Hydrogen

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Green Hydrogen: Big Gaps Between Ambition and Implementation
January 14, 2025

Introduction:

(Eurekalert) "Over the past three years, global project announcements for green hydrogen have almost tripled," says PIK researcher and lead author Adrian Odenweller. "However, only seven percent of the production capacity originally announced for 2023 has been completed on time during this period." According to the study, the recent problems with the market ramp-up of green hydrogen can be attributed to increased costs, a lack of willingness to pay on the demand side and uncertainties about future subsidies and regulation.

"Enormous additional subsidies of around one trillion US dollars would be required to realise all announced hydrogen projects by 2030," explains Falko Ueckerdt from PIK, "Green hydrogen will continue to have difficulties meeting the high expectations in the future due to a lack of competitiveness." However, permanent subsidies are not a solution. The two researchers therefore recommend using demand-side instruments such as binding quotas to channel green hydrogen specifically into sectors that are difficult to electrify, such as aviation, steel or chemicals. For example, according to an EU regulation, 1.2 percent of all aviation fuels must be blended with synthetic fuels based on hydrogen from 2030. This quota is set to rise to 35 percent by 2050.

Subsidy requirements far exceed announced global subsidies

In their study, the researchers quantify three key gaps between theory and practice: the past implementation gap, the future ambition gap and the future implementation gap. The first results from the difference between originally announced hydrogen projects and the projects actually realised in 2023. The ambition gap refers to the discrepancy between the amount of hydrogen that would be required by 2030 according to 1.5-degree scenarios and the projects currently announced by 2030. Although announced hydrogen projects are sufficient for the majority of the scenarios analysed, a wide implementation gap remains: The subsidies required to realise all projects by 2030 far exceed the global public financial support announced to date.

Read more of the Eurekalert article here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1070242

For a presentation of study results as published in Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-024-01684-7

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Reservoirs of Hydrogen Could Be Hiding Inside Our Planet's Mountain Ranges
by David Nield
March 20, 2025

Introduction:

(Science Alert) New research suggests there could be massive reserves of naturally occurring hydrogen gas hiding away in the mountain ranges of the world – potentially giving us access to a huge, untapped source of clean energy.

These reservoirs of gas would have been produced over millions of years, the study suggests. An international team of researchers combined field recordings with computer modeling to simulate plate tectonic movement, mountain formation, and the possible production of hydrogen.

While there are ways to produce hydrogen artificially, it's not easy – and they typically emit greenhouse gases along the way, which somewhat defeats the point. Finding large natural reserves would be an incredible step forward for the clean energy technology.

"This new research advances our understanding of suitable environments for natural hydrogen generation," says geophysicist Sascha Brune, from the GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences in Germany.

"Given the economic opportunities associated with natural H2, now is the time to go further and also investigate migration pathways of hydrogen and deep, hydrogen-consuming microbial ecosystems to better understand where potential H2 reservoirs can actually form."

Read more here: https://www.sciencealert.com/reservoir ... n-ranges

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'Beam-down' solar reactor produces green hydrogen without electricity
By Abhimanyu Ghoshal
June 23, 2025
https://newatlas.com/energy/csiro-beam- ... -hydrogen/

Researchers at Australia's national science agency have developed an efficient method to produce green hydrogen for energy-hungry, high-temperature industrial processes – and it starts with concentrated sunshine.

Heavy industries like steelmaking, and iron and alumina production, utilize hydrogen because it can replace fossil fuels in combustion processes while producing only water vapor as a byproduct instead of CO2 emissions. That's all well and good, but producing hydrogen through processes like electrolysis consume a lot of energy too. Greenifying the production of hydrogen itself is another crucial step towards reducing the impact of these industries on the environment.

That's what the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) in Australia is hoping to accomplish with its latest breakthrough, the beam-down solar reactor. While the concept appears to have been first developed years before, it's the first time it's been demonstrated in Australia.

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Engineering Breakthrough Opens Door to Cheap Hydrogen Power
A new type of hydrogen fuel cell operates at much lower temperatures than what’s typically required for existing fuel cells, bringing them closer to widespread implementation.
By Gayoung Lee Published August 11, 2025

As an alternative to fossil fuel combustion, hydrogen fuel cells hold tremendous promise. But they’re also notoriously difficult and expensive to manage, which largely explains why we don’t see them everywhere (or anywhere, for that matter, except for a few initiatives that are “exploring” their efficiency). But that may soon change.

In a Nature Materials paper published August 8, researchers announced the development of a new type of solid-oxide fuel cell (SOFC) that addresses an underlying problem for these contraptions: temperature. Hydrogen fuel cells, a type of SOFC, directly convert hydrogen gas into energy and water. This process, while very efficient and long-lasting, demands ridiculously high operating temperatures ranging from 1,292 to 1,472 degrees Fahrenheit (700 to 800 degrees Celsius).

The new cell, however, works at just 572 degrees F (300 degrees C), less than half of what was previously required. “Bringing the working temperature down to 300°C would slash material costs and open the door to consumer-level systems,” said Yoshihiro Yamazaki, study senior author and a materials engineer at Kyushu University in Japan, in a statement.

https://gizmodo.com/engineering-breakth ... 2000641497

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Ultrafast photothermal process achieves 3,000°C in 0.02 seconds, boosting hydrogen production efficiency sixfold

by The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)
https://phys.org/news/2025-10-ultrafast ... sting.html

The rapid and energy-efficient synthesis of high-performance catalysts is a critical hurdle in advancing clean energy technologies like hydrogen production. Addressing this challenge, a research team at KAIST has now developed a novel platform technology that utilizes a 0.02-second flash of light to generate an ultrahigh temperature of 3,000°C, enabling the highly efficient synthesis of catalysts.

This breakthrough process reduces energy consumption by more than a thousandfold compared to conventional methods while increasing hydrogen production efficiency by up to six times, marking a significant step toward the commercialization of clean energy.

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Vema predicts cheap hydrogen could change where data centers are built

February 3, 2026

The automotive industry has struggled to adopt hydrogen at scale, but industrial users and data centers might have better luck.

Vema Hydrogen inked a deal in December to supply California data centers, and now it has completed a pilot project in Quebec to power industry with hydrogen that it produces deep underground.

The startup drills wells in regions with specific types of iron-rich rock that release hydrogen gas when treated with water, heat, pressure, and some catalysts. Vema then draws the hydrogen to the surface and sells it to industrial users.

“To supply the Quebec local market, which is about 100,000 tons per year, you would need 3 square kilometers, which is nothing,” Pierre Levin, CEO of Vema, told TechCrunch.

Vema’s first pilot well will produce several tons of hydrogen per day, and next year, it plans to drill its first commercial well, which will reach 800 meters into the Earth. Vema expects to produce hydrogen from the first wells for less than $1 per kilogram, a widely used benchmark for clean hydrogen.

https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/03/vema- ... are-built/

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