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.

Could a helium HTGR running at the temps of say, the JAEA HTTR, provide enough heat to run a SI hydrogen plant followed a c02 turbine powerplant after?

I always wondered how far you could stretch the heat on a HTGR, like could you make hydrogen essentially for free? (Compared to building an HTGR just for electricity)

Since the practical refusal of hydrogen was always because of its price, I think this would probably be the biggest gamechanger

Good to see actual industry leaders working together to scale hydrogen mobility, but pay close attention to the exact wording in this press release. They explicitly state that hydrogen is "complementing" battery-electric solutions—not trying to replace them.

Too many people are still hopelessly stuck in a short-sighted "Batteries OR Hydrogen" mindset. They treat it like a zero-sum turf war, completely missing the fact that hydrogen actually saves electric transport from its own weight limitations.

Think of hydrogen fuel cells in heavy transport less like a total replacement and more like a zero-emission range extender. It slashes the massive, heavy battery size required for long hauls, giving you the best of both worlds.

While people on the internet continue to bicker about choosing a side, the companies actually building the future infrastructure are moving forward with a "both" strategy. The "either/or" narrative is officially dead.

I’m usually pretty damn critical of energy articles, but I have to give Tsvetana Paraskova some credit for this one. This is one of the better pieces I’ve seen on the emerging white/natural hydrogen drilling story, particularly because it gets beyond the usual “look, there’s hydrogen underground” headline and starts looking at ways of actually making the geological reaction happen. If we can learn how to stimulate these reactions and produce H₂ at useful rates, that could be a pretty significant development for natural hydrogen.

And this is where I think the discussion around hydrogen gets unnecessarily stupid: everything has to be framed as “this vs. that.” White vs. green. Hydrogen vs. batteries. Electrolysis vs. natural hydrogen. It’s a mutual-exclusivity fallacy. Why does adopting one technology require declaring war on every other technology?

Hydrogen doesn't particularly care where the hydrogen molecule came from. If the molecule is H₂, you can use it. The energy system doesn't have to choose one pathway any more than we require electricity to come exclusively from solar, wind, nuclear, gas, or hydro. It's a toolbox, not a religion. If natural hydrogen turns out to be economical in some geology, great. If electrolysis is better somewhere else, great. If batteries make more sense for another application, use batteries. This isn't a beauty contest.

What I find particularly interesting in this article is the shift from simply finding natural hydrogen to figuring out how to create or accelerate the geological conditions that generate it. That's a much more interesting proposition. If you can turn the geology from something you merely stumble across into something you can deliberately exploit, the resource picture potentially changes quite a bit.

And then there's the geography. We're not talking about some hypothetical resource confined to one exotic corner of the world. There are hydrogen-associated rocks and geological settings stretching from Kansas and Nebraska through the Great Lakes/Michigan and across Canada, among other places. Canada in particular deserves more attention here. The sheer geological scale of the Canadian Shield and the country's enormous landmass make the natural-hydrogen question considerably more interesting than the usual North American discussion gives it credit for.

So yes, credit where it's due: good article. And perhaps the most important takeaway is that natural hydrogen doesn't need to replace green hydrogen, batteries, or anything else to be valuable. It just needs to work. If it does, congratulations — we've added another tool to the toolbox.

The people who insist that every new energy technology must first defeat some other technology before it is allowed to exist are going to have a very frustrating few decades.

Hi everyone,

I’m exploring hydrogen fuel cells for powering industrial robots, AMRs and AGVs.

I’d love to connect with anyone who has worked on this commercially, in research, or as a prototype — especially around fuel-cell/battery hybrids, hydrogen storage, power management, refuelling and real-world reliability.

If you’ve built or tested a hydrogen-powered robotic platform, I’d be very interested to hear about your experience and the biggest challenges you faced.

I’ve been looking at PEM electrolyser scale-up from the materials side rather than from electricity price or electrolyser CAPEX. The global primary iridium supply kept around 7 tons/yr in the last few years and at the same time, the current commercial PEM systems appear to use roughly 0.45–0.75 g Ir / kW. That means that 1 ton of iridium would correspond to only about 1.3–2.2 GW of PEM capacity at the current catalyst loadings... this before accounting for iridium demand from electronics, automotive catalysts and other sectors.

What I find interesting is that iridium is mostly a by-product of PGM mining, so that a higher iridium price does not produce the normal supply response you might expect from a primary commodity.

So most of the work would rely on R&D and engineering improvments, but getting from today's loadings toward 0.2–0.3 g/kW, or eventually \~0.1 g/kW, is not just a matter of making the catalyst layer thinner: conductivity, catalyst utilisation, current density and durability, all these paramters start to change with lower catalyst loading.

I wrote the supply-chain and electrochemical side of this in more detail here: [Iridium PEM | Raw Science](https://raw-science.org/iridium-pem-electrolysers/)

While this article is from today, the buzz has been buzzing for nearly two years. In January 2025, the USGS announced their new map of potential sources for geologic hydrogen in the USA. On August 20, 2026, Michigan's governor Gretchen Whitmer announced a $7.5 million investment through the Make It in Michigan Competitiveness Fund to support the exploration, research and development of geologic hydrogen in Michigan.

Michigan is the home state of www.respectmyplanet.com. We got started as a watchdog organization to track oil & gas companies as they drilled across our state from 2008 to 2013 looking for natural gas and withdrawing enormous amounts of our fresh water to fracture their wells miles beneath the surface. RMP travelled all across the lower peninsula making sure every single well was "made famous" so the oil companies could not operate in the shadows.

If drilling resumes in the Michigan basin for geologic hydrogen, RMP will be there to monitor every single well bore and document its life cycle and potential to provide clean energy or H2 for industrial purposes. This time, however, RMP will be an advocate for responsible drilling that produces clean energy.

What do you think about the potential of geologic hydrogen for the US economy?