r/HydrogenSocieties • u/respectmyplanet • 3d ago
China cements global lead in hydrogen energy development
https://hydrogen-central.com/china-cements-global-lead-in-hydrogen-energy-development/Every time I post something here that is even remotely positive about hydrogen—especially anything involving fuel-cell vehicles—I can almost set my watch by what happens next.
Within minutes, the usual hydrogen-response squad appears:
“But why would you waste electricity making hydrogen?”
“Just put the electricity directly into a battery!”
“Hydrogen is only 50% efficient!”
“Why would anyone use a fuel cell when batteries exist?”
And, of course, approximately 47 variations of the same argument, carefully rearranged so that the conclusion remains unchanged: hydrogen is stupid, batteries have already won, and apparently the entire world just hasn't gotten the memo yet.
So I have a modest question.
What, exactly, are we supposed to make of China?
Not Germany. Not Toyota. Not BMW. Not some hydrogen startup with a PowerPoint presentation.
China.
The country that has absolutely demolished the rest of the world in solar manufacturing.
The country that dominates battery manufacturing.
The country that has built an enormous EV industry.
The country that has built a massive renewable-energy manufacturing ecosystem.
The country that has become the world's largest EV market.
The country that has spent years scaling technologies that everyone else said couldn't possibly become cheap enough to matter.
And now that same country is going absolutely bananas on hydrogen.
At some point, doesn't this become an interesting data point?
Because according to the conventional Reddit hydrogen-hater wisdom, China should presumably have looked at hydrogen and said:
“LOL. Why would we waste electricity making hydrogen when batteries are more efficient?”
Instead, China appears to have said something more like:
“Cool. Let's build the batteries and the hydrogen industry.”
The numbers are getting difficult to dismiss as a science experiment.
This new report says China now accounts for more than half of global renewable-hydrogen capacity. It has roughly 620 hydrogen refueling stations, more than 350 km of dedicated hydrogen pipelines, and more than half of the world's electrolyzer and fuel-cell manufacturing capacity. Hydrogen production and consumption both rank first globally.
And the IEA's 2026 Global Hydrogen Review says China was responsible for nearly three-quarters of new electrolyzer installations globally in 2025.
So I'm genuinely curious about something.
If the entire hydrogen argument can be reduced to:
“Electricity → battery → wheels = good”
and
“Electricity → hydrogen → fuel cell → wheels = stupid because efficiency”
then why is the country with perhaps the world's deepest understanding of batteries, solar manufacturing, electrification, supply chains and industrial-scale energy technology investing so heavily in BOTH?
Maybe—just maybe—the Chinese aren't confused.
Maybe they're not sitting around waiting for Reddit to explain round-trip efficiency to them.
Maybe they understand something that gets lost in these endless “battery vs. hydrogen” arguments:
Energy systems aren't built around one efficiency number.
They are built around applications.
Weight.
Range.
Refueling time.
Utilization.
Grid availability.
Seasonality.
Energy storage duration.
Industrial feedstocks.
Hydrogen-derived fuels.
Long-distance transport.
Heavy-duty vehicles.
Remote operations.
Infrastructure.
And, perhaps most importantly, economics at scale.
That doesn't mean hydrogen wins everywhere. It obviously doesn't.
It means that “batteries are more electrically efficient” isn't the same thing as “therefore hydrogen has no useful role.”
And watching China simultaneously build the world's battery/solar/EV manufacturing juggernaut while aggressively scaling hydrogen makes the simplistic version of that argument look increasingly awkward.
But hey, I'm sure there is a perfectly reasonable explanation.
Perhaps someone in China simply hasn't discovered the efficiency chart from Reddit yet.
Anyway, here's the article:
China cements global lead in hydrogen energy development
I'm posting it mainly because I think the interesting question isn't whether hydrogen will replace batteries.
The interesting question is why the country that has done more than almost anyone on Earth to prove the viability of batteries, solar and electrification is apparently unwilling to make that choice.
They are building the battery economy.
And they're building the hydrogen economy.
Maybe there's a lesson in that.
Or, alternatively, China is just wasting electricity on purpose because they haven't read the comments section here yet.
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u/nanoatzin 3d ago edited 3d ago
Hydrogen is the highest density energy source. It occupies the same nitch as batteries, but less weight. Hydrogen is used to store electricity until converted back to electricity by fuel cell with high efficiency. Fill time is nearly instant. Pressurized fuel tanks can be swapped out like propane tanks instead of filling. There are underground hydrogen deposits similar to how we mine methane, but deeper. The only issues are supply chain logistics and cheap standardized refillable armored fuel tanks that avoid catching fire in accidents. Hydrogen and fuel cells solves the problem of how to store solar and wind for night and weather. But if you sell oil or methane then your job is propaganda to claim all of that is a bad thing.
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2d ago
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u/Mannerheim_Line 2d ago
The BMW iX5 Hydrogen targets an estimated driving range of up to 750 kilometers (466 miles) on the WLTP cycle
The fully electric BMW iX5 60 xDrive offers an estimated driving range of up to 401 to 525 miles (645 to 845 km) under provisional WLTP testing.
They probably made the same range on purpose (though you can not even tell the precise range with the battery). But they just have to add another kg of hydrogen to add another 100 km.
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u/Outside_Bison6179 2d ago
A bit of a long comment, I also fully agree. I've always had the same feeling. Okay, hydrogen doesn't seem that easy because, it has a relatively low energy density by volume, which makes storage more difficult. On the other hand, I'm not an expert in this, but from what I know, hydrogen has a very high energy density by mass: about 120 MJ/kg, versus roughly 44 MJ/kg for petrol/gasoline. In any case, similar things were once said about solar: difficult, expensive, ... It was, however, already well known by the end of the 1990s that a large solar power belt in southern Europe or North Africa could generate enough energy to supply a substantial part of Europe's needs. The EU/US governments didn’t act on it because, I guess, they wanted to protect their domestic energy suppliers. Well, ok, I can partially understand this, but it was still very shortsighted, the same with transferring all manufacturing plants to China, equally shortsighted.
So, by being unwilling to push further into solar and hydrogen, there was clearly resistance from incumbent energy providers, particularly the oil and gas industries oligarchs. And indeed,I think you still see this nowadays in a lot of comments on the hydrogen subreddit. I think you can see the same dynamic around the wars in Ukraine (a war for territory but implicitly also of course for rare-earth materials, 10ky чёрт primate Putin thought that he could just kill his friendly neighbour and get away with the theft in broad daylight) and Iran (war for petrol and a bit more complicated because there are primates playing around with nuclear warheads). But the transition will be inevitable. In the end, oil is a finite resource.
Now, it is almost a stroke of luck that China has relatively limited domestic oil and gas resources compared with its demand, so it has a strong incentive to develop alternative energy sources. Solar power is now often cheaper than new fossil-fuel generation. Nobody could have imagined that the cost of solar would go down that quickly in 20-30 years, while efficiency continued to increase. And something similar seems indeed starting to happen with hydrogen, although at an earlier stage. I think, however, it may develop much more rapidly than we expect, at least in countries like China, where they are embracing hydrogen technology. Imagine having a hydrogen storage system at home (e.g. Photoncycle from Norway) or in a community. You will become much more energy-independent. Well, I think that for a detached single-family house, you can become totally energy independent. There are some islands where this is being tested.
And of course, that kind of decentralisation doesn’t seem to suit incumbent utilities or political and economic interests that benefit from more centralised energy systems and relatively expensive energy. It’s clear that there are certain androids appearing in the hydrogen fora on reddit (perhaps in favour of EV car companies). There are now movements towards more distributed forms of organisation and governance too, including the rise of co-operatives (see, for example, [Monocle’s article on the rise of business co-operatives](https://monocle.com/business/rise-of-business-co-operatives/)). I think solar and hydrogen will be able to play a role in this.
If a country like China moves also first into long-haul transport based on hydrogen, I think it could gain a significant advantage. The EU, US and other countries that jump on the bandwagon too late will find themselves at a disadvantage, the same, indeed, what happens with the other two pilars (solar, batteries and rare earths) because it will, indeed, be difficult to compete with such a low-cost, much more distributed energy system. There are companies like Toyota, Hyundai, Iveco, BMW, etc. that are already working a lot, since long time, on hydrogen transport vehicles, but I’m really wondering what will happen if Chinese hydrogen batteries and hydrogen-electric cars suddenly appear on the market...
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u/Mannerheim_Line 3d ago
Hydrogen was never about efficiency or anything else. It was always about Tesla cult fighting competing technologies.
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u/Regular_Attempt_7073 2d ago
You can store a ton of hydrogen which will produce more energy than any battery that exists. It’s already been figured out. Most nations are doing it with huge battery parks but dig a big ass hole and fill it with a big ass storage tank and instead of curtailing wind or solar dump that extra energy into hydrogen production and now you are capturing hours of electricity production that otherwise would be lost. Fuel cells attached to buildings with built in hydrogen production is a model being sold in Germany now, guarantees off grid power year around from solar alone and Germany is not exactly the solar rich country of choice.
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2d ago edited 2d ago
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u/Mannerheim_Line 2d ago
So 85% of cars in China are gas cars and they have only 90k stations. That says it all. EVs are just extremely inefficent waste of time and space. They need giant parking lots for 20 stalls cause they can not just fill up and leave in 5 minutes. There have to be more of them cause in the winter they probably need to charge every 200 km. You wanted to impress us with theses numbers but they just show how wasteful EVs are. Add all the maintenance for those millions of charges.
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u/taggingtechnician 1d ago
The motivation is very clear to anyone who works in the intelligence sectors.
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u/el-catt1v0 3d ago
I follow your thought entirely. But there might be an additional layer: China does not only want to control their domestic hydrogen market. They also want to control the global one. With solar, battery, and rare earth already under their control they will have absolute control about energy in the future. That's why it is easy to believe that Chinese bots are being used to manipulate western opinion on hydrogen as well.