Hydrogen, Ammonia & Sustainable Fuels

The French physicist's flight near Paris was an early practical demonstration of the gas's lifting power, long before anyone considered hydrogen as an energy carrier for power or transport.

Using Volta's newly invented battery, the two British scientists demonstrated electrolysis for the first time, the reverse of the reaction every hydrogen fuel cell depends on.

The Welsh scientist's apparatus demonstrated the basic fuel cell reaction more than a century before it found any practical application in vehicles or power generation.

Their process, built in Germany to combine nitrogen and hydrogen gas, won Haber a Nobel Prize and remains the technological basis for the vast majority of ammonia produced today.

Anticipating the exhaustion of Britain's coal reserves, the geneticist proposed a network of wind turbines producing hydrogen and oxygen by electrolysis for long-term energy storage. This was the first articulation of hydrogen as a carrier to smooth the variable output of renewable power, the founding idea of the hydrogen economy.

The hydrogen-filled airship's destruction in New Jersey killed 36 people and became, fairly or not, the defining image of hydrogen's dangers for much of the twentieth century.

Fuel cells supplied electricity and drinking water aboard the missions, the technology's first major practical application and proof that hydrogen-based power generation could work reliably outside a laboratory.

Speaking at General Motors, Bockris described an economy in which hydrogen, underpinned by nuclear and solar power, served as an energy carrier for end-uses unsuited to electrification. He framed it as an answer to fossil fuel depletion and environmental pollution, giving the concept its enduring name.

Jones echoed the dual rationale of energy security and environmental protection, but focused solely on nuclear power as the electrolysis energy source and on transport applications, prioritising aviation and heavy goods movement. Modern interest in the hydrogen economy is generally traced to this report.

Both bodies were founded in 1974 and pursued initiatives including advocacy for national hydrogen strategies. Their creation gave the emerging hydrogen economy permanent international institutional backing and visibility.

A spike in attention to the hydrogen economy during the 2000s was widely described as hype by critics and by proponents of rival technologies, and investors lost money when it deflated. The episode shaped later, more cautious framings of hydrogen's role.

The output was generated by electrolysis and used primarily to make ammonia for fertiliser. It was an early instance of renewable-powered hydrogen feeding industrial ammonia synthesis.

UNIDO-ICHET operated from 2004 until 2012 as an internationally backed hydrogen technology centre. Turkey later published a Hydrogen Technologies Strategy and Roadmap in 2023.

Two fuel cell buses operated on route 25 from January 2004 until December 2005, then on route RV1 until January 2007. The trial was among the early European demonstrations of hydrogen public transport.

The project first opened in Orlando as public bus transportation, with Ford Motor Company announcing a fleet of hydrogen-fuelled Ford E-450 vehicles. US hydrogen refuelling infrastructure otherwise remained underdeveloped outside parts of California as of February 2020.

Electrolyser capital costs fell by 60% between 2010 and 2022 before rising 50% between 2021 and 2024. The reversal undercut assumptions that green hydrogen production costs would decline steadily.

The first mass-produced hydrogen fuel cell car moved the technology from demonstration fleets to a commercially available vehicle, though sales remained a small fraction of the wider electric vehicle market.

Japan published a strategy to become the world's first "hydrogen society", the first national hydrogen strategy adopted by a major economy. It committed Japan to a hydrogen-based economy spanning power generation, transport and industry rather than isolated pilot projects, setting out infrastructure goals and guiding private investment, and began a wave of comparable strategy documents from other governments.

The Council's formation marked the resurgence of interest in hydrogen as an energy carrier after the 2000s bubble. Its creation coincided with commercial releases of fuel cell cars and with plans by Toyota, Hyundai and Chinese industry groups to scale production.

The plan funded creation, storage and distribution infrastructure and the use of hydrogen to power local buses and trains. It represented early public capital for integrated hydrogen supply chains.

The strategy set continent-wide targets for electrolyser capacity and renewable hydrogen production, becoming the reference point against which most subsequent European and national hydrogen policies were measured.

The Alliance was created to coordinate industrial actors around clean hydrogen deployment. It preceded the bloc's formal hydrogen strategy adoption.

By 2021 some 28 governments had published hydrogen strategies; by 2024 the count reached 60. Most were characterised as "scale first, clean later", adding regulations to improve green hydrogen viability without mandating its use, and economic analysis suggests few can meet their 2030 goals.

Graham Cooley, appointed CEO in 2009, raised almost £500 million for the company before the Sheffield plant opened. Mass electrolyser manufacturing capacity is the bottleneck for green hydrogen supply.

The government issued a strategy document and asserted primacy in doing so. In the same month the chair of the UK Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Association resigned, alleging oil companies had inflated blue hydrogen cost projections to maximise future government support payments.

The chair of the UK Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Association quit, claiming UK and Norwegian oil companies deliberately overstated blue hydrogen costs to maximise technology support payments from government. The episode exposed the contested politics of fossil-derived low-carbon hydrogen.

Despite the commitment, Iceland continued as of 2024–26 to import nearly all the petroleum products powering its transport and fishing fleet. Its earlier hydrogen output, 2,000 tonnes by electrolysis in 2002, went mainly to ammonia for fertiliser.

The plant is being converted to a natural gas/hydrogen facility capable of 30% hydrogen blending, with full hydrogen firing scheduled for 2045. It is a leading example of hydrogen combustion for grid electricity.

The Hydrogen Hotshot Initiative aims to cut green hydrogen costs to $1 a kilogram by 2031. The target is complicated by electrolyser costs rising 50% between 2021 and 2024.

The demonstration project in Henan Province began operations at million-cubic-metre scale. Large geological storage addresses one of hydrogen's principal weaknesses as a long-term energy store.

Shipments included over 350 units to mining conglomerates in Australia's Pilbara region, over 200 to Indonesia and 120 to Chile and Peru. The exports marked China becoming a supplier of hydrogen heavy vehicles to other nations.

The pilots focus on establishing hydrogen-dedicated highways alongside wider deployment. They accompany fleets of hydrogen heavy trucks, buses and mining trucks moving from trials to commercial operation.

The flagship project, intended to produce green hydrogen and ammonia for export toward Europe, continued pre-development work, though repeated delays illustrated the financing and infrastructure challenges facing large hydrogen export ventures in Africa.

Large domestic manufacturing capacity, built by firms already dominant in solar and battery equipment, continued to undercut Western and Japanese electrolyser prices, while state-linked green hydrogen projects such as Sinopec's Xinjiang plant expanded output.

Green hydrogen was priced at US$3.9–4.67 per kg in mid-2025 and green ammonia at US$641 per tonne in July 2025. Price discovery through auctions established reference costs for one of the largest prospective markets.

Additional funding rounds offered per-unit subsidies to bridge the cost gap between renewable hydrogen and fossil alternatives, drawing bids from producers across multiple member states, though total awarded capacity remained well short of the bloc's own production targets.

Treasury rules finalised in early 2025 set strict conditions on how green hydrogen projects had to source clean electricity to qualify, and subsequent tax legislation shortened the window for new projects to begin construction and claim the credit.

Developers, including major domestic energy companies, shelved or delayed planned green hydrogen and ammonia ventures as rising costs and weaker-than-expected buyer demand forced a broad reassessment of the sector's earlier, more optimistic timelines.

The mechanism required power utilities to source a share of electricity from hydrogen or ammonia, with initial contracts awarded to fuel cell and co-firing projects as the country built a policy-driven domestic hydrogen power market.

Saudi Arabia's NEOM Helios green hydrogen and ammonia project, backed by Saudi and international partners, targeted about 1.2 million tonnes of green ammonia a year, among the largest such facilities planned anywhere, with production originally scheduled to begin in 2025; construction continued through 2025 but the start-up date slipped well beyond what was first announced. Green ammonia is the principal proposed vehicle for shipping hydrogen energy internationally.

Awards under the National Green Hydrogen Mission's production-linked scheme advanced several projects toward construction, part of a target to build several million tonnes of annual production capacity by the end of the decade.

The Energy Law of the People's Republic of China, effective 1 January 2025, formally classified hydrogen as an energy source rather than merely a hazardous chemical. The reclassification removed a longstanding regulatory obstacle to hydrogen production and distribution.

Berlin planned tenders for 5.5 GW of new hydrogen-ready gas-fired power plants plus 2 GW of comprehensive H2-ready modernisations of existing stations. The programme positioned hydrogen combustion as a future dispatchable power source.

Local subsidies expired, forcing operators to buy hydrogen externally at higher cost, while fuel cell stacks reached the end of their operational lives. The suspensions showed how dependent deployed hydrogen transport remained on continuing public support.

Regulators signed off on a multi-billion-euro core pipeline network running several thousand kilometres, intended to connect future domestic production, storage and import points as the country built infrastructure ahead of confirmed demand.

The Japanese utility burned a 20 per cent ammonia blend alongside coal at its Hekinan power station, one of the largest such tests to date, though international energy analysts argued co-firing mainly prolonged coal plant life rather than delivering deep emissions cuts.

The document set out Turkey's national direction for hydrogen technology development. It followed the closure of the UNIDO-ICHET centre in Istanbul.

The vessel's entry into service demonstrated hydrogen-derived fuel use in deep-sea shipping. Shipping is among the priority long-haul transport end-uses envisaged for green hydrogen and its derivatives.

The 2022 NZE forecast hydrogen supplying about 30% of heavy truck energy demand and 2% of rail energy demand in 2050. Such scenarios shaped which end-uses governments and investors treated as hydrogen's future markets.

The plan set development targets for the Chinese hydrogen sector over the following 15 years. It aligned provincial and municipal hydrogen strategies with a national framework.

By the end of 2022 just 70,200 hydrogen fuel cell vehicles had been sold globally, against 26 million plug-in electric vehicles. The gap marked the effective loss of the light-duty road market for hydrogen and narrowed the capability's expected end-uses to heavy industry, long-haul transport and storage.

The bank's analysis anticipated global cost parity between green and grey hydrogen by 2030, and earlier if a global carbon tax were applied to grey production. Such projections underpinned the investment case for electrolytic hydrogen.