The Hydrogen Issue (again!)
I was at a conference recently where one of the attendees from a local council talked about the implementation of Zero Emission buses in the area. She said they were running a hydrogen pilot as well as a full battery electric pilot.1
My reputation for always asking questions at things like this remains intact as I stuck my hand in the air and asked: ‘Given the failure of so many other hydrogen bus pilots, what are you going to do differently to improve the chances of a success?’
She thought for a few seconds and said something along the lines of ‘Mumble, mumble, mumble, different situation, mumble, mumble mumble, next question...’
In other words she had no explanation why this council - despite seeing the failure of numerous other hydrogen bus pilots both in the UK and abroad - would have a pilot that would turn out any differently.
Which does raise the question of why do councils continue to run hydrogen pilots knowing that the result is always going to be some combination of ‘It’s too expensive. We can’t source cheap enough hydrogen. The hydrogen supply is too erratic. The buses don’t give us the performance we expect’?
Time after time pilot projects have been run to try and prove that fuel cell vehicles have a place in transport. Time after time they have fallen short.
Which is ironic given that fuel cell technology is a proven method of providing electricity.
The issue comes when you try to scale the technology to work at a bigger scale.
For a limited pilot that has a small number of vehicles, a small amount of hydrogen, and defined timeline, and a good amount of support from a funder with deep pockets, it’s relatively easy to show that the technology works.2
The issue comes when you want to scale that up to a larger volume of vehicles. Sourcing cheap hydrogen is always a problem. There is a limited amount of green hydrogen available in any given location. Which means you’re down to using one of the less green versions that comes from something nasty like steam reformation of methane. That immediately throws your green credentials out of the window.
On top of that there’s the question of cost. Brown hydrogen (ie sourced from fossil fuels) is relatively cheap compared with green hydrogen. But for a truly green solution you need to be using green hydrogen. This only comes from electrolysis (ie passing a renewable electric current through water and capturing the resulting H2 release).
For electrolysis there are two options: build your own electrolysis plant locally or buy green hydrogen from another source.
Building a green plant locally is the ‘ideal’ solution. But it can be expensive - both in capital costs and from the point of view of actually producing hydrogen through the process. Because of the inefficiencies of the process you need to use something in the region of 2 to 3 times more electricity to produce enough hydrogen to take you 10 miles than you do to charge a battery to go the same distance.3
That’s just physics.
Buying it from another source will be even more expensive because you have to pay for shipping and/or storage. Each stage in the process will also entail losses due to the ‘porous’ nature of hydrogen containment vessels.
Either way you’re paying more for hydrogen than for the equivalent amount of energy from a battery
But not all hydrogen bus projects have failed. Cologne, Germany has managed to roll out over 100 hydrogen-powered buses. How has it done that? Two reasons:
1) The hydrogen it uses is actually waste hydrogen from a local processing plant. Not low carbon by any means. But it saves venting the hydrogen directly into the atmosphere or- even worse - burning it.
2) They received 34 million Euros from the government to set this up.4
What this goes to prove is that if you have enough funding from somebody else’s pockets, and a reliable source of hydrogen you can probably make hydrogen work.
Otherwise, the laws of physics make it something of a fool’s errand.
I know I’m probably going to get some pushback from hydrogen supporters about this. The main pushback is going to be ‘All that’s missing is the hydrogen infrastructure. If we had more of that hydrogen would work’. Probably true. But then again the same was being said for EV charging infrastructure and that seems to have grown by a larger factor than Hydrogen across the world (and with far fewer government subsidies).
Even in places such as the US where hydrogen has a lot of support because it generally comes from fossil fuel sources there are only 50 public hydrogen refuelling sites and 48 of them are in California. 5
If you want chapter and verse on hydrogen usage globally the font of knowledge as far as I am concerned is Michael Barnard who writes for Cleantechnica (and others) 6
Meanwhile, local authorities and other governmental bodies continue to spend fortunes in taxpayer money to pilot a product that has constantly proven to be uneconomical and unreliable. The list of hydrogen bus failures for example, is extensive.7
But go ahead, conference presenter. Your pilot will probably be the exception to the rule and prove that hydrogen for transport can work at an economic cost with reliable hydrogen supplies. Good luck with that.
For the sake of humiliation and privacy I will not name the presenter, council, or event. But it took place at the British Motor Museum this year (2026)
I’ve yet to find a single hydrogen pilot that didn’t rely on large grants from some third party - usually the taxpayer
1 kg of Hydrogen in an efficient process would need 39.4kWh of electricity to produce. https://www.astrodynetdi.com/blog/understanding-power-requirements-for-hydrogen-generation
That 1kG of hydrogen would transport a bus about 15 km (9 miles). https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652621044127
Even my relatively inefficient Polestar 2 would travel around 230km (137miles) on 39.4kWh of energy