https://www.ifri.org/en/papers/chinas-hydrogen-economy-five-years

This quote from the article:

The automaker is exploring multiple alternative powertrain technologies rather than relying on a single solution for every transport task. The choice of technology depends on the requirements of individual routes and operations, including vehicle utilization, reliability, emissions, operating costs and access to the necessary energy infrastructure.

Battery-electric trucks, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles and hydrogen combustion engines each have different technical and operational characteristics. BMW’s approach is to determine which option is best suited to a particular application based on practical performance and measurable data.

And this quote:

Dirk Wiedmann, head of Production Network and Logistics at BMW Group, said the company is taking a technology-neutral, data-driven approach to selecting alternative truck powertrains.

Represent the very same arguments www.respectmyplanet.org has used for over 15 years to debunk anti-hydrogen bashers like Michael Liebreich, Michael Barnard, Joe Romm, Mark Jacobson, Zach Shahan, Fred Lambert, and so many more.

If anyone tells you just one technology is all you need and the science is settled, they're either lying to you or don't understand energy.

You don't have to hate batteries to support hydrogen, far from it. Hydrogen supporters recognize the importance of batteries. Why do so many anti-hydrogen battery bots on places like Reddit and tech comment sections spew so much hate toward hydrogen?

I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge the unexpected passing of Dr. Joe Romm. Like many here, I never knew him personally or met him, but if you have spent any time reading or debating about hydrogen over the last two decades, you knew his work.

To be completely frank, I spent years fundamentally disagreeing with almost everything he published. I found his positions on hydrogen incredibly frustrating, and from my vantage point, he sat on the completely opposite side of a very fierce ideological fence. But in the grand scheme of the energy transition debate, he was the ultimate long-distance sparring partner—uncompromising, sharp, and a constant foil to hydrogen proponents.

While I never saw eye-to-eye with his conclusions, there is no denying he was a formidable intellectual force who forced the industry to constantly sharpen its data and arguments. The clean energy commentary space is losing a major, historic voice, and the debate is going to feel a lot emptier without his perspective to push back against.

My thoughts go out to his family, friends, and colleagues. Rest in peace.

Country leading the world in solar and battery production misses memo that hydrogen is not necessary because of.... <checks notes> .... solar and battery production.

The world is not running out of oil. It may be running out of something more important. Margin for error.

Saudi Aramco is warning that the world's readily available oil inventory buffer is becoming dangerously small. Rebuilding inventories could take years.

At the same time, Shell expects refining margins of around $42 per barrel in Q3, up from $24 in Q2.

Those two things belong in the same conversation.

The old energy system can become more profitable precisely as it becomes less resilient.

And that is where this gets uncomfortable.

For years, we have talked about the energy transition as if building the alternative was the risky choice.

But doing nothing was never neutral.

Choosing not to build alternatives is also a choice. It preserves dependence on the system we already have.

And now that system is showing us what dependence costs.

There is another question I keep coming back to.

What if we had started earlier?

We cannot know what hydrogen would cost today if it had received twenty years of sustained investment, industrialization and deployment.

But we know what happened to technologies that did.

Between 2010 and 2024, the global cost of utility-scale solar electricity fell about 90%. Installed battery storage costs fell about 93%.

The physics didn't suddenly change.

The economics around the physics did.

Low-emissions hydrogen is only now approaching $10 billion a year in project investment. And it still represents only around 1% of global hydrogen production.

Maybe the uncomfortable part isn't that hydrogen failed to become competitive fast enough.

Maybe we never gave it enough scale to find out how competitive it could become.

Meanwhile, some countries have already started moving.

That was the point of #14.

Different economies are building different hydrogen economies for different reasons. Industry. Shipping. Aviation. Energy imports. Exports. Storage. New power demand.

They don't all need the same solution.

They just need alternatives.

Others are still debating whether the transition itself is worth the investment.

That debate has a cost too.

Every year spent preserving dependency is another year not spent building redundancy.

And none of this means replacing every barrel with hydrogen.

Direct electricity where it works. Batteries where they work. Larger grids. Storage. Nuclear where it makes sense.

And molecules where molecules are still needed.

electricity → hydrogen → storage

electricity → hydrogen → ammonia

electricity → hydrogen → methanol

electricity → hydrogen → eSAF

electricity → hydrogen → industrial feedstock

electricity → hydrogen → dispatchable power

This is much bigger than hydrogen cars.

Hydrogen doesn't need to defeat oil.

It only needs to help make fewer barrels indispensable.

Because the last profitable barrel doesn't have to be the last barrel on Earth.

It only has to be the barrel everyone still needs when there aren't enough alternatives left.

And perhaps that is the real warning in 2026.

Maybe the most interesting investment question isn't which energy source is better.

It's where the next dollar of capital can change the economics the most.

The last barrel may become extraordinarily valuable not because we ran out of oil, but because we ran out of time to make it optional.

Catalysts tell us what might happen. Filings tell us what actually happened.

Not financial advice. DYOR.

Government body would sign purchase contracts of up to 15 years with synthetic aviation fuel producers before selling output to fuel suppliers, with the state covering the price gap.

https://www.hydrogeninsight.com/production/france-includes-double-sided-auction-to-subsidise-up-to-160-000-tonnes-of-e-saf-a-year-in-2027-draft-budget/2-1-2053379

The status will halve administrative timelines, with the project expected to start operations by 2030. The government of Castille and León in Spain has announced that Elyse Energy’s 60MW eM-Numancia development will be given the status of a “priority industrial project” up to 2030, which will halve administrative timelines.

https://www.hydrogeninsight.com/production/spanish-e-methanol-project-to-be-fast-tracked-after-receiving-priority-status-from-regional-government/2-1-2053014

Every time I post something here that is even remotely positive about hydrogen—especially anything involving fuel-cell vehicles—I can almost set my watch by what happens next.

Within minutes, the usual hydrogen-response squad appears:

“But why would you waste electricity making hydrogen?”

“Just put the electricity directly into a battery!”

“Hydrogen is only 50% efficient!”

“Why would anyone use a fuel cell when batteries exist?”

And, of course, approximately 47 variations of the same argument, carefully rearranged so that the conclusion remains unchanged: hydrogen is stupid, batteries have already won, and apparently the entire world just hasn't gotten the memo yet.

So I have a modest question.

What, exactly, are we supposed to make of China?

Not Germany. Not Toyota. Not BMW. Not some hydrogen startup with a PowerPoint presentation.

China.

The country that has absolutely demolished the rest of the world in solar manufacturing.

The country that dominates battery manufacturing.

The country that has built an enormous EV industry.

The country that has built a massive renewable-energy manufacturing ecosystem.

The country that has become the world's largest EV market.

The country that has spent years scaling technologies that everyone else said couldn't possibly become cheap enough to matter.

And now that same country is going absolutely bananas on hydrogen.

At some point, doesn't this become an interesting data point?

Because according to the conventional Reddit hydrogen-hater wisdom, China should presumably have looked at hydrogen and said:

“LOL. Why would we waste electricity making hydrogen when batteries are more efficient?”

Instead, China appears to have said something more like:

“Cool. Let's build the batteries and the hydrogen industry.”

The numbers are getting difficult to dismiss as a science experiment.

This new report says China now accounts for more than half of global renewable-hydrogen capacity. It has roughly 620 hydrogen refueling stations, more than 350 km of dedicated hydrogen pipelines, and more than half of the world's electrolyzer and fuel-cell manufacturing capacity. Hydrogen production and consumption both rank first globally.

And the IEA's 2026 Global Hydrogen Review says China was responsible for nearly three-quarters of new electrolyzer installations globally in 2025.

So I'm genuinely curious about something.

If the entire hydrogen argument can be reduced to:

“Electricity → battery → wheels = good”

and

“Electricity → hydrogen → fuel cell → wheels = stupid because efficiency”

then why is the country with perhaps the world's deepest understanding of batteries, solar manufacturing, electrification, supply chains and industrial-scale energy technology investing so heavily in BOTH?

Maybe—just maybe—the Chinese aren't confused.

Maybe they're not sitting around waiting for Reddit to explain round-trip efficiency to them.

Maybe they understand something that gets lost in these endless “battery vs. hydrogen” arguments:

Energy systems aren't built around one efficiency number.

They are built around applications.

Weight.

Range.

Refueling time.

Utilization.

Grid availability.

Seasonality.

Energy storage duration.

Industrial feedstocks.

Hydrogen-derived fuels.

Long-distance transport.

Heavy-duty vehicles.

Remote operations.

Infrastructure.

And, perhaps most importantly, economics at scale.

That doesn't mean hydrogen wins everywhere. It obviously doesn't.

It means that “batteries are more electrically efficient” isn't the same thing as “therefore hydrogen has no useful role.”

And watching China simultaneously build the world's battery/solar/EV manufacturing juggernaut while aggressively scaling hydrogen makes the simplistic version of that argument look increasingly awkward.

But hey, I'm sure there is a perfectly reasonable explanation.

Perhaps someone in China simply hasn't discovered the efficiency chart from Reddit yet.

Anyway, here's the article:

China cements global lead in hydrogen energy development

I'm posting it mainly because I think the interesting question isn't whether hydrogen will replace batteries.

The interesting question is why the country that has done more than almost anyone on Earth to prove the viability of batteries, solar and electrification is apparently unwilling to make that choice.

They are building the battery economy.

And they're building the hydrogen economy.

Maybe there's a lesson in that.

Or, alternatively, China is just wasting electricity on purpose because they haven't read the comments section here yet.

Good for BMW. To me it's so much more than reducing CO2. The biggest win is that you can make your own fuel domestically. You don't need to rely on buying natural gas from Russia/USA or battery making materials from China.

Obviously the sustainability factor and renewable energy factor is huge and the CO2 reduction is big. And reducing pollution to your rivers and groundwater to make batteries is a big win too. But the biggest win is making your own fuel at home and keeping those dollars (& jobs) in your own country rather than sending those energy dollars to countries that are using them to undermine you and create jobs elsewhere.

Dongde Energy says the Xinjiang plant will produce 100,000 tonnes of ‘carbon-negative’ synthetic aviation fuel annually.
Chinese developer Dongde Energy has unveiled its 11bn-yuan ($1.64bn) e-SAF project in Xinjiang, northwest China, which it says will produce 100,000 tonnes of “carbon-negative” synthetic aviation fuel annually from green hydrogen and captured CO2.

The project, in Yiwu County in Xinjiang’s Hami region, would produce 50,000 tonnes of green hydrogen a year, supported by 2GW of wind power, and utilise 400,000 tonnes of CO2 — while drawing on the developer’s experience with smaller pilot e-SAF projects.

https://www.hydrogeninsight.com/production/chinese-developer-launches-1-6bn-green-hydrogen-based-e-saf-project-with-2gw-of-wind-power/2-1-2050403

The government funding will go towards innovative technological solutions, rather than production.
The German government has launched a €212.5m ($250m) funding programme for research into e-fuels made using green (or other “climate-friendly”) hydrogen and captured CO2, in a bid to reduce the medium-to-long term costs of production.

Lancaster cementing its role as the hydrogen capital of the USA.

I’m comparing compact hydrogen generators with larger continuous-use systems and trying to understand the engineering tradeoffs.

I’ve also been looking at products from Hydro Heal. For PEM electrolysis, does scaling down the cell generally affect gas purity, moisture separation, heat management, or membrane lifespan during longer runs?

Curious what people with chemical engineering or electrolysis experience think?

*Something about the AI boom puts hydrogen into perspective. Not the technology, but the money.*

Plug Power has accumulated a deficit of $8.66 billion over nearly three decades. On its own, that number looks enormous. Then you change the scale.

Five major technology companies spent more than $400 billion in capex in 2025, and the IEA expects that figure to rise another 75% in 2026. That puts a single year close to $700 billion. Some of the companies benefiting from this buildout can generate several times Plug's entire accumulated deficit in a single quarter.

So what is $8.66 billion, really?

A huge amount of money for a company that never reached scale, or a surprisingly small amount of capital for an industry trying to build production, storage, transport, distribution and demand almost from scratch?

AI didn't start with AI. Today's boom sits on decades of investment in semiconductors, telecommunications, the internet, cloud computing, data centers, power infrastructure, software and research. Much of the system was already there when demand exploded. The hundreds of billions going into AI today are accelerating an ecosystem that took decades to build.

Hydrogen is much earlier. Capital spending on low-emissions hydrogen projects is expected to approach only $10 billion in 2026, while low-emissions hydrogen itself is only just crossing 1% of global production.

Now imagine $100 billion going into hydrogen. Not as a forecast, just as a thought experiment. Roughly a decade of today's investment rate compressed into a much shorter period, allowing production, storage and distribution to develop together rather than waiting on each other.

$100 billion sounds enormous in hydrogen. In AI, it no longer does.

Of course, capital doesn't create demand. Only around 20% of new low-emissions hydrogen offtake volumes signed in 2025 were firm commitments. Build too early and infrastructure sits underused. Wait for demand to be obvious and the infrastructure needed to serve it may not exist.

Plug's accumulated deficit is not hydrogen capex. It is one company's accounting history. And the economics are different. Much of the value created by AI can scale digitally once the underlying computing infrastructure exists. Hydrogen remains a physical molecule that has to be produced, stored, moved and delivered. Low-emissions hydrogen also has to compete with established production in industries like refining, ammonia and methanol.

That difference matters, but so does time. AI is scaling on infrastructure built over decades, while hydrogen is still building much of the system it needs to scale. Oil had more than a century to do the same. We are comparing the cost of building hydrogen today with the cost of using systems that have had decades to mature.

Maybe hydrogen hasn't consumed too much capital.

Maybe we have never seen what hydrogen looks like with a lot of capital.

$8.66 billion looks enormous when the denominator is Plug.

It looks very different when the denominator is an energy system.

So what would hydrogen look like after its first $100 billion?

Could hydrogen be the AI of energy?

*Catalysts tell us what might happen. Filings tell us what actually happened.*

*Not financial advice. DYOR.*

The Viking Astrea is set for delivery in 2027 and follows the launch of the world’s first H2-powered cruise ship earlier this year, the Viking Libra.
The world's second-ever hydrogen-powered cruise ship was launched by Italian shipbuilder Fincantieri on Friday last week at a shipyard in Ancona, on Italy’s Adriatic coast.

Commissioned by cruise line Viking, the Viking Astrea will run on a propulsion system “based partially on liquefied hydrogen and fuel cells”, presumably in addition to a diesel engine.

Like its predecessor the Viking Libra — the world’s first hydrogen-powered cruise ship, set to be delivered by the end of this year — the Viking Astrea will use fuel cell technology manufactured by Fincantieri subsidiary Isotta Fraschini Motori (IFM) capable of producing up to 6MW of power.

The Viking Astrea is set to be delivered in May 2027 and has a gross tonnage of about 54,300 tonnes. It will be capable of carrying up to 998 passengers once operational on its inaugural routes across the Mediterranean and Northern Europe.

After its “float-out” process, the ship will be moved to a separate dock for final construction and interior build-out.

“The float out of the Viking Astrea represents another important milestone for Viking,” said Viking CEO Leah Talactac.

“From the beginning, we have sought thoughtful ways to design more efficient ships, and the Viking Astrea is an important step forward in that ongoing effort.”

Viking had previously ruled out liquefied natural gas (LNG) as an option for reducing emissions from its cruise ships, and instead backed hydrogen fuel cells, which can allow vessels to be operated emissions-free in protected areas such as Norwegian fjords.

https://www.hydrogeninsight.com/transport/italian-shipbuilder-launches-world-s-second-hydrogen-powered-cruise-ship/2-1-2043166

Over the years a lot of disingenuous things were said to try to stop hydrogen technology for energy from progressing. Ten years ago it was fuel cells go bad too fast and platinum loading of catalysts. Those arguments were eventually overcome, but for about 10 years there was also the standard sentence in every hydrogen article: “Hydrogen burns clean but it does not exist on earth naturally. Most of it is produced with natural gas.”

And while it’s true that most hydrogen today is still made with natural gas, it is misleading to talk about hydrogen as though it somehow requires natural gas when virtually every other form of energy has its own dependence on coal, oil, natural gas, or some other resource somewhere in the chain.

Now we know hydrogen is found in many places naturally, and efforts have been underway for years to figure out how to unlock subsurface hydrogen. But one of the pillars of the anti-hydrogen argument that still endures, and is no less ignorant, is the hydrogen efficiency argument.

The argument goes something like this: why make hydrogen with electricity, only to turn that hydrogen back into electricity or use it in a vehicle? Why not just use the electricity directly?

It sounds convincing until you start asking a more basic question: what electricity?

We routinely have energy resources that are available but aren't being used. Solar panels produce nothing at night and can produce more electricity than the grid can use during the day. Wind turbines sometimes have to be curtailed because there isn't enough demand or transmission capacity. And, as this article points out, there is enormous hydropower potential sitting behind dams that isn't being fully utilized.

That unused energy isn't made more useful simply because hydrogen isn't 100% efficient.

If a dam has the ability to produce electricity that otherwise isn't going to be produced, using some of that electricity to make hydrogen can turn an otherwise wasted resource into a storable, transportable energy commodity. The same principle applies to excess solar and wind.

The efficiency argument makes much more sense when you're talking about taking scarce electricity that could be used directly and deliberately converting it to hydrogen instead. But that isn't the only situation where hydrogen can be produced.

Sometimes the question shouldn't be “What is the most efficient way to use this kilowatt-hour?” Sometimes the question should be “What can we do with the energy that would otherwise go unused?”

Hydrogen is one answer.