Hydrogen has been the future as long as I have been paying attention to electric cars. There are many problems with it, including Hydrogen is the smallest molecule. It leaks through seals, embrittles metals, and has terrible energy density by volume. You either compress it to 700 bar (heavy tanks), liquefy it at -253°C (energy-intensive), or store it in metal hydrides (heavy, slow release). Solid state batteries are much more interesting. They extend EV range to 600-1000 miles and enable 10-minute charging. If they work at scale, they kill hydrogen for cars, trucks, and probably short-haul aviation too.
I have a problem with the current physics of this. A car requires a LOT of energy to run. The electrical requirements "at the pump" are going to be pretty hefty for 10 minute charging.
Unless:
1. Reduce capacity requirements. IE Cars evolve smaller and smaller until they are practically aerodynamically efficient go-karts. A trend opposite of current affairs....
2. Charge for longer timeframes but swap in less than 10 minutes. IE standardise and replace batteries as needed.
I suspect that the "10 minute recharge" meme will be obviated by ridiculous ranges allowing us to then charge while sleeping instead.
I like the idea of swappable batteries in theory, but in reality... well... that's a lot of logistics and a lot of potential for things to go wrong. Consider the swappable propane tank market, for instance; it's clear that returning cans need refurbishment and testing before you can give them back out to people. This implies it probably can't be just done on-site at a gas station.
They also weigh an absolute ton, so specialized lift equipment is needed; they take up space and will be very difficult to move around. So, are we expecting to stock a huge pile of batteries somewhere with an automatic loader/unloader that can handle multiple people at once with a quick turnover rate that can put away a 2000 pound battery? It's just too much infra, compared to a charging station...
And then there's the matter of the vehicle design; chassis rigidity is important and batteries, being a huge weight, need to be positioned properly with enough load bearing structure around them to support this. I'm imagining a hydraulic lift raising a 2000 pound battery up into my car; some massive brace needs to be attached below it to hold it up. Talk about difficult to get right; we've got harsh conditions like road salt and rust to deal with, and we have to make a fully automatable fastening device that can work at a random gas station with any brand of car... yikes.
You're actually much closer to the idea with the reduce-capacity idea. I had a Ford Focus Electric a while ago that had about 80km of range on a good day. This was more than enough for 90% of my driving; my old SUV handled the rest. Net carbon savings were huge; pity it was totaled in an accident or I'd have kept it going. Even at almost 10 years old it still kept a charge no problem and was a delight to drive compared to a normal Focus. My current EV has far more range but feels heavy and ponderous despite nearly 500 HP.
2-3 min battery replacement is already a thing in China for trucks. The largest manufacture CATL is also pushing for safety and compatibility standards so all trucks can use all truck batteries in future.
And for charging they are building charging stations with batteries that are charged slowly but can charge cars fast.
The electricity revolution is just picking up pace
Trucks are a far cry from cars. There's a lot more space and specialized service facilities and maintenance procedures are the norm. Drivers are expected to understand far more about their vehicles.
Very much simplified, a 10 minute charge would mean 6C charging throughout the curve. 100 kWh battery would thus require 600 kW on average. Right now the most powerful MCS chargers deliver 1440 kW.
So not impossible, as long as the battery can handle the current. It's obvious that charging technology is not going to be the bottleneck.
(A real battery would probably have a charging curve that slows down towards the end, so more than 6C would be required in realistic conditions.)
While hydrogen fuel cell technology may not hold a distinct competitive advantage in the passenger vehicle market—where battery electric vehicles have achieved greater maturity in infrastructure and cost reduction—it retains significant merits in heavy-duty trucking and stationary power generation applications. This is particularly true when "grey hydrogen" (industrial by-product hydrogen derived from processes such as steam methane reforming or chlor-alkali production, rather than electrolysis powered by renewable energy) is readily available at competitive prices.
Under such conditions, the total cost of ownership for fuel cell systems can achieve parity with, or even fall below, that of lithium-ion battery solutions. Furthermore, when accounting for the end-of-life considerations—where fuel cells present fewer recycling challenges and material recovery complexities compared to the substantial battery waste stream associated with electrochemical energy storage—hydrogen fuel cells emerge as a fundamentally more sustainable and economically viable long-term solution.
The arena of pragmatic debate here is in the billion tonne / annum heavy haulage mineral resources sector.
The few big players are keen to drop fossil fuels for many reasons and have had the capital to invest in meaningful R&D for the past decades which is still ongoing.
They also have an advantage of fixed controlled routes and total infrastructure control over extraction, haulage, and shipping sites; power, rail, roads, et al.
Bulk hydrogen makes a lot less sense than pumping water up a hill. We have thousands and thousands of sites throughout the country that would be great for pumped storage and require absolutely no advanced technology. They are buildable today.
Location, location, location - there are many sites globally suitable for geological bulk hydrogen storage; the UK has had the Tesside site operational until recently since the early 1970s.
They were built 50 years ago. (Slightly before today).
Scaling that up to the energy storage potential of the right geological structures of the sizes needed to power cities and run heavy industrial isn't as economically clearcut as you may assume.
Solid state batteries are overhyped because their production complexity makes them a pricing nightmare for the average consumer. Sodium ion batteries are the practical choice for short distance transport because they are affordable and charge incredibly fast.
When it comes to long distance shipping or aviation, the energy density of liquid fuel is simply too hard to beat. Fossil fuels will stay dominant for decades, likely evolving into carbon captured or bio derived alternatives rather than being replaced by batteries.
Compressed hydrogen and cryogenic liquefaction also present explosive/BLEVE risks. Metal-hydride is probably the only reasonably safe-ish option. Other issues (like hydrogen embrittlement, leaking, slower flow-rate) are all very real challenges, but 'solvable'. Solving all of them at a price that consumers/businesses can stomach is quite debatable.
Batteries are just too good nowadays to expect hydrogen to receive the level of R&D and infrastructure investment to become at all competitive.
Looking forward to seeing solid state batteries for aviation, but the scary part is that they get heavier when they discharge as oxygen from the air turns into solid oxide.
Isn't that good for aviation? Makes it relatively less expensive to carry reserve energy you don't expect to use, don't have to pay the weight cost during takeoff when weight costs the most energy because you just charged the battery and once you're at cruising speed more weight is just neutral momentum.
Probably the least convenient thing would be if you had to land and take off again somewhere without recharging.
Electric heavy duty trucks are already here, with existing battery technology.
> In 2020, nearly all new trucks in China ran on diesel. By the first half of 2025, battery-powered trucks accounted for 22% of new heavy truck sales, up from 9.2% in the same period in 2024, according to Commercial Vehicle World, a Beijing-based trucking data provider. The British research firm BMI forecasts electric trucks will reach nearly 46% of new sales this year and 60% next year.
> The share of electrics in new truck sales, from 8% in 2024 to 28% by August 2025, has more than tripled as prices have fallen. Electric trucks outsold LNG-powered vehicles in China for five consecutive months this year, according to Commercial Vehicle World.
> While electric trucks are two to three times more expensive than diesel ones and cost roughly 18% more than LNG trucks, their higher energy efficiency and lower costs can save owners an estimated 10% to 26% over the vehicle’s lifetime, according to research by Chinese scientists.
I'm not a fan of the way grey hydrogen was written off: That hydrogen is already being produced today by several different refinery processes, and then burned in a furnace because no one else wants it.
So the right way to handle the carbon accounting isn't to assume that all the CO2 produced by the refinery processes count against the hydrogen produced, but rather that the energy that refineries get from burning the hydrogen would be replaced by them burning natural gas instead.
The per-kg energy value of burning H2 is ~2.5x the value of natural gas (refineries generally use LHV for this accounting). But each kg of natural gas that gets burned produces ~2.8 kg of CO2 (because burning replaces the puny hydrogen with relatively larger oxygen atoms).
2.5*2.8 = 7kg of CO2 per kg of H2 taken out of the refinery. Which isn't as big a difference from the 10kg reported in the article as I expected when I set about writing this comment.
I don't disagree with your numbers, but "and then burned in a furnace because no one else wants it" is doing a lot of work.
Why does nobody want it? If it is being burned off because nobody wants it, then it effectively has less value after compressing and delivering it than the natural gas itself (or as you say, they'd be selling it and burning the natural gas instead).
The truth is, you can burn it off and save the cost and trouble of purifying and storing it (which also uses energy and produces carbon), especially when using it in fuel cells requires 99.99% purity. You couldn't just pipe it over to a data center or power plant.
It's worth considering also that not only is the hydrogen that would come out dirtier (because it's being replaced by natural gas), it's also making the natural gas dirtier, because you're burning methane instead of hydrogen to refine it.
Good article, as always hydrogen for transport is dead. Unfortunately, as they say, what is dead can never die. And there will always be companies trying to siphon off public funds to do “trial runs”.
One thing that seems wrong is in the efficiency comparison: step 1 for hydrogen should be grid transmission, not electrolyzer.
Also, how come the BEV price doesn’t adjust in response to electricity prices (not that it would impact the result).
This is a very poor analysis, since it doesn’t account for the capital costs. Even if hydrogen is inefficient compared to batteries, it could win if the upfront investment was low enough to offset the additional fuel cost. This is quite obvious, since that’s why diesel trucks are winning today — the upfront cost of a diesel engine is cheap enough that it offsets the higher lifetime fuel costs.
I do think that batteries will win, but the correct argument is one that shows that capital costs of batteries are going down faster than the cost of hydrogen production.
Show me how the capital costs of rolling out high PSI hydrogen infra will be cheaper than building a power grid. You can even refit and re-use existing natural gas pipelines to move hydrogen if you want to cheat. I am willing to bet the costs per kW will still be crazy, especially at last mile where you are in an area populated by humans.
I don't see a bright future for hydrogen in transport while we keep putting cheap solar, wind, and batteries on the grid / roads.
Yeah. Vehicle costs are pretty much the same (for battery electric and fuel cell electric buses, at least) and are about 2-3x more than ICE. On-site hydrogen infra for fueling/storage is substantially more than charging equipment. H2 fuel is currently $10-20 per kg (the higher end accounts for vapor losses), which is, again, much greater than either diesel or electricity.
Hydrogen is so hard to handle that NASA never really figured it out; hydrogen leaks just delayed Artemis 2 last week. There's been about 70 years of trying to solve these issues for space launch and very little progress. It doesn't seem like it'll be easier trying to do this as the scale of every gas station?
The article skips that i think most realistic and plausible option - fuel cell using hydrogen extracted from the standard hydrocarbon fuel right on the truck. Thus hydrogen would be present only in the short path - from fuel splitter to the fuel call. The fuel cell has higher efficiency than ICE and having electrical engine works better for trucks than ICE too. Such setup is overkill, at least for near future, for regular cars, while for trucks it seems worth the investment.
Onboard reforming has been explored and it's not great. The end-to-end efficiency is poor (<50%). It adds a ton of complexity. It requires having a reactor running at over 700°C. It takes time to warm up. It's not cleaner. Impurities like sulfur kill it.
In the end it's only about as efficient as just using a regular diesel engine, much harder to service, more expensive to maintain, and doesn't improve your carbon footprint at all. What's the point?
This analysis does not account for side benefit of the oxygen. If you split water to get hydrogen, then for every kilogram of hydrogen you get, you also get 8 kg of oxygen. Liquid oxygen is not an expensive commodity, its market price is about $1/kg, but in this context this makes a difference. For example, in the first infographic, the cost of green hydrogen produced today is listed as £16.97 which is about $23. If you can recoup $8 from this by selling the oxygen, or even only $5, then this makes a difference. If you select green H2 with 2030 assumptions, you get £7.67, or about $10s. If you sell the oxygen at $5, you basically get the hydrogen at half price, and this makes the hydrogen powered truck slightly more economical than the battery powered one.
Does the cost of green hydrogen not already price this in? It would be crazy to go through the trouble of electrolysis and just vent the oxygen into the atmosphere
The current market price is based on current supply and demand. Splitting water to create enough hydrogen for non-trivial fraction of the transportation sector would generate an enormous amount of oxygen. The price of oxygen would likely tank in that situation.
Except you can make oxygen for pretty cheap using oxygen concentrators. The technology is simple enough that home versions exist for patients with lung problems can lug one around at all times to have a feed of oxygen rich air. Oxygen is almost 21% of the air we breathe, it's trivial to capture. Hydrogen counts for only 0.000055%.
As much as I find H2 fuel cell technology - which is a type of a gas based electric battery with no moving parts - fascinating, I can't help but wonder if we would be better off just running hybrids on e-fuels.
e-fuels are just low quality gasoline, IIUC, made by (waves hands) ethical means from thin air using electricity. They still generate NOx gases, but ICEs just take them as is, and they're much more energy dense compared to long range batteries.
The only real problem is that there don't seem to be many green and scalable means to produce them, but if we could, I think it can be an overall better alternative to seemingly unworkable hydrogen based EVs and/or unrecyclable battery based EVs.
I think the Edison motors approach will be the most future-proof, using drop-in power supply bricks, one can abstract the power source to the point where it won't matter if it's a fuel cell, natural gas turbine or a new battery technology, to the truck it's just electricity (plus or minus some metadata for things like regen breaking or engine gear)
This has been tried a few times. The sticking point has always been twofold
0- this is a massive upfront investment for what amounts to a small time savings (having extra batteries on hand, charging them and the equipment to remove / move / install the heavy units
1- unless manufacturers agree to share a specification, you're tied to a single brand and risk being shut out of replacements when that inevitably goes away because it didn't catch on or got deprecated
2- for individual consumers, the battery is the most expensive component of their vehicle, and trading it for a used one of unspecified origen to save a few minutes instead of charging is not appealing.
Given one and two, overcoming the expense of 0 is not at all economical for many situations. The ones that most need it can't afford it, or could be satisfied with relatively short high voltage charging.
The point of the Edison motors approach is that you can just drop in a diesel engine - their initial goal is to electrify trucks used for industrial work in Canada by making them series hybrids.
It will work great for them because these trucks are designed to be modular and easily repairable (they are driven hard and WILL break when their owners need them). I would not be surprised at all if it develops into an impromptu standard just because so many eyes are on the system all the time.
Battery swaps are not practical, but the guy you're replying to is making the point that an electric vehicle could be built with a modular, removable power source, and converted between gas/hybrid/battery/hydrogen/natural gas/whatever later in life depending on the needs. That's just not possible with a vehicle which directly connects the powerplant with the wheels - there's too much nonsense like transmissions and differentials to deal with when you do that.
I think it makes a ton of sense for trucks, much less sense for cars.
Would a system like the one in China - with the user of methanol conversion from excess Wind/Solar/Other power gen (even idle coal) making it much more flexible to generate/transport/store rather than trying to buildout gas distribution.
With the added advantage of fuel cell swaps [0] and reload giving the trucks a quicker turnaround time per charge (i think similar op is used for electric trucks as well as some consumer car models)
It certainly solves the problem of recharge points as the infra can be rolled out piecemeal, and since it would be for heavy trucks less disruptive of the rest of the cityscape (can have the outside metroplitan areas etc with maybe emergency stops within)
Or -hear me out- we can put these long I beams on the ground and put some cables above. Then tie 50 trucks to each other and they can get whatever kind of electricity from anything you can make electricity out of.
Well we already have a lot of those, at least in North America (best freight rail system in the world), and it might make sense to build even more tracks in some areas. But rail will never be practical for time-sensitive cargo. It just takes too long to assemble a train and move cars through switching yards. We're always going to need a lot of trucks no matter what.
Sort of. The locomotives are diesel electric series hybrids. Which means you can make one that can travel anywhere that isn't electrified but add a pantograph to it for minimal additional cost and then stop burning diesel anywhere that is, and electrify the lines piecemeal.
Add a battery car and you only have to electrify a minority of the lines to be off diesel a majority of the time.
Truely rail-fans are transportation equivalent to vegans in food or cross-fit in exercise. I've spent many an hour on the Isle of Sodor and appreciate how useful those engines are in so many contexts. Yet still, there are buses that move alongside Percy, and pick up stranded passengers, and the Fat Controller (aka Sir Topham Hat) still has a sedan. It's a multi-modal world out there and the tractor trailer still has a place in it.
Excellent analysis. Two points: what if 1) only surplus energy from offshore wind would be used for green H2 electrolysis and 2) the price would be at or below £/€/$ 1.50 per Kg?
Thanks. Both good questions, and they come up a lot.
To be clear, I'm fully behind decarbonising freight. It's one of the hardest sectors to clean up and it needs serious attention. But hydrogen for road transport requires jumping in with both feet (due to infrastructure requirements) when there are dozens of smaller, commercially proven steps that get you equivalent results. Better route planning, driver training, aerodynamic retrofits, hybrid and battery electric for shorter routes, even just reducing empty running.
These aren't exciting and they don't get press releases, but they compound. The industry could cut emissions meaningfully with changes that pay for themselves today, without waiting for a national hydrogen infrastructure that doesn't exist yet.
On surplus offshore wind: the economics only work if you assume the electricity is genuinely surplus, meaning there's literally no other use for it. In practice, the UK grid still runs gas plants for roughly 40% of generation. Every MWh of offshore wind that goes into an electrolyser instead of displacing gas is a missed decarbonisation opportunity. "Surplus" renewable electricity is a future state, not a current one, and even when we get there, interconnectors, grid storage, and demand response will compete for those MWh. The electrolyser only makes sense after all of those higher value uses are saturated.
On £1.50/kg: that would genuinely change the fuel cost picture, getting you to roughly 12-15p per mile which is competitive with diesel. But the distribution problem doesn't go away at any price point. You still need compression or liquefaction, transport, and a national network of dispensing stations. The UK has 11 public hydrogen stations. Even free hydrogen doesn't help if there's nowhere to fill up. The grid is already everywhere. Adding a charger to a depot is a transformer upgrade. Adding a hydrogen station is a £2-5M civil engineering project.
The place where cheap green hydrogen gets really exciting is exactly the applications where you can't just plug in: steel, ammonia, seasonal storage, maritime. Those don't need a distributed national refuelling network, they need point to point bulk delivery to industrial sites and ports, which is a much more tractable logistics problem.
The logistical nightmare of hydrogen makes its production price almost irrelevant. Using surplus wind energy for carbon capture to create synthetic fuels is much smarter because these liquids are compatible with our current global infrastructure. You bypass the need for expensive new pipelines and specialized tanks entirely. By binding green hydrogen into a stable synthetic hydrocarbon, you get a fuel that is easy to move, has high energy density, and won't leak through solid steel.
Hydrogen has been the future as long as I have been paying attention to electric cars. There are many problems with it, including Hydrogen is the smallest molecule. It leaks through seals, embrittles metals, and has terrible energy density by volume. You either compress it to 700 bar (heavy tanks), liquefy it at -253°C (energy-intensive), or store it in metal hydrides (heavy, slow release). Solid state batteries are much more interesting. They extend EV range to 600-1000 miles and enable 10-minute charging. If they work at scale, they kill hydrogen for cars, trucks, and probably short-haul aviation too.
> enable 10-minute charging.
I have a problem with the current physics of this. A car requires a LOT of energy to run. The electrical requirements "at the pump" are going to be pretty hefty for 10 minute charging.
Unless:
1. Reduce capacity requirements. IE Cars evolve smaller and smaller until they are practically aerodynamically efficient go-karts. A trend opposite of current affairs....
2. Charge for longer timeframes but swap in less than 10 minutes. IE standardise and replace batteries as needed.
I suspect that the "10 minute recharge" meme will be obviated by ridiculous ranges allowing us to then charge while sleeping instead.
I like the idea of swappable batteries in theory, but in reality... well... that's a lot of logistics and a lot of potential for things to go wrong. Consider the swappable propane tank market, for instance; it's clear that returning cans need refurbishment and testing before you can give them back out to people. This implies it probably can't be just done on-site at a gas station.
They also weigh an absolute ton, so specialized lift equipment is needed; they take up space and will be very difficult to move around. So, are we expecting to stock a huge pile of batteries somewhere with an automatic loader/unloader that can handle multiple people at once with a quick turnover rate that can put away a 2000 pound battery? It's just too much infra, compared to a charging station...
And then there's the matter of the vehicle design; chassis rigidity is important and batteries, being a huge weight, need to be positioned properly with enough load bearing structure around them to support this. I'm imagining a hydraulic lift raising a 2000 pound battery up into my car; some massive brace needs to be attached below it to hold it up. Talk about difficult to get right; we've got harsh conditions like road salt and rust to deal with, and we have to make a fully automatable fastening device that can work at a random gas station with any brand of car... yikes.
You're actually much closer to the idea with the reduce-capacity idea. I had a Ford Focus Electric a while ago that had about 80km of range on a good day. This was more than enough for 90% of my driving; my old SUV handled the rest. Net carbon savings were huge; pity it was totaled in an accident or I'd have kept it going. Even at almost 10 years old it still kept a charge no problem and was a delight to drive compared to a normal Focus. My current EV has far more range but feels heavy and ponderous despite nearly 500 HP.
2-3 min battery replacement is already a thing in China for trucks. The largest manufacture CATL is also pushing for safety and compatibility standards so all trucks can use all truck batteries in future. And for charging they are building charging stations with batteries that are charged slowly but can charge cars fast. The electricity revolution is just picking up pace
Trucks are a far cry from cars. There's a lot more space and specialized service facilities and maintenance procedures are the norm. Drivers are expected to understand far more about their vehicles.
Very much simplified, a 10 minute charge would mean 6C charging throughout the curve. 100 kWh battery would thus require 600 kW on average. Right now the most powerful MCS chargers deliver 1440 kW.
So not impossible, as long as the battery can handle the current. It's obvious that charging technology is not going to be the bottleneck.
(A real battery would probably have a charging curve that slows down towards the end, so more than 6C would be required in realistic conditions.)
The path of most interest to many is Renewables -> bulk hydrogen as storage -> electricity grid.
The bulk storage method of interest is dissolved salt caverns: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47160599
While hydrogen fuel cell technology may not hold a distinct competitive advantage in the passenger vehicle market—where battery electric vehicles have achieved greater maturity in infrastructure and cost reduction—it retains significant merits in heavy-duty trucking and stationary power generation applications. This is particularly true when "grey hydrogen" (industrial by-product hydrogen derived from processes such as steam methane reforming or chlor-alkali production, rather than electrolysis powered by renewable energy) is readily available at competitive prices.
Under such conditions, the total cost of ownership for fuel cell systems can achieve parity with, or even fall below, that of lithium-ion battery solutions. Furthermore, when accounting for the end-of-life considerations—where fuel cells present fewer recycling challenges and material recovery complexities compared to the substantial battery waste stream associated with electrochemical energy storage—hydrogen fuel cells emerge as a fundamentally more sustainable and economically viable long-term solution.
The arena of pragmatic debate here is in the billion tonne / annum heavy haulage mineral resources sector.
The few big players are keen to drop fossil fuels for many reasons and have had the capital to invest in meaningful R&D for the past decades which is still ongoing.
They also have an advantage of fixed controlled routes and total infrastructure control over extraction, haulage, and shipping sites; power, rail, roads, et al.
Recent notes from that edge include:
* Fortescue says Rio Tinto wrong about electric trucks, admits hydrogen tech at “very early stage” - https://reneweconomy.com.au/fortescue-says-rio-tinto-wrong-a...
* BHP and Rio Tinto welcome first Caterpillar battery-electric haul trucks to the Pilbara - https://www.riotinto.com/en/news/releases/2025/bhp-and-rio-t...
and
* Andrew Forrest pivots on hydrogen trucks - https://www.afr.com/companies/mining/fortescue-and-rio-say-b...
Forrest being one of the more pro-hydrogen billionaires in the mix.
FWiW I watch all the approaches with interest and expect to see more Red Queen racing before any trophies go out.
Bulk hydrogen makes a lot less sense than pumping water up a hill. We have thousands and thousands of sites throughout the country that would be great for pumped storage and require absolutely no advanced technology. They are buildable today.
Location, location, location - there are many sites globally suitable for geological bulk hydrogen storage; the UK has had the Tesside site operational until recently since the early 1970s.
They were built 50 years ago. (Slightly before today).
Pumped hydrogen at Walpole is a great functional little project that eases the grid edge brown out problem. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45332157 )
Scaling that up to the energy storage potential of the right geological structures of the sizes needed to power cities and run heavy industrial isn't as economically clearcut as you may assume.
My favorite part is that high pressure hydrogen leaks can auto-ignite in air.
http://www.icders.org/ICDERS2007/abstracts/ICDERS2007-0255.p...
Solid state batteries are overhyped because their production complexity makes them a pricing nightmare for the average consumer. Sodium ion batteries are the practical choice for short distance transport because they are affordable and charge incredibly fast.
When it comes to long distance shipping or aviation, the energy density of liquid fuel is simply too hard to beat. Fossil fuels will stay dominant for decades, likely evolving into carbon captured or bio derived alternatives rather than being replaced by batteries.
Compressed hydrogen and cryogenic liquefaction also present explosive/BLEVE risks. Metal-hydride is probably the only reasonably safe-ish option. Other issues (like hydrogen embrittlement, leaking, slower flow-rate) are all very real challenges, but 'solvable'. Solving all of them at a price that consumers/businesses can stomach is quite debatable.
Batteries are just too good nowadays to expect hydrogen to receive the level of R&D and infrastructure investment to become at all competitive.
Looking forward to seeing solid state batteries for aviation, but the scary part is that they get heavier when they discharge as oxygen from the air turns into solid oxide.
Isn't that good for aviation? Makes it relatively less expensive to carry reserve energy you don't expect to use, don't have to pay the weight cost during takeoff when weight costs the most energy because you just charged the battery and once you're at cruising speed more weight is just neutral momentum.
Probably the least convenient thing would be if you had to land and take off again somewhere without recharging.
> Probably the least convenient thing would be if you had to land and take off again somewhere without recharging.
...or... go around?
Except you started with 1500 miles of charge for a 200 mile flight because "fully charged" weighs less.
If you're up there waiting for a long time you don't have to fly in a tight circle at a high speed.
Electric heavy duty trucks are already here, with existing battery technology.
> In 2020, nearly all new trucks in China ran on diesel. By the first half of 2025, battery-powered trucks accounted for 22% of new heavy truck sales, up from 9.2% in the same period in 2024, according to Commercial Vehicle World, a Beijing-based trucking data provider. The British research firm BMI forecasts electric trucks will reach nearly 46% of new sales this year and 60% next year.
> The share of electrics in new truck sales, from 8% in 2024 to 28% by August 2025, has more than tripled as prices have fallen. Electric trucks outsold LNG-powered vehicles in China for five consecutive months this year, according to Commercial Vehicle World.
> While electric trucks are two to three times more expensive than diesel ones and cost roughly 18% more than LNG trucks, their higher energy efficiency and lower costs can save owners an estimated 10% to 26% over the vehicle’s lifetime, according to research by Chinese scientists.
https://www.ap.org/news-highlights/spotlights/2025/chinas-di...
https://electrek.co/2026/01/24/hybrid-and-electric-semi-truc...
https://www.electrive.com/2026/01/23/year-end-surge-electric...
I'm not a fan of the way grey hydrogen was written off: That hydrogen is already being produced today by several different refinery processes, and then burned in a furnace because no one else wants it.
So the right way to handle the carbon accounting isn't to assume that all the CO2 produced by the refinery processes count against the hydrogen produced, but rather that the energy that refineries get from burning the hydrogen would be replaced by them burning natural gas instead.
The per-kg energy value of burning H2 is ~2.5x the value of natural gas (refineries generally use LHV for this accounting). But each kg of natural gas that gets burned produces ~2.8 kg of CO2 (because burning replaces the puny hydrogen with relatively larger oxygen atoms).
2.5*2.8 = 7kg of CO2 per kg of H2 taken out of the refinery. Which isn't as big a difference from the 10kg reported in the article as I expected when I set about writing this comment.
I don't disagree with your numbers, but "and then burned in a furnace because no one else wants it" is doing a lot of work.
Why does nobody want it? If it is being burned off because nobody wants it, then it effectively has less value after compressing and delivering it than the natural gas itself (or as you say, they'd be selling it and burning the natural gas instead).
The truth is, you can burn it off and save the cost and trouble of purifying and storing it (which also uses energy and produces carbon), especially when using it in fuel cells requires 99.99% purity. You couldn't just pipe it over to a data center or power plant.
It's worth considering also that not only is the hydrogen that would come out dirtier (because it's being replaced by natural gas), it's also making the natural gas dirtier, because you're burning methane instead of hydrogen to refine it.
Good article, as always hydrogen for transport is dead. Unfortunately, as they say, what is dead can never die. And there will always be companies trying to siphon off public funds to do “trial runs”.
One thing that seems wrong is in the efficiency comparison: step 1 for hydrogen should be grid transmission, not electrolyzer.
Also, how come the BEV price doesn’t adjust in response to electricity prices (not that it would impact the result).
This is a very poor analysis, since it doesn’t account for the capital costs. Even if hydrogen is inefficient compared to batteries, it could win if the upfront investment was low enough to offset the additional fuel cost. This is quite obvious, since that’s why diesel trucks are winning today — the upfront cost of a diesel engine is cheap enough that it offsets the higher lifetime fuel costs.
I do think that batteries will win, but the correct argument is one that shows that capital costs of batteries are going down faster than the cost of hydrogen production.
Show me how the capital costs of rolling out high PSI hydrogen infra will be cheaper than building a power grid. You can even refit and re-use existing natural gas pipelines to move hydrogen if you want to cheat. I am willing to bet the costs per kW will still be crazy, especially at last mile where you are in an area populated by humans.
I don't see a bright future for hydrogen in transport while we keep putting cheap solar, wind, and batteries on the grid / roads.
Yeah. Vehicle costs are pretty much the same (for battery electric and fuel cell electric buses, at least) and are about 2-3x more than ICE. On-site hydrogen infra for fueling/storage is substantially more than charging equipment. H2 fuel is currently $10-20 per kg (the higher end accounts for vapor losses), which is, again, much greater than either diesel or electricity.
Hydrogen is so hard to handle that NASA never really figured it out; hydrogen leaks just delayed Artemis 2 last week. There's been about 70 years of trying to solve these issues for space launch and very little progress. It doesn't seem like it'll be easier trying to do this as the scale of every gas station?
The article skips that i think most realistic and plausible option - fuel cell using hydrogen extracted from the standard hydrocarbon fuel right on the truck. Thus hydrogen would be present only in the short path - from fuel splitter to the fuel call. The fuel cell has higher efficiency than ICE and having electrical engine works better for trucks than ICE too. Such setup is overkill, at least for near future, for regular cars, while for trucks it seems worth the investment.
Onboard reforming has been explored and it's not great. The end-to-end efficiency is poor (<50%). It adds a ton of complexity. It requires having a reactor running at over 700°C. It takes time to warm up. It's not cleaner. Impurities like sulfur kill it.
In the end it's only about as efficient as just using a regular diesel engine, much harder to service, more expensive to maintain, and doesn't improve your carbon footprint at all. What's the point?
This analysis does not account for side benefit of the oxygen. If you split water to get hydrogen, then for every kilogram of hydrogen you get, you also get 8 kg of oxygen. Liquid oxygen is not an expensive commodity, its market price is about $1/kg, but in this context this makes a difference. For example, in the first infographic, the cost of green hydrogen produced today is listed as £16.97 which is about $23. If you can recoup $8 from this by selling the oxygen, or even only $5, then this makes a difference. If you select green H2 with 2030 assumptions, you get £7.67, or about $10s. If you sell the oxygen at $5, you basically get the hydrogen at half price, and this makes the hydrogen powered truck slightly more economical than the battery powered one.
Does the cost of green hydrogen not already price this in? It would be crazy to go through the trouble of electrolysis and just vent the oxygen into the atmosphere
The current market price is based on current supply and demand. Splitting water to create enough hydrogen for non-trivial fraction of the transportation sector would generate an enormous amount of oxygen. The price of oxygen would likely tank in that situation.
Except you can make oxygen for pretty cheap using oxygen concentrators. The technology is simple enough that home versions exist for patients with lung problems can lug one around at all times to have a feed of oxygen rich air. Oxygen is almost 21% of the air we breathe, it's trivial to capture. Hydrogen counts for only 0.000055%.
As much as I find H2 fuel cell technology - which is a type of a gas based electric battery with no moving parts - fascinating, I can't help but wonder if we would be better off just running hybrids on e-fuels.
e-fuels are just low quality gasoline, IIUC, made by (waves hands) ethical means from thin air using electricity. They still generate NOx gases, but ICEs just take them as is, and they're much more energy dense compared to long range batteries.
The only real problem is that there don't seem to be many green and scalable means to produce them, but if we could, I think it can be an overall better alternative to seemingly unworkable hydrogen based EVs and/or unrecyclable battery based EVs.
Which batteries are unrecyclable?
you sort of answered your own question here
I think the Edison motors approach will be the most future-proof, using drop-in power supply bricks, one can abstract the power source to the point where it won't matter if it's a fuel cell, natural gas turbine or a new battery technology, to the truck it's just electricity (plus or minus some metadata for things like regen breaking or engine gear)
This has been tried a few times. The sticking point has always been twofold
0- this is a massive upfront investment for what amounts to a small time savings (having extra batteries on hand, charging them and the equipment to remove / move / install the heavy units
1- unless manufacturers agree to share a specification, you're tied to a single brand and risk being shut out of replacements when that inevitably goes away because it didn't catch on or got deprecated
2- for individual consumers, the battery is the most expensive component of their vehicle, and trading it for a used one of unspecified origen to save a few minutes instead of charging is not appealing.
Given one and two, overcoming the expense of 0 is not at all economical for many situations. The ones that most need it can't afford it, or could be satisfied with relatively short high voltage charging.
The point of the Edison motors approach is that you can just drop in a diesel engine - their initial goal is to electrify trucks used for industrial work in Canada by making them series hybrids.
It will work great for them because these trucks are designed to be modular and easily repairable (they are driven hard and WILL break when their owners need them). I would not be surprised at all if it develops into an impromptu standard just because so many eyes are on the system all the time.
Battery swaps are not practical, but the guy you're replying to is making the point that an electric vehicle could be built with a modular, removable power source, and converted between gas/hybrid/battery/hydrogen/natural gas/whatever later in life depending on the needs. That's just not possible with a vehicle which directly connects the powerplant with the wheels - there's too much nonsense like transmissions and differentials to deal with when you do that.
I think it makes a ton of sense for trucks, much less sense for cars.
Would a system like the one in China - with the user of methanol conversion from excess Wind/Solar/Other power gen (even idle coal) making it much more flexible to generate/transport/store rather than trying to buildout gas distribution.
With the added advantage of fuel cell swaps [0] and reload giving the trucks a quicker turnaround time per charge (i think similar op is used for electric trucks as well as some consumer car models)
It certainly solves the problem of recharge points as the infra can be rolled out piecemeal, and since it would be for heavy trucks less disruptive of the rest of the cityscape (can have the outside metroplitan areas etc with maybe emergency stops within)
[0] https://m.chinatrucks.org/news/10750.html
Is it that hydrogen is a dirty fossil fuel in garish green makeup?
No, that's not the problem given in the article.
And no, that's not an accurate hot take ankle deep summary of the hydrogen industries arc.
* https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/oil-and-gas/our-insights...
Or -hear me out- we can put these long I beams on the ground and put some cables above. Then tie 50 trucks to each other and they can get whatever kind of electricity from anything you can make electricity out of.
Well we already have a lot of those, at least in North America (best freight rail system in the world), and it might make sense to build even more tracks in some areas. But rail will never be practical for time-sensitive cargo. It just takes too long to assemble a train and move cars through switching yards. We're always going to need a lot of trucks no matter what.
Nearly zero of the freight rail network in north America is electrified: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_electrification_in_th...
Sort of. The locomotives are diesel electric series hybrids. Which means you can make one that can travel anywhere that isn't electrified but add a pantograph to it for minimal additional cost and then stop burning diesel anywhere that is, and electrify the lines piecemeal.
Add a battery car and you only have to electrify a minority of the lines to be off diesel a majority of the time.
Extra points for electrifying steep grades.
Any sufficiently method of ground transportation contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of a rail network.
Truely rail-fans are transportation equivalent to vegans in food or cross-fit in exercise. I've spent many an hour on the Isle of Sodor and appreciate how useful those engines are in so many contexts. Yet still, there are buses that move alongside Percy, and pick up stranded passengers, and the Fat Controller (aka Sir Topham Hat) still has a sedan. It's a multi-modal world out there and the tractor trailer still has a place in it.
Excellent analysis. Two points: what if 1) only surplus energy from offshore wind would be used for green H2 electrolysis and 2) the price would be at or below £/€/$ 1.50 per Kg?
Thanks. Both good questions, and they come up a lot.
To be clear, I'm fully behind decarbonising freight. It's one of the hardest sectors to clean up and it needs serious attention. But hydrogen for road transport requires jumping in with both feet (due to infrastructure requirements) when there are dozens of smaller, commercially proven steps that get you equivalent results. Better route planning, driver training, aerodynamic retrofits, hybrid and battery electric for shorter routes, even just reducing empty running.
These aren't exciting and they don't get press releases, but they compound. The industry could cut emissions meaningfully with changes that pay for themselves today, without waiting for a national hydrogen infrastructure that doesn't exist yet.
On surplus offshore wind: the economics only work if you assume the electricity is genuinely surplus, meaning there's literally no other use for it. In practice, the UK grid still runs gas plants for roughly 40% of generation. Every MWh of offshore wind that goes into an electrolyser instead of displacing gas is a missed decarbonisation opportunity. "Surplus" renewable electricity is a future state, not a current one, and even when we get there, interconnectors, grid storage, and demand response will compete for those MWh. The electrolyser only makes sense after all of those higher value uses are saturated.
On £1.50/kg: that would genuinely change the fuel cost picture, getting you to roughly 12-15p per mile which is competitive with diesel. But the distribution problem doesn't go away at any price point. You still need compression or liquefaction, transport, and a national network of dispensing stations. The UK has 11 public hydrogen stations. Even free hydrogen doesn't help if there's nowhere to fill up. The grid is already everywhere. Adding a charger to a depot is a transformer upgrade. Adding a hydrogen station is a £2-5M civil engineering project.
The place where cheap green hydrogen gets really exciting is exactly the applications where you can't just plug in: steel, ammonia, seasonal storage, maritime. Those don't need a distributed national refuelling network, they need point to point bulk delivery to industrial sites and ports, which is a much more tractable logistics problem.
The logistical nightmare of hydrogen makes its production price almost irrelevant. Using surplus wind energy for carbon capture to create synthetic fuels is much smarter because these liquids are compatible with our current global infrastructure. You bypass the need for expensive new pipelines and specialized tanks entirely. By binding green hydrogen into a stable synthetic hydrocarbon, you get a fuel that is easy to move, has high energy density, and won't leak through solid steel.
Not only is it competing with battery electric, it’s potentially competing with just plain old electric.
There are truck pantographs being tested out. It seems like an idea that could have potential in major shopping routes.
https://youtu.be/_3P_S7pL7Yg