrough we can’t see yet, hydrogen conversion back to electricity is less efficient than batteries for many applications—especially passenger cars, despite that 1975 idealism: short version, hydrogen cars are dead, at least for now (though fans point out it’s a matter of a couple of minutes to refuel this kind of vehicle versus an EV).

Heavier loads make more hydro-sense

But hydrogen trucks aren’t. Maybe. After all, ‘As the lightest of all the energy carriers, hydrogen would be a better option for lorries with large loads travelling long distances’.

There’s also parallel interest in looking at it to fuel moving big things through space, where batteries are too heavy or slow to recharge—and most definitely in the rail context, where the fact they can operate on non-electrified railway lines is raising a lot of interest, with Siemens Mobility working on two-car hydrogen trains with a range of up to 1,200 kilometres on a single tank of hydrogen, and which are set for early delivery for South Bavarian operator later this year.

The same argument applies in maritime transport, which has been experimenting on another less polluting fuel, green methanol, which we reported on in 2024, but there’s a lot of interest in hydrogen in this sector.

But there’s always also been interest in hydrogen in non-transport applications; a lot of industrial applications, from oil refining (desulphurisation), producing ammonia for fertilizers, and synthesising methanol, and, of course making steel, already use hydrogen: the more of the green variety we can employ here, the better.

It seems to be the case that hydrogen is more of a niche solution than the universal energy answer we once imagined, and may not be something that powers our homes (certainly in the UK, at least for the foreseeable). We are also far off that hydrogen infrastructure that we were promised ten years back.

Less visible—but more distributed?

But hydrogen does make sense, at least in certain use cases. We are getting better at making green hydrogen: in the last five years, production costs have dropped as much 50%, due to cheaper electrolysers and wider availability of renewable power.

Though Trump has rolled back a lot of the previous White House’s Green projects, there has been at least some serious work in developing the stuff’s potential, the EU has a Hydrogen Strategy very much focused on application of green hydrogen in heavy industry and ports, and has a target of renewable hydrogen covering around 10% of the Union’s entire energy needs by 2050. The UK also seems to be serious about moving in this direction, too, as are the Saudis (to the tune of $10bn).

So, we still need to scale green hydrogen and there’s a lot of deep science and smart engineering that still needs to happen. We may have to accept a lot of hybrid systems to start with, like hydrogen paired with ammonia, or hydrogen as synthetic fuels, and so on. But investment is coming back in, promising ideas abound, especially in things like hydrogen turbine tech, and much more.

Bottom line: hydrogen still matters--but there’s been a big recalibration of what its ideal place in the value chain really is. Does that really matter, though, if you drive a battery car and travel in a hydrotrain? Which would you prefer: a car that spits out water, or better ways to make steel and power container ships?

We think even the lads in the cheesecloth shirts back then would shrug and be fine with that.