The promise we ignored while chasing batteries

This week we received a release from Nebraska Public Power District marking the 11th annual National Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Observation, which takes place each Oct. 8 in a nod to hydrogen’s atomic weight of 1.008. The release was straightforward and refreshingly free of political rhetoric. Hydrogen, it noted, is already at work providing fuel, feedstock and power to sectors across the United States, with promising applications in everything from transportation to national defense.

Roman Estrada, NPPD’s Generation Research Senior Program Manager, described hydrogen as a “technological solution available today that is flexible, domestically sourced and capable of being deployed across multiple sectors critical to our economy and national defense.” In an era when our energy debates often resemble shouting matches between wind farms and tailpipes, that’s a quietly radical statement.

Hydrogen is not a distant, pie-in-the-sky idea. It’s abundant, energy-dense, and can be produced domestically, creating the kind of economic resilience policymakers say they want but rarely seem to act on. Properly deployed, it can stabilize the grid, reduce emissions, and support industries that can’t be electrified easily — such as freight transportation, heavy manufacturing and aviation. It also has the potential to work alongside, rather than against, other energy sources.

Of course, hydrogen technology isn’t a magic wand. Storage, distribution, and infrastructure challenges remain real and expensive–but so were the early hurdles for natural gas, nuclear power, and yes, electric cars. The difference is that hydrogen never received the kind of marketing blitz or regulatory favoritism that battery electric vehicles did. Billions in subsidies and incentives have been shoveled toward lithium batteries, often with modest gains in performance, persistent supply chain vulnerabilities and as discussed in yesterday’s Gazette, a substantial fire hazard.

The federal government has invested tens of billions of dollars in subsidizing electric vehicles through a combination of tax credits, grants, and infrastructure spending. Much of that commitment stems from provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act, which expanded and extended tax incentives for EV purchases. Estimates suggest that the cost of these incentives to the government over the coming decade could reach well into the tens of billions of dollars, with each new EV purchase effectively costing taxpayers between $23,000 and $32,000, even though the consumer may receive only a $7,500 credit.

Meanwhile, hydrogen remained the quiet workhorse of laboratories and niche industries — less flashy, more practical, and perhaps, more promising.

We cannot, of course, discuss fuel cell technology without the name Stanley Meyer popping up. Readers may recall Meyer as the man who, in the 1980s, claimed to run a car on water.

Meyer’s work has lived on more in legend than in mainstream engineering journals, but it’s a reminder that the allure of hydrogen isn’t new. The difference now is that the science has matured and technology is catching up.

If NPPD makes it a point to formally recognize the potential, it’s worth asking a simple question: what if we’d spent a fraction of the effort pushing hydrogen that we spent subsidizing a single drivetrain technology? We might be a lot closer to energy independence — and a lot less dependent on what’s happening in someone else’s rare earth mine.

Hydrogen may not grab headlines like electric cars, but it may yet power a good share of the future.