Elon Musk may consider hydrogen “mind-bogglingly stupid” as a power source for cars, but the derision of the world’s most successful electric vehicle manufacturer has not stopped Washington from nursing dreams that hydrogen might become a big part of an envisioned clean new energy future.
That dream came into focus three years ago at a time when the “climate crisis” dominated Washington’s thinking. Praising the role hydrogen could play in a brave new energy world that was “sustainable and equitable,” the United States had a plan and the money in place to set off something more than a mushroom cloud with the world’s most plentiful element.
The National Clean Hydrogen Strategy and Roadmap, released in June 2023, claimed the planned $9.5 billion in spending on various hydrogen projects would result in 100,000 jobs by 2030, while also reducing the economy’s emissions by 10% by 2050.
Now, however, the vision appears dormant in the Trump administration. The national plan may not be a flaming skeleton like the most infamous hydrogen project of the last century, the Hindenburg – a different administration could resurrect it – but its single biggest item, $3 billion to two West Coast “hydrogen hubs,” is halted and in litigation.
Although cheap, abundant hydrogen energy remains an aspiration rather than a reality, experts say debates around it highlight significant issues regarding American energy and national security, including the U.S. competitive position with other big economies – especially China. The contrasting goals of the Biden and Trump administrations highlight the uncertainty states and businesses face as the federal government capriciously offers or withholds support, and raise questions about whether the government should spend billions to create a market the private sector has largely ignored.
Supporters see it as something more than another tool in the anti-global warming chest. “The need for this industry is sound, there is a sense of global competitiveness and a need for action,” said Frank Wolak, the executive director of the Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Energy Association. “As far as the U.S., we need to ask how are we going to use our resources to respond to this global activity?”
Detractors argue most “clean hydrogen” projects are strategies to combat a global warming catastrophe that even the U.N. acknowledged in May is implausible. “It never made sense economically, it only makes sense if you really believe humanity was destroying the earth,” said H. Sterling Burnett of the Heartland Institute, a conservative group opposed to most government funding of green energy.
Thus far, the Trump administration has sided with the detractors, casting a jaundiced eye at most of the proposed hydrogen spending. Their review of the proposed projects showed that many of them involved fledgling enterprises with unproven staying power – or in some cases were projects launched simply to suck up money the Biden administration had promised.
“We want to make sure that we support applications with a pathway to commercial viability,” an Energy Department official told RealClearInvestigations. “There might come a day when the technology changes and the math makes sense; we’re not closing the doors on hydrogen forever.”
Experts told RCI that the tepid hydrogen market can be seen as either the reason federal muscle and wallets will be needed on this frontier, or as exactly why taxpayers should not be trying to move a fringe needle.
One rationale for moving ahead is international and strategic, in that China’s technology on the hydrogen front has raced ahead and the U.S. should remain competitive. While scientists at the National Laboratory of the Rockies, which heads the Energy Department’s HydroGEN Consortium, declined comment, several of their colleagues said hydrogen needs the kind of government support China is providing and that the investment will pay off by giving the U.S. more arrows in its energy quiver.
Thus far, Americans have largely ignored the implications of falling behind in hydrogen production and use, especially in heavy industry and transportation, said Laima Eicke of the Research Institute for Sustainability (RIFS) in Potsdam, Germany. Eicke acknowledged that Trump’s reelection has led to “policy uncertainty surrounding the future of the U.S. hydrogen sector.”
But “the international dimension of the U.S. hydrogen strategy has received much less attention in the U.S. policy debate and is less defined,” Eicke told RCI.
Those arguments have failed to sway Trump’s team.
“They say the same thing about wind and solar, that we’re ‘falling behind China,’” an administration official told RCI. “It’s true China makes a lot of solar panels, but they sell those to other countries while they build new coal plants.”
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