{"id":66616,"date":"2025-04-25T09:55:59","date_gmt":"2025-04-25T16:55:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/energi.media\/?p=66616"},"modified":"2025-04-25T09:55:59","modified_gmt":"2025-04-25T16:55:59","slug":"opinion-green-hydrogen-for-energy-was-a-story-we-told-ourselves","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/energi.media\/opinion\/opinion-green-hydrogen-for-energy-was-a-story-we-told-ourselves\/","title":{"rendered":"Opinion: Green hydrogen for energy was a story we told ourselves"},"content":{"rendered":"

This article was published by The Energy Mix<\/a> on April 24, 2025.<\/em><\/p>\n

By Michael Barnard\u00a0–\u00a0Energy Mix Guest Writer<\/span><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The French philosopher Bruno Latour once said technology doesn\u2019t succeed because it works. It succeeds because enough people act like it does.<\/p>\n

For nearly a decade, that\u2019s exactly what happened with green hydrogen as an energy carrier. The story was so compelling, the coalition so wide, the urgency so real, that for a time, it barely mattered that the physics didn\u2019t cooperate.<\/p>\n

Now, in 2025, the act is ending. Major energy firms are quietly walking away. Government strategies are being rewritten. Even the loudest champions of hydrogen-fuelled futures have stopped performing certainty. And Latour would recognize every step of this collapse.<\/p>\n

How Technologies Become \u2018Blackboxed\u2019<\/h2>\n

Actor-Network Theory (ANT), Latour\u2019s signature contribution to science and technology studies, doesn\u2019t look for simple causal chains. It doesn\u2019t ask whether a technology is good or bad, efficient or wasteful. Instead, it traces how coalitions of people, tools, policies, expectations, and diagrams\u2014actors, both human and non-human\u2014come together to make something seem real, viable, and inevitable.<\/p>\n

When that network holds, the object becomes \u201cblackboxed.\u201d Its underlying complexity is hidden. Everyone just uses it, funds it, believes in it. When the network fails, the box opens. The myths spill out.<\/p>\n

One well-known example is the case of the pasteurization of milk in France, which Latour analyzed in his book The Pasteurization of France. He showed how Louis Pasteur\u2019s scientific work succeeded not merely because of laboratory discoveries, but because it aligned with the goals of public health officials, military hygienists, farmers, politicians, and media outlets. Pasteur became a central actor in a broad network that collectively transformed microbial theory into national infrastructure. The bacteria weren\u2019t defeated by science alone, but by a network that enrolled everything from hospitals to dairies into a shared protocol of cleanliness and control.<\/p>\n

Another example, widely analyzed through an ANT lens by others, is the adoption of electronic medical records (EMRs) in health care systems, something I was involved in professionally for a decade. In countries where EMRs failed to take hold, it wasn\u2019t due to poor software design alone, but due to a failure to align physicians, hospitals, insurers, IT departments, and regulatory frameworks into a coherent network. The technology, in effect, had no actors willing to perform it into widespread use.<\/p>\n

In contrast, in places where EMRs succeeded (like Estonia or parts of Scandinavia), the network included strong political will, patient buy-in, standardized interfaces, and legal frameworks that made digital records the obligatory passage point for healthcare interactions.<\/p>\n

Belief Pumps Up Hydrogen<\/h2>\n

Green hydrogen\u2019s rise between 2015 and 2022 was a textbook case of such network formation. It began with climate targets that demanded something\u2014anything\u2014that could decarbonize hard-to-electrify sectors. Industrial heat, long-haul transport, seasonal storage, aviation. Each problem became an actor in need of a solution.<\/p>\n

Hydrogen, long the bridesmaid of energy debates after the early 2000s hype cycle, fit the bill. Governments began publishing\u00a0hydrogen strategies<\/a>\u00a0with cost targets and gigawatt dreams. Electrolyzer firms received infusions of capital. Startups promised hydrogen-powered trucks, ships, planes, even entire economies.\u00a0Reports from respected agencies<\/a>\u00a0forecast dramatic cost declines. Roadmaps used 2030 as a kind of magical threshold, just far enough away to absorb the uncertainties. The European Commission, the\u00a0Japanese government<\/a>, the\u00a0Australians<\/a>\u00a0and Koreans, as well as Californians, all signed on.<\/p>\n

At the same time, oil majors saw in hydrogen a rare opportunity to stay relevant.\u00a0Shell, BP, Total\u00c9nergies, and others joined industry alliances<\/a>\u00a0and launched pilot projects. They saw a chance to repurpose gas infrastructure, rebrand fossil assets, and secure\u00a0public subsidies<\/a>\u00a0in the name of climate progress.<\/p>\n

The Hydrogen Council, launched at Davos in 2017, became the face of this alignment. A forum where oil CEOs, automakers, and government ministers could all agree that hydrogen was the path forward. That unanimity wasn\u2019t evidence of inevitability. It was evidence of enrollment.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, a host of non-human actors reinforced the narrative: Electrolyzer prototypes at trade shows, shiny infographics showing hydrogen pipelines spanning continents, funding mechanisms with\u00a0lofty acronyms<\/a>, and cost curves pointing downward with the confidence of gravity.<\/p>\n

Policy documents functioned like scripts in a play. If you were a policymaker, you had to say the lines. If you were a company, you had to audition for funding. If you were a journalist, you had to\u00a0report the boom<\/a>. By 2020, green hydrogen was not just a possibility. It had become an expectation. A technology made real through repetition.<\/p>\n

The Promise Deflates<\/h2>\n

And then, the\u00a0disarticulation<\/a>\u00a0began. Not all at once, and not dramatically. That\u2019s not how these networks unravel. Instead, they fray.<\/p>\n

BP quietly\u00a0dissolved its hydrogen mobility unit<\/a>. No press release, just a subtle change in direction. Airbus\u00a0delayed its hydrogen aircraft program<\/a>, likely permanently. The math didn\u2019t work. The infrastructure didn\u2019t exist. British Columbia, which had once flirted with seven major green hydrogen energy projects,\u00a0walked away from all of them<\/a>. In Australia, the government shifted from dreams of exporting green hydrogen to Japan and Korea to a\u00a0more sober focus on domestic industrial use<\/a>\u2014steel, ammonia, chemicals. In Norway, the showcase hydrogen ferry ended up emitting more carbon dioxide than the diesel vessel it was meant to replace. The maritime pivot stayed for now, but the\u00a0broader transportation ambitions faded<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Then came the signal moves in Europe and the United States. In France and\u00a0Germany<\/a>, top-level economic advisory bodies issued a joint recommendation:\u00a0stop funding hydrogen in road transport<\/a>. Focus on battery-electric trucks instead. The advice wasn\u2019t controversial in economic circles. It just punctured the public narrative. In the United States, the Department of Energy under the Trump administration began considering\u00a0cuts to four of the seven federally supported hydrogen hubs<\/a>, including the one in California, which had been focused on hydrogen for transportation. Whether motivated by ideology or economic realism, the effect was the same: another leg of the hydrogen-for-energy stool kicked out.<\/p>\n

Latour would not be surprised. These weren\u2019t technical failures, strictly speaking. Electrolyzers still electrolyze. Pipelines still transport. Fuel cells still function. What changed was the willingness of actors to keep performing the alignment. When the financial returns didn\u2019t arrive, when the infrastructure costs mounted, when alternative technologies outpaced hydrogen on key metrics, the incentive to stay in character disappeared. The performance unraveled.<\/p>\n

And with it, the black box opened. Inside was a technology that made sense for some things\u2014fertilizer production, chemical feedstocks, methanol synthesis\u2014but not for many of the things it had been promised to revolutionize. The round-trip efficiency remained poor. The cost per kilogram remained stubbornly high. The competition, particularly from electrification, kept advancing. Every government that pulled back, every company that shifted focus, every analyst who updated projections was part of the same Latourian process. They stopped reinforcing the illusion. They exited the network.<\/p>\n

A Niche Technology<\/h2>\n

What remains is a smaller, more stable version of the hydrogen story. Green hydrogen is still useful, but it is not universal. It is not the\u00a0Swiss Army knife<\/a>\u00a0of decarbonization. It is a niche tool, appropriate for specific applications where no better alternative exists. Industrial use, not energy fantasy. The actor-network will persist in that narrower form. Fewer players, fewer speeches, fewer renderings of hydrogen planes and trucks. More spreadsheets. More quiet deployments. Less theatre.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a lesson here, and it\u2019s not that hydrogen is bad or that its supporters were wrong. It\u2019s that techno-economic narratives are not objective truths waiting to be discovered. They are constructed, maintained, and occasionally dismantled by networks of aligned actors. When everyone agrees, it\u2019s often because disagreement has been designed out. And when the story collapses, it does so not with a bang but with a quiet shifting of feet, a few missing names on the conference agenda, a line item dropped from the budget.<\/p>\n

Green hydrogen for energy was a compelling narrative. It enrolled resources, focused attention, and gave policymakers a sense of direction. But it wasn\u2019t grounded in competitive fundamentals. It was performed into existence, and it\u2019s now being performed back out. Not because it never had value, but because the value was always contingent on everyone believing at once.<\/p>\n

For half a decade I\u2019ve been one of the people on the wrong side of the narrative, along with people like BNEF founder Michael Liebreich, chemical engineer Paul Martin, road decarbonization expert David Cebon and many others that I know. We\u2019ve been trying to tell people what was obvious to us because we looked at the reality, not just the story.<\/p>\n

But Latourian networks are self-healing. Until they aren\u2019t.<\/p>\n

The network is no longer holding. The actors are stepping away. And as Latour would remind us, that\u2019s when you see what was keeping the whole thing alive.<\/p>\n

This opinion piece\u00a0originally appeared<\/a>\u00a0on Cleantechnica. Republished with the author\u2019s permission.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This article was published by The Energy Mix on April 24, 2025. By Michael Barnard\u00a0–\u00a0Energy Mix Guest Writer The French philosopher Bruno Latour once said technology doesn\u2019t succeed because it works. It succeeds because enough [Read more]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":66617,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"give_campaign_id":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[120,548,80,14,744],"class_list":{"0":"post-66616","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-opinion","8":"tag-clean-energy","9":"tag-emissions","10":"tag-environment","11":"tag-featured","12":"tag-green-energy"},"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nGreen hydrogen - Thoughtful Journalism About Energy's Future<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The green hydrogen story was so compelling, the urgency so real, that for a time, it barely mattered that the physics didn\u2019t cooperate.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/energi.media\/opinion\/opinion-green-hydrogen-for-energy-was-a-story-we-told-ourselves\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Green hydrogen - 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