by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) Green hydrogen stands at a crossroads—hailed as a linchpin of the low-carbon future, yet caught in a double bind between stunning technical progress and the stubborn realities of implementation. Shanghai Electric just delivered its first barrels of green methanol at a wind-and-biomass facility hailed as a world first. Envision Energy is ramping up to 320,000 tons of green ammonia in Inner Mongolia without touching the grid. In California, NewHydrogen is skipping electricity altogether with a looping thermal process that could change the game.
But even as these breakthroughs surge, cracks widen: Stellantis is walking away from hydrogen vehicles, citing a “niche market” and missing infrastructure. The contradiction is now unmistakable—this is a fuel racing ahead in theory, but stalling where rubber meets road.
The “Breakthroughs”: Stunning Technical Progress and Strategic Vision
The global landscape for green hydrogen is characterized by an array of impressive advancements in production scale, technological innovation, and governmental backing:
Scaling Up Production and Commercialization
In Australia, Energys has secured planning approval for its green hydrogen production facility in Hastings, Victoria. This project is a commercially focused B2B industrial supply initiative, designed to displace grey hydrogen derived from natural gas.
...
Shanghai Electric has launched the first phase of its Taonan green hydrogen-to-methanol plant in Jilin, a global first for a commercial-scale project integrating wind power and biomass gasification to produce green methanol.
...
Envision Energy, has commissioned a significant green hydrogen and ammonia production facility in Chifeng.
...
In the UK, Hazer Group and EnergyPathways (EPP) have signed a non-binding Memorandum of Understanding to assess the development of a Hazer-licensed hydrogen production facility.
...
Pioneering New Production Technologies:
NewHydrogen in California has announced its first production of clean hydrogen using its ThermoLoop technology.
...
PyroGenesis’s subsidiary, Pyro Green-Gas, has completed a project for Tata Steel in India involving the valorization of coke-oven gas.
...
Crucial Governmental and R&D Support
India’s Ministry of New & Renewable Energy has issued a second call for proposals under the Research and Development Scheme of its National Green Hydrogen Mission.
...
The “Breakdown”: Stubborn Realities of Implementation
Despite these compelling advances, the path to widespread green hydrogen adoption is not straightforward. The stubborn realities of implementation are starkly highlighted by challenges in infrastructure, cost, and market readiness:
Stellantis’s Retreat from Hydrogen Vehicles
...
The Bottom Line
For green hydrogen to break through—not just technologically, but commercially—it needs more than capability. It needs context, connection, and above all, demand. The most advanced technologies in the world are wandering in search of a killer app—something that turns potential into pull, scale into inevitability.
Until then, we’re building elegant solutions without a starring role, and every success risks becoming a ghost: visible, viable, but unclaimed. READ MORE
Related articles
Steel plant in Vance’s hometown trades clean future for more coal: The Middletown, Ohio, plant was set to receive $500 million to make "green" steel. Then its CEO embraced President Donald Trump. (Politico)
Excerpt from Politico: The Middletown plant that employed Vance’s grandfather and lifted his family out of poverty was supposed to be the future of manufacturing, boosted by former President Joe Biden’s climate and infrastructure laws. By repowering a blast furnace with hydrogen and natural gas and cutting its reliance on coal, the facility would have been on its way to cranking out steel and reducing its climate pollution.
On Monday, Cleveland-Cliffs CEO Lourenco Goncalves declared the experiment over. Instead, he told investors on an earnings call that he was now working with the Department of Energy to “enhance Middletown using beautiful coal, beautiful coke,” echoing Trump’s claims about one of the nation’s most-polluting fuels.
“It’s clear by now that we will not have availability of hydrogen, so there is no point in pursuing something that we know for sure that’s not going to happen,” Goncalves said. “We informed the DOE that we would not be pursuing that project.”
The journey of the Middletown plant traces the Trump administration’s rapid dismantling of Biden’s vision for a lower-carbon future that was designed to create jobs and grow the economy while boosting American clean tech innovation and shifting the economy away from its reliance on fossil fuels. The Biden plan to transform the clean energy economy relied on hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies and incentives, which in turn would help generate additional private investment.
The Trump administration has almost completely reversed that approach, undercutting both the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure law — and pledging to increase the nation’s reliance on coal and other fossil fuels.
...
Under Biden, the Middletown plant was supposed to receive a $500 million federal grant to repower a coal-fired blast furnace in order to produce steel with clean hydrogen and natural gas. For decades, a mist of black soot has blanketed the cars and homes of the people who live closest to the plant. Had the hydrogen plan been implemented, it could have transformed one of the dirtiest steel plants in the country into one of the cleanest. It would have created an additional 200 permanent jobs and 1,200 construction jobs at the plant that now employs about 2,500.
...
While Goncalves did not specify how the administration was helping his company with the coal it purchases, Cleveland-Cliffs’ bottom line has been boosted by a 50 percent tariff that Trump imposed on imported steel last month — doubling the rate from 25 percent.
...
Where the Biden plan used tax incentives and grants — funded through taxpayer dollars — the Trump plan relies on steep tariffs passed along to consumers, said Scott Lincicome, vice president of general economics at the conservative Cato Institute. The U.S. steel industry is the fourth largest of any country in the world, he said, and has long leveraged “cronyism” to get more government incentives and generate higher profits rather than relying on a free market.
“We have the fourth-largest steel industry in the world, so the idea that this industry needs government help is pretty fantastical,” he said. “The reason that tariffs are so universally derided is because they’re just a really inefficient, distortionary and indirect way to protect or boost domestic industry.”
He said the Cleveland-Cliffs decision to avoid increasing its reliance on natural gas and clean hydrogen was another backward-looking move to keep using a more expensive and dirtier fuel source that drives up pollution and prices at the same time.
“It’s the worst-choice policy and worst-choice energy source,” he said. READ MORE
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