this post was submitted on 19 May 2025
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I remember being taught in school that hydrogen was the future of energy—an efficient, clean fuel created from water using renewable energy, with water as the only byproduct. All we needed was the infrastructure.
But reality hasn’t matched the theory. Green hydrogen is hard to produce, and the lack of infrastructure is a major barrier. Without users, there’s no incentive to build it, and without infrastructure, users can’t adopt it.
I agree with the article that hydrogen likely isn’t the future of transport. Electric vehicles are easier to deploy and already replacing diesel buses and trucks.
Still, hydrogen has potential—especially as an energy storage medium. Renewables like wind and solar are variable, and while nuclear is steady, it doesn’t store energy. Today, we heavily rely on coal, gas, and oil to fill the gaps between supply and demand.
Hydrogen could fill that role cleanly: store excess renewable energy and release it when needed. Batteries are an option too, but lithium mining is polluting and might be better reserved for vehicles. Hydroelectric is great but geographically limited.
So hydrogen’s future may not be in transport, but in stabilizing a clean energy grid. Ironically, that’s the role that threatens fossil fuel companies most—perhaps why their focus has been on hydrogen for transport instead?
Instead of point to point transportation, hydrogen has actually shown a lot of impact in forklifts and hydrogen powered trucks that move materials within and around industries and factories. One of the companies I know that's been doing this is plug power (PLUG) and their filings can give a good idea of what stage hydrogen is in the US
Isn't there a case for hydrogen as jet fuel? It has the potential to be much lighter than batteries, which shouldn't be surprising given that it uses oxygen from the atmosphere.
Hydrogen as a substance is light, but the equipment to make it viable isn't. The kind of high pressure tank required to keep it under high enough compression to make the energy density viable, with walls thick enough so that it doesn't embrittle and explode specularly after a few weeks' usage, is hugely heavy.
Hydrogen and it's future were purely cemented in a society with battery technology maxing out in advanced alkaline cells. Now that we're able to produce cheap, robust, and recyclable Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries with reasonable energy densities, hydrogen is pretty much officially dead. The only way it might survive is in heavy equipment applications, but pivoting those off of fossil fuels and their associated infrastructure is basically not going to happen for the foreseeable future and wouldn't really make sense anyway since the bulk of available hydrogen is manufactured using methane captured during traditional fossil fuel extraction. I'd compare it to the hype around recycled plastics/paper, purely manufactured based on the ability to sound good in marketing and inconsiderate of the significant downsides.