Hydrogen Makes Sense – But Only in a Specific, Hypothetical Scenario

By Edward A Sanchez — March 3, 2025

If you’ve followed me on The Watt Car for any length of time, you’ll know I’m not a huge fan of hydrogen fuel cells, and consider it folly that BMW, Honda and, perhaps most notoriously, Toyota, have collectively plowed billions of dollars into hydrogen fuel cell research and development. The axe I grind against hydrogen isn’t specifically against the fuel cell concept, but against the fuel, and more specifically, the sourcing of the fuel itself.

Today, the vast majority of commercially available hydrogen (over 90%) is produced as a byproduct of natural gas production, effectively making it a fossil fuel. This is the so-called “grey” hydrogen. “Blue” hydrogen is essentially the same industrial process as grey hydrogen, but with carbon capture and storage. The largely mythical “green” hydrogen is made exclusively from renewable energy, which powers an electrolysis process, separating the oxygen from the hydrogen molecules in water (remember high school chemistry class?). Even here, the conundrum is green hydrogen takes more energy for the electrolysis process than it yields in a fuel cell reaction.

The hypothetical future scenario in which “green” hydrogen makes some level of sense is if we have a super-abundance of electricity generation, either in the form of renewables, nuclear, or another low- or no-carbon process in which there’s such a ridiculous surplus of it, that the fact that it lags EVs ever so slightly in well-to-wheel carbon footprint is effectively irrelevant.

I will grant that hydrogen has some advantages in the context of transportation fuel over batteries. It is lighter weight, faster refueling, and can be more easily applied to applications such as aviation, and scenarios where portability is of high importance.

If we get to such a mythical, mystical, optimistic future of hyper-abundant energy, where my utility bill is $20 instead of $300 (I live in California, what can I say?) and hydrogen is only negligibly more expensive than electricity itself, I say sign me up. But we are probably many decades away from that scenario being a reality, and such a reality will have numerous other disruptive effects on industry and society – namely, traditional electric utilities effectively going out of business, or being run predominantly by Artificial Intelligence or robots, and the costs of most goods and services plummeting dramatically. Which is convenient, because it may come around the same time when AI takes the majority of human jobs, so whatever pittance we’re making from universal basic income will help us afford this newfound ultra-cheap energy.

I don’t mean to make a sudden dark, dystopian detour – I do it only to illustrate how narrow the promise of hydrogen being a truly green, game-changing fuel is.

(mage courtesy Nikola)