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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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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.