By Kennedy Maize
Hydrogen – the primary element of the universe – has long had energy mavens looking longingly at its use as a fuel. H2 is plentiful – although not necessarily easily or cheaply produced – and energetic. It is versatile, able to be burned directly in internal combustion engines or to make steam in gas fired power plants, used to make electricity in fuel cells. It is infinitely renewable and largely clean (burning it in the air will produce oxides of nitrogen, which are pollutants).
H2 as an energy source has never really caught on. Recent developments have major players backing away from hydrogen. That’s a result of market conditions, and, at least in the U.S., government policy uncertainty.
Pennsylvania-based Air Products (NYSE:APD), a multinational firm with 2024 revenue of $12.1 billion, recently announced it is cancelling two hydrogen projects and a carbon monoxide project, taking a $3.1 billion charge (about $800 million in cash) in the 2025 second quarter.
In an 8K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Air Products said it is pulling the plug on a 35 metric tons/day green hydrogen project in Massena, N.Y. “based on recent regulatory developments rendering existing hydroelectric power supply ineligible for the Clean Hydrogen Production Tax Credit (45V) as well as slower than expected development of a hydrogen mobility market in the region.” The $500 million project planned to use electric power from an existing New York Power Authority hydropower plant on the St. Lawrence River to split the river water, separating the hydrogen and oxygen.
The company also bailed out of a project with World Energy in Paramount, Calif., to expand production of “sustainable aviation fuel” produced from used oils such as those from fast food outlets. Air Products said, “The decision to exit this project reflects challenging commercial aspects surrounding the expansion project and current operations.”
Chemical and Engineering News (C&EN) commented, “Air Products’ emphasis on massive low-carbon hydrogen projects in recent years led to the ouster of its longtime CEO Seifi Ghasemi earlier this month. The new CEO, Eduardo Menezes, has wasted no time taking the axe to a few of his predecessor’s plans.”
The Air Products move was not its first major retreat from producing hydrogen from renewables, which is known as “green” hydrogen. Conventional hydrogen production breaks up natural gas to get to the hydrogen atoms, getting a “gray” moniker. C&EN reported, “Under Ghasemi’s watch in December, the company canceled a $4 billion green hydrogen project it intended to build in Texas with the energy firm AES. That plant would have produced 200 t of hydrogen per day.”
In other blows to H2’s prospects, CleanTechnica has headlined a story on the “Crumbling Of Hydrogen For Transportation.” It highlights the bankruptcy filing by the shady Nikola hydrogen-powered truck company. The company over the years has fleeced investors in a “pump-and-dump” operation after going public in a 2020 SPAC proceeding, briefly achieving a temporary market cap of $13 billion.
But there was never much reality about the claims for H2-fuel cells making electricity to power Nikola’s semi-trailer trucks. A case of its scam of investors was a 2016 demonstration of its trucks running on a road at its nearby factory. It turns out that the trucks had no engines and were coasting downhill. Nikola founder and CEO Trevor Milton, a former door-to-door salesman and college dropout, was sentenced in 2023 to four years in jail after conviction on federal securities and wire fraud charges.
The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Feb. 19, saying that it was seeking a buyer. Nikola told the bankruptcy court it hopes to line up a sale by April. If it fails to pull off a rescue, the company will attempt to liquidate its assets.
Commenting on the Nikola implosion, CleanTechnica writer Michael Barnard commented, “To be clear, all of the hydrogen for transportation plays were effectively dead in 2022, 2023, and 2024 as well, but the thing about startups and subsidiaries that manage to get funding is that they persist as dwindling husks of themselves for years before collapsing entirely. The people still left in the building when the music stops have seriously bad career judgment, as getting out much earlier would have been wiser, while never walking through the doors of the thermodynamic and economic dead ends would have been wiser still.”
To subscribe, for back issues, and a searchable archive, The Quad Report.