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US to Cancel Billions for West Coast Hydrogen Hubs Amid Shutdown
(www.bloomberg.com)
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this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2025
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Honestly, could be worse. Hydrogen is a greenwashing scam anyway.
The bad part is that funding for wind and solar projects is apparently being cancelled, too.
On an unrelated note, I had to read that article with some bullshit popup about ToS demanding binding arbitration and a class action waiver superimposed on it because I refused to tap "accept." Binding arbitration and a class-action waiver, just to read a damn web page! Fucking delusional.
Bloomberg is shit; please find a better source.
There are both processes which need it to decarbonize like nitrate fertilizer manufacturing, and things like cars where you can get the same outcome more cheaply via other methods, leaving hydrogen based systems as greenwashing.
On the whole, this is not great.
And I'm unwilling to ditch Bloomberg; they're doing a meaningful chunk of the environmental tech reporting right now, and gift links like this one enable almost everyone to access it.
You should let go of your BEV obsession too. Hydrogen cars will be very cost effective once the technology get scaled up. FCEVs can be cheaper than ICE cars to make, and green hydrogen can get cheaper than fossil fuels. They will be valid options in the future.
People have been saying that for 20 years. Meanwhile battery-electric actually became practical. We aren't in a place where we can wait another 20.
H2 is complimentary to batteries. You can discharge battery capacity that will recharge to full the next day. It's affordable enough to make already, and as a fuel, is tradeable/exportable power. Making H2 is needed to support more renewables so that surpluses aren't wasted.
Making H2 just doesn't stop you from using BEVs today or tomorrow. Faster charging for more range using a fuel that was made when, and priced because, it was conveniently sunny.
The world can get there without the US, and energy sabotage was always a GOP magnet. But anti-H2 sentiment, based on genuine disinformation, but ok perhaps overhyped Toyota prototypes prior to infrastructure maturity, has made adoption/progress slower, if only because renewables adoption has been slower than what was possible.
We've already waited decades for BEVs to be ready. It's hypocritical to say we cannot wait for anything else. And besides, hydrogen cars are in production right now, so we don't have to wait much longer for it be mainstream.
And given that the BEV is simply not going to the universal solution, there will be many people that will have to wait anyways. So we should be open to other options regardless.
What are you actually advocating for here? Not electrifying and waiting another few decades for hydrogen? You come off as excessively defensive of the practically nonexistent H2 industry and excessively critical of electrification, which is basically the Shell and Exxon position. We don't have time wait for anything, we need to use the tech we have now to reduce warming. Where do we get the hydrogen in your world? Is it blue or green? Blue is just fossil fuels with extra steps and green doesn't make sense until we have significant excess renewables and already electrified the easy stuff (buildings) and then it might still make sense only for industry/shipping and niche stuff. H2 itself has a GWP of 11 or so, and we will leak quite a bit. So again, what are you actually arguing for? I can't buy hydrogen, period. I can't buy a hydrogen vehicle, or a hydrogen furnace, or a hydrogen anything. What do you actually think we plebs should be doing here? I already want green steel as much as you do.
The first point to make is that hydrogen is not decades off. Green hydrogen is happening now, and its production is rapidly expanding alongside the expansion of renewable energy production. Many sectors can rapidly adopt green hydrogen right away. This is similar to the conversation we we had about solar power about a decade ago. Critics of solar power back then were being Luddites (and sometimes secret fossil fuel industry stooges). They were convinced that solar could not be cost-effective or scale, based off of very outdated understandings of the issue, but they were wrong. This conversation is repeating with green hydrogen.
On a related note, pro-electrification crusaders are being hypocrites on this subject. They themselves are demanding that we wait decades for miracle batteries or multi-decadal long electrification programs. Because they want "perfect" solutions rather than "good" solutions. A good example is how they demand we fully electrify all rail, a process that will take decades, rather than doing something faster like switching diesel trains to hydrogen trains. In reality, adopting hydrogen now, alongside more reasonable forms of electrification, will be a faster path for reducing CO2 emissions.
Also note that most "fearmongering" types of argument against hydrogen originated from the fossil fuel industry. They are always spreading propaganda intended to undermine green energy projects, and make similar claims about all green technologies. Claims that hydrogen is dangerous, or a GHG, or will leak, etc., are all fear tactics created with minimal amounts of evidence. In reality, hydrogen has very few problems, and adopting it will drastically make transportation and industry safer and more green. It is unfortunate that many environmentalists have fallen for this tactic, but I suppose every green idea had to overcome it.
Finally, you can buy hydrogen and hydrogen-related products. Sure, we are still a bit early on the adoption curve, but that is true of every new idea. Someone can buy a hydrogen car, or a furnace, or whatever right now. Many more are also capable, but don't know it yet. So rather than demonizing something for not being able to basically time travel, environmentalists should promote green ideas in order to accelerate their adoption.
Yes, hydrogen cars exist in tiny numbers...but there is wildly inadequate fueling infrastructure, and no sign that it will be built out. Meanwhile, you can charge at home, and there is a massive buildout of fast chargers underway in most of the world. I don't expect hydrogen for ground surface transportation to be meaningful as a result.
That's closed-minded thinking. There is nothing stopping the rapid deployment of hydrogen cars. The obsession with only one type of green car is a major detriment to the green car movement. For many people, green transportation is a threat to their lifestyle, since they are not allowed to look at any option other than the BEV.
Its literally driven by economics and practicality. People dont buy them because its cheaper and more convenient to use battery-electric.
If there had been a huge green hydrogen build out earlier, it might have been different, but it isn't
The case for H2 is just to make it (electrolysis). The case for consumer FCEVs comes well after the production capacity is abundant, but then also after heavier transport refueling is deployed sufficiently.
Also to compress it, chill it, transport it, and store it, while avoiding leaks and fires. You're absolutely right though, first comes renewables (and a shit ton of batteries), hopefully in parallel some green steel and chemical processes, then heavy transit and the harder edge cases to electrify, assuming electrification hasn't already solved those issues by then. Talking about regular folks buying fuel cell cars is not realistic.
That is the exact opposite of reality. BEVs are heavily subsidized globally. Without enormous government support, the market for them would be very small.
Opposition to hydrogen is falling for fossil fuel propaganda. It is absolutely necessary for solving climate change.
On the contrary, hydrogen itself is fossil fuel propaganda. They sell it on its "potential" for being generated via electrolysis using renewable electricity ("green hydrogen"), but in practice the vast majority of it comes from cracking natural gas ("gray hydrogen"). And that "potential" will never come to fruition, because by the time it would battery electric vehicle ("BEV") tech and infrastructure will be so far ahead there won't be a point anymore.
We should just face facts: a hydrogen car is, in practice, a CNG car, except that you've converted the fuel into a form that makes it (even more of) a pain in the ass to handle for no good reason.
If anything, if we're really Hell-bent on non-BEV solutions then we should go the opposite way and work on synthesizing "green hydrogen" into hydrocarbon liquid fuel so that we can use it with the fueling infrastructure and internal-combustion vehicles we already have, making that stuff carbon-neutral.
Obviously, an H2 economy has to be green H2 based. Pure H2 will always be cheaper than e-fuels, because the latter is more steps. An airplane costs 100x in lifetime fuel as its purchase price, and H2 will always be cheaper in addition to more range due to it being the highest energy density fuel.
Much anti-H2 propaganda has come from BEV stockholder base. H2 is not a threat to BEVs, and can help refuel them quicker/cheaper in public chargers, but in no way does it stop the people who understand batteries to make better batteries.
It has to be that to be a good thing, but it doesn't have to be that to exist. There are plenty of people pushing for spending $$$$$$$$$ on fuel cell cars and hydrogen fuel stations even when they're just being used with cracked natural gas for no actual environmental benefit.
It's like pretending your diesel car is green even though you've never put a drop of B100 in it.
At the point of production, sure. At the point of use, not so much, since hydrogen is so much more difficult/expensive to store and transport.
Energy density by weight, not by volume. It doesn't do much good to have longer range if you can't carry enough cargo because too much of the plane is taken up by fuel tanks.
It actually does. Making H2 from NG, for heat/transportation, is using NG with extra expensive steps. H2 already exists as a fundamental chemical (including Ammonia) for agriculture and rocket fuel. An H2 economy is for expanded use, and green H2 is only economic possible case.
fatter planes with fatter delta wings.
Except that's total bullshit. In fact, it's literally same argument used against BEVs in the past. There was a time when any talk of BEVs were shouted down by people who kept insisting that the grid is being powered by coal or natural gas, and that BEVs were nothing more than "coal-powered cars" and the like. But now we know that's nonsense. Electricity can be made green, whereas fossil fuels cannot. Same is true of hydrogen.
The other point is that we are push hard towards the limits of BEVs can really achieve. We'll never see long-ranged airplanes powered by batteries, and same can be said of ocean-going ships. Many industries stand no chance of switching to batteries either. They either require a fire source, or need the chemistry provided by hydrogen. Nor will the grid reach zero emissions without long-duration energy storage, which will require hydrogen in most cases. So if you actually think this problem through, you'll realize that batteries alone are only going to solve a small part of the problem. Everything else will require hydrogen in some way.
E-fuels will require prodigious amounts of green hydrogen to exist at scale. They are produced by combining H2 with CO2. While I don't rule them out as a solution, it will require massive investments in hydrogen first. It is not an excuse to dismiss hydrogen.
It doesn't require "massive investments in hydrogen," though! It just requires electrolyzing the hydrogen, and that's the easy part. It can be done right there in the same facility as the Fischer-Tropsch reactions, so the end product you're distributing everywhere is a convenient liquid and all you need to handle the hydrogen gas itself is a short chunk of pipe going between reaction vessels.
The "massive investments in hydrogen" for the "hydrogen economy" are all the absurd cryogenic or ludicrously high-pressure storage tanks to build out the entire distribution and fuel station network that we'd need to use actual H~2~ as an energy storage medium instead of just an intermediate step in an industrial process. None of it is necessary for synthetic liquid fuels.
That happens to be fossil fuel propaganda for e-fuels. The process is a heat based industrial scale, where fossil fuel supply chains are already developed, and H2 "extraction" is part of a continuous heat process, and ample CO (often co2 processed into CO) generation is part of the process. Furthermore these are net 0 fuels which are not good enough, or as good as green fuels. A reasonable carbon tax is $300/ton. Direct air capture can reach costs below this amount, and compete with green transition, but only if the CO2 is permanently sequestered or solidified. 0 credit would be given if e-fuels CO2/CO content comes from fossil fuels or air capture.
Again, H2 or Ammonia, are the right long term fuels. They can be synthesized without the heat-based industrial processes, or at least use H2 for the heat. H2 economy means smaller scale production distributed closer to customers.
No, it doesn't, because it's my own original thought and I'm not a fossil fuel propaganist.
I'm not talking about fucking cracking natural gas; I'm talking about building an electrolysis plant running on renewable electricity next to a former refinery doing all the hydrocarbon chemistry that has been adaptively reused to make synthetic fuel. The hydrogen is not supposed to be coming from petroleum!
On the contrary, carbon neutral is absolutely good enough. Why the hell wouldn't it be?!
Again, you're wrong about H~2~ because throwing out all the liquid fuel infrastructure we already have to switch to the most difficult-to-handle choice short of something hypergolic is just fundamentally stupid.
I don't know anything about ammonia; maybe it really is the right solution. It's kind of a different topic, though. Do you want to start talking about that instead?
H2 (or green electricity) is carbon negative when it displaces FF use. unnecessary and expensive efuels are not. DAC is/can be carbon negative. But sequestering the CO2 is less expense than combining it with H2 into an efuel that negates the capture value of DAC. A carbon tax and dividend is a better social mechanism for cost (including climate cost) reductions even when investing in DAC reduces the tax collections and dividends.
A misunderstanding, that stems from extreme volume of disinformation, is that energy transition means "first we have to nuke all infrastructure from orbit" strawman, that is used to protect the status quo. Instead, less then no new dead ender energy infrastructure investments should be made during transition, and then one day, fairly far away, old inefficient machinery will not be worth repairing, even though access to fuel will continue existing for a very long time, and no matter how inneficient it is, a machine will be sold for something greater than 0 to someone who needs it for backup, or because it is cheap.
Just because you can't hold H2 in your existing beer mug container doesn't mean H2 handling is not a largely solved problem. Ammonia is higher energy density than liquid H2 with propane container handling solutions.
Having enough electrolyzers for that is still a huge investment. Plenty of naysayers have said, and still are saying, that this alone is impossible. Also, if we can make the Fischer-Tropsch process cost-effective for making synthetic fuels, then green hydrogen would have already become really cheap by then.
No one is wedded to the idea of always using pure H2 for everything. The pro-H2 position is simply pointing out that green hydrogen is necessary for solving climate change, even if that means making synthetic fuels in the end. But it is worth saying that using pure H2 is not some huge challenge. Having to use cryogenic fuels or high pressure tanks are already possible in cars today.
Wat?
An electrolytic cell is just a couple of chunks of metal stuck in some water and hooked up to a voltage source, plus some tubes to collect the gases. It's so simple elementary school kids could build one in science class, and (unlike the proton exchange membrane in a fuel cell) requires no exotic materials or complicated-to-manufacture components.
If that's true, we've been talking past each other and don't disagree as much as it seemed. But I'm not convinced it is. Every time I've seen folks talking about the "hydrogen economy," it's in the context of building out a shitload of infrastructure for carting gaseous H~2~ around, with zero mention of making synthetic liquid fuels.
And that latter part is the point I care about: it's true that batteries are never gonna be viable for stuff like aviation, but gaseous H~2~ fuel cells won't be either. The real future for that stuff looks a lot like the present, except using non-fossil feedstocks to make the same sorts of fuels we're already using. That could mean fuel synthesized from hydrogen, or biofuel, or some mix of both -- it doesn't even matter as long as it performs the same as the Jet A or whatever you're trying to replace -- but it's definitely gonna be a liquid that's easy to handle with the infrastructure we already have and it's probably gonna be burned in the same sorts of combustion engines we're already using, not reacted in a fuel cell.
The goal is carbon-neutral fuel made from non-fossil sources, for those use-cases batteries aren't good for. Hydrogen is only part of one possible solution, and a pretty incidental part at that. Talking about the "hydrogen economy" is missing the point.
It's "possible," sure, but at huge cost and complexity that means it's flat out dumb compared to using a liquid fuel. And that's never gonna change.
By the way, I'd like to get back to my original "greenwashing scam" point for a minute. Consider that there are two orthogonal issues here:
With "the hydrogen economy," a huge emphasis is placed on the latter of those two issues, while the former is just sort of hand-waved as a trivial detail we'll get to later, even though transitioning from "gray" to "green" hydrogen is also a huge unsolved problem that isn't trivial at all.
Meanwhile, with liquid fuels and combustion engines, the latter is a solved problem, so there's no excuse to direct less than full attention to the former.
So if you're an entity with a vested interest in fossil fuel extraction, what're you gonna do? You're gonna push for hydrogen, of course, because it provides a whole extra set of distracting issues for engjneers and tree-huggers to occupy themselves with that aren't getting down to the brass tacks of actually replacing the fossil feedstock with a sustainable one.
e-fuels or bio fuels are only short term solutions that are greenwashing because in the short term there is insufficient green H2 abundance. Their only value is to keep using your existing machinery.
For new machinery/transportation, a fuel cell is 2x the efficiency of a combustion engine. It is a range extender for any battery electric machine/home, with usable waste heat. A green economy involves people eventually going back to buy fossil fuels from drug stores, because there eventually are so few machines that use them. It is greenwashing to say "we want to keep everything the same except just have very expensive gasoline".
It's simply ok to make new H2/Ammonia consuming machines that displace older machines even as people are not forced to upgrade until they are ready. In long term, H2 will always be cheaper than e-fuels in addition to being 2x the energy value with far more flexible use.
You and I might know that, but the loudest critics of hydrogen do not. They really think that this step is impossible.
Just to be clear, green synthetic fuels are a huge ask. We will need direct air capture of CO2 before it is feasible at scale. It is a technology only now coming into view, and is still effectively impossible at this very moment.
For aviation, the conversation was always centered around either SAF (either biofuels or synthetic fuels) or LH2.
FYI, batteries are themselves never going to be truly green. You will always have a dirty supply chain for their production and mining. Today, that requires vast amounts of fossil fuels to be used. Even if you really believe batteries can solve most of transportation, there will still be a major reason to abandon BEVs in transportation at some point in the future.
Then you are making a similar mistake that the critics of electrolyzers are making: Forgetting that this is just a series of pipes and tanks, and those are dirt cheap to scale up. Cheaper than expanding the grid BTW. If we have to use gaseous or liquid hydrogen, we could easily do it.
Transitioning from gray to green hydrogen is trivial. It's literally the same process that the grid is going through now. Nothing changes for the end-user, since it is the same thing to them, just like green electricity. In fact, the reason why this conversation is happening at all is because pro-hydrogen people are certain this step is easily solved.
Actually making green hydrocarbon fuels in the quantities needed is not a trivial problem. It is likely just as difficult, if not more so, than figuring out how to distribute pure hydrogen. It needs to be mentioned that we can pipe hydrogen just like natural gas. The infrastructure for that is already largely built.
Fossil fuel companies would strongly oppose any kind of green energy. It's a conspiracy theory to think that would support the lesser of two apocalyptic outcomes. At best, only the pipeline companies would accept a transition to green hydrogen. But that is the same situation as the utility companies, and we don't spread conspiracy theories about the BEVs being a trick by the utility companies.
Okay, good point. I was thinking about how we have all that point-source CO~2~ coming from our legacy fossil fuel power plants, but we'd still also need a separate source of clean electricity. If we built that, it would make more sense to replace the fossil fuel plant with it than to augment it. You'd have to refine the transportation fuel from petroleum the normal way, but that's more efficient than doing the hydrogen synthesis thing using dirty electricity.
Hey now, I didn't say that! I was just talking about the relative merits of batteries vs. fuel cells vs. normal combustion engines running on synthetic or bio fuels.
The real way to "solve most of transportation" is zoning reform that results in cities with walkable density. Bicycles come in second, and rail transit a distant third. Cars of any type are really only suitable for the 20% of the population that's rural, service vehicles, contractors and delivery people that need to haul bigger loads than fit on a cargo bike, etc.
(Speaking of which, once you reduce the demand for vehicle fuel that much, stuff like biodiesel made from waste veggie oil starts to look plentiful enough to make a decent dent in the market. That, at least, has been a solved problem for decades, and I've got the '90s VW and B100 fuel receipts to prove it.)
Anyway, I'm still pretty skeptical about building out an entire "economy" around storage and distribution of a gas that's so famously difficult to store that it can leak straight through metal, and more bullish than you are on synthetic fuel processes that we've known how to do for a century but just haven't bothered commercializing/scaling up because fossil fuels have been too cheap, but I'm kinda running out of motivation to continue defending my position on it. Thanks for the interesting discussion!
Not even close. Even if all cars were eliminated, there will still be enormous commercial need for fuels, such as commercial trucking, shipping, aviation, mining, construction, etc. Not to mention that growing crops for biodiesel require massive energy inputs in the form of fertilizers, pesticides, farm equipment, etc. And of course, the farmland needed will displace food production, which is its own major problem.
Which is why biofuels can never really be taken seriously as part of a green economy.
Sure, same here.
Mostly unnecessary; that's what freight trains are for. (Short-haul from freight depot to loading dock can be handled by battery electric trucks.)
Believe it or not, sails! Obviously you're not going to get a 100% reduction because modern shipping companies wouldn't tolerate being becalmed (and I'm not falling for that article's "up to 90%" claim either, BTW -- I only picked that one to link because it has a decent overview of multiple different technologies), but it can still make a big dent in the fuel requirements.
Not much you can do about how much fuel a given flight uses... but you can reduce the number of flights by shifting travelers to high-speed passenger rail instead.
In other words, stuff that doesn't actually go anywhere (instead just driving back and forth on a site that probably has good access to the grid or a generator), which means it's (comparatively) real easy to electrify.
Who said anything about that? I was talking about waste veggie oil.
I'm not sure you fully appreciate how large a reduction in automobile/trucking/shipping/construction equipment fuel use I'm proposing. I'm saying we should electrify or modal-shift so much of the demand that biodiesel made from just the stuff thrown out by restaurants and meat-packing plants and whatnot -- without even growing bespoke crops for it -- could satisfy most of what remains.
No. Absolutely not. Sorry, but I cannot this claim seriously at all. We are not going to switch to sail ships again. I don't think you grasp just how big modern shipping actually is, and how impossible such an idea really is.
I doubt you have any grasp of how massive the problem really is, and how tiny your proposed solutions are in comparison. For instance, you keep citing the possibility of using waste cooking oil for biofuels. Well, the world only makes 3.7 billion gallons of that per year: https://oilandenergyonline.com/articles/all/supply-and-demand-report-used-cooking-oil/
Converted to barrels of oil equivalence, that's around 100 million barrels. The problem? That's literally one day's worth of petroleum consumption: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_consumption
So you are about 0.3% of the way of solving the problem with that idea. Even if we could radically reduce petroleum use in the way you are imagining, that's still going to be a negligible impact. And the world's GDP is still growing. There's still multiple billions of people that will want to live like the first world. So demand for energy will skyrocket in the coming decades, not decrease. The problem will only get exponentially larger and harder to solve.
Ultimately, this is eco-Ludditism, and is more about wishing away the problem than actually solving it. Worse, you enabling the worse stereotypes about environmentalists. Namely that they are crazy wackos who aren't willing to engage with reality. Any solution must take seriously the idea that there >8 billion people on Earth now, and they all want to live in convenience.
I'm hopeful for wind powered shipping. An abundant H2 supply would accelerate this https://youtu.be/HFIzcPBGGEQ (1.2mw high altitude turbine thethered to large ship) that can scale even higher.