Chemical Engineer Paul Martin Reflects On Liebreich’s Hydrogen Ladder & #Hopium — Part 1
In this edition of CleanTech Talk, Paul Martin and I discuss Michael Liebreich’s hydrogen ladder. Paul is a working chemical process engineer, and has spent his career building prototypes of biofuel, hydrogen, and chemical processing plants as part of scaling them to full, modularized production systems for clients. Paul’s piece in CleanTechnica on why hydrogen is not suitable as a replacement for natural gas in buildings is a must read.
Liebreich is an entrepreneur, founder of what has become Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), chairman on multiple boards, has engineering and business degrees, and represented the UK on their skiing team in 1992. He’s had a rich and interesting life, but for the purposes of this pair of podcasts and attendant articles, it’s his iteratively improving hydrogen ladder Paul Martin and I are focusing on.
Regular readers of CleanTechnica will know that I have been assessing hydrogen’s place in the decarbonized economy in the areas of transportation, oil refining, and industry, among others. Paul and I share a strong opinion that “blue” hydrogen, which is sourced from fossil fuels with 10-30 times the mass of CO2 which is theoretically going to be sequestered or used, is a fossil-fuel industry lobbying effort and not a viable climate solution.
Listeners are recommended to keep the hydrogen ladder in front of them as Paul and I talk through aspects of it.
We start with a discussion of one of Paul’s frequently used hashtags, #hopium, which he defines as the drug that is made out of our own hope to overcome our faculties and divert government money to things which aren’t useful. We agree that the fossil fuel industry are masters of PR when it comes to giving false hope to governments and individuals that we can just vacuum CO2 out of the air or out of smokestacks after emitting it, rather than the reality that we leave most fossil fuels unburned and unused.
Paul steps through existing hydrogen production, pointing out that of the 120 million tons used annually today, less than 0.1% could be considered green hydrogen, intentionally cracked from water using renewably generated electricity. All hydrogen today is actually black, at least 30% blacker per unit of energy than the fossil fuel it was made from. For coal, up to 30 kg of CO2 is created for every kg of hydrogen, with one data point suggesting a proposal in Australia to make hydrogen from low-grade coal with 35 kg of CO2 for each kg of hydrogen. For natural gas, it’s up to 10 kg, but there is also methane leakage with its 86x worse than CO2 on 20 years global warming potential. Creation of hydrogen from natural includes an almost equal amount of GHGs in methane leakage, which is typically not counted in the emissions.
We continue with a discussion of ground transportation, where there is no place for hydrogen, in our opinion. Paul draws out the efficiency versus effectiveness argument first. Gasoline isn’t efficient, as perhaps 15% turns into useful energy, but it is effective due to being cheap, easily poured into gas tanks, and easily transported.
Hydrogen is neither efficient or effective for ground transportation. The misleading truths that are used for #hopium are that it’s the most common element in the universe and has excellent energy density for its mass.
The first truth is not helpful, as all hydrogen available to us is tightly chemically coupled with other substances, whether that is fossil fuels or water. It takes a lot of energy to break those bonds.
The second truth is not helpful either. Hydrogen, as the lightest element and lightest gas, has very poor energy density by volume, regardless of whether you compress it to 700 atmospheres, a little over 10,000 pounds per square inch, or chill it to 24 degrees above absolute zero to liquify it. As a gas, it has less than a third the energy density by volume of methane, and as a superchilled liquid, its energy density by volume is only 75% better.
Paul points out that the Toyota Mirai vs Tesla Model 3, otherwise comparable cars, is illustrative in that the Mirai weighs as much as the Tesla, even though it only carries 5.6 kilograms of hydrogen. The tanks weigh hundreds of kilograms. A standard hydrogen cylinder weighs 65 kg and only delivers 0.6 kg of hydrogen, a problem that transportation uses have to overcome with expensive thin-walled aluminum tanks wrapped in carbon fiber. It’s also worth noting that hydrogen cars have less interior and luggage room due to the hydrogen storage and fuel cell component space requirements.
Paul points out the lost mechanical energy of compression. He calculated once that the energy used to compress 5 kg of hydrogen to 700 atmospheres was equivalent to the kinetic potential energy of suspending the car 500 meters in the air, ready to drop. That energy is lost. If superchilled hydrogen were used instead, 40% of the energy in the hydrogen would have to be used to chill it.
The final devil in the details is thermal management. Hydrogen is an interesting gas in that unlike many other gases, it gets warmer as it expands. Anyone used to compressed air cans know that the jet of air comes out cold, but an equivalent jet of hydrogen would come out hot. Even though compressed hydrogen isn’t liquified, in other words, it has to be chilled in its tanks before being pumped into cars, another loss of energy.
This all leads to the common myth that hydrogen cars are quick and convenient to refuel. The reality is shown by Toyota’s entry in the 24-hour enduro Super Taikyu Series in Japan’s Shizuoka Prefecture. They prepped a racing Corolla with a hydrogen combustion engine. It had four huge carbon-fiber tanks in the area where you would normally have back seats. They brought four tractor trailers full of equipment to fuel the car. The car had to spend four hours of the 24 hours of the race refueling. Ineffective, inefficient, and with startling infrastructure requirements.
As Paul says, the devil isn’t hiding in the details, he’s waving his pitchfork in plain sight of anyone willing to see him.
We move on to agreeing in general that hydrogen might have a direct play in long-haul shipping, or at least hasn’t proven itself uncompetitive in that space. I recently assessed Maersk’s methanol drivetrain dual-fuel ships announcement, and 40-day journeys with thousands of tons of fuel are a very hard problem to crack. Maersk has proposed a green methanol manufacturing facility capable of producing enough synthetic green methanol annually to cover half of one trip for one of the eight ships.
For the rest of the first half of the podcast, aviation is in our sights. Paul and I agree that short- and medium-haul aviation — basically all air trips within the boundaries of most continents — are going to be battery electric. Hydrogen has no advantages for those ranges.
And we agree that long-haul aviation is another hard problem. I went deep on long-haul aviation’s global warming contributions and challenges recently, so had the concerns at top of mind. First was the problem of direct carbon dioxide emissions of course, but aviation also has contrail and nitrous oxides emissions problems.
Contrails are water vapor, effectively clouds. Due to the altitude of especially night-flying high-altitude planes, they keep more heat in than they reflect. That’s something that can partially be managed by changing operations, reducing altitude and night-time operations, but there are economic reasons why planes fly high and at night that need to be addressed with economic incentives.
Nitrous oxides are trickier. Any fuel burned in oxygen produces nitrous oxides with a bunch of the nitrogen from the air, which is, after all, 78% nitrogen. Nitrogen combined with oxygen in the form of N20, nitrous oxide or laughing gas, has a global warming potential of 265 times that of CO2, and persists in the atmosphere a long time.
Another form of nitrous oxide, NO2 or nitrous dioxide, is the chemical precursor to smog, causing asthma and other heart lung problems. For those following along, yes, if you have a natural gas stove or furnace in your home, it’s also putting NO2 into your home’s air along with carbon monoxide, which you need a detector for if you don’t have it. All the more reason to electrify to induction stove tops and heat pumps as your appliances age out.
Paul’s perspective is that hydrogen for long-haul aviation has multiple problems. The first is that it can’t be stored as a pressurized gas in airplanes due to the increasing loss of atmospheric pressure and bulk as planes ascend to 30,000 ft. The second is that even chilled, it’s much less dense by volume than kerosene, so it would have to be stored in the fuselage. The third is that fuel cells are bulky for energy output of sufficient electricity, so would also have to be within the fuselage, and fuel cells give off a lot of heat. So that means either jets lose a fair amount of passenger and luggage storage, or get a lot bigger and heavier, even before the cooling and venting requirements for the fuel cell heat. That makes the economics of jet travel problematic, which might be just fine, as it arguably should be more expensive than it is.
However, this means that it would be hydrogen jet engines that would be used if hydrogen were to be used directly as a fuel. And burning hydrogen in a jet engine will produce a lot of water vapor, hence the same contrails, and nitrous oxides, hence the high global warming potential. Hydrogen would only deal with two-thirds of the problem.
Paul and I agree that biofuels for hard-to-service transportation modes such as long-haul shipping and aviation, along with operational changes and reduced use, are likely the best we can do until we achieve a battery as much better than lithium-ion as lithium-ion is than lead acid, and that took a century.
But we’ve had biofuels certified for aviation use since 2011, and they just aren’t being used. They are more expensive, despite being much lower CO2 emissions cradle-to-grave than kerosene. Once again, negative externalities have to be priced.
The next half of the podcast discussion gets into places where hydrogen actually has a place in the sun, but makes it clear that hydrogen is actually a decarbonization problem, not a decarbonization solution.
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Newly published data from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), reviewed by the SUN DAY Campaign, reveal that solar accounted for over 75% of US electrical generating capacity added in the first nine months of 2025. In September alone, solar provided 98% of new capacity, marking 25 consecutive months in which solar has led among all energy sources.
Year-to-date (YTD), solar and wind have each added more new capacity than natural gas has. The mix of all renewables remains on track to exceed 40% of installed capacity within three years; solar alone may be 20%.
Solar was 75% of new generating capacity YTD
In its latest monthly “Energy Infrastructure Update” report (with data through September 30, 2025), FERC says 48 “units” of solar totaling 2,014 megawatts (MW) were placed into service in September, accounting for 98% of all new generating capacity added during the month. Oil provided the balance (40 MW).
The 567 units of utility-scale (>1 MW) solar added during the first nine months of 2025 total 21,257 MW and were 75.3% of the total new capacity placed into service by all sources. Solar capacity added YTD is 6.5% more than that added during the same period a year earlier.
Solar has now been the largest source of new generating capacity added each month for 25 consecutive months, from September 2023 to September 2025. During that period, total utility-scale solar capacity grew from 91.82 gigawatts (GW) to 158.43 GW. No other energy source added anything close to that amount of new capacity. Wind, for example, expanded by 11.07 GW while natural gas’s net increase was just 4.60 GW.
Between January and September, new wind energy has provided 3,724 MW of capacity additions – an increase of 28.6% compared to the same period last year and more than the new capacity provided by natural gas (3,161 MW). Wind accounted for 13.2% of all new capacity added during the first nine months of 2025.
Renewables were 88% of new capacity added YTD
Wind and solar (plus 4 MW of hydropower and 6 MW of biomass) accounted for 88.5% of all new generating capacity while natural gas added just 11.2% YTD. The balance of net capacity additions came from oil (63 MW) and waste heat (17 MW).
Utility-scale solar’s share of total installed capacity (11.78%) is now virtually tied with that of wind (11.80%). If recent growth rates continue, utility-scale solar capacity should surpass that of wind in FERC’s next “Energy Infrastructure Update” report.
Taken together, wind and solar make up 23.58% of the US’s total available installed utility-scale generating capacity.
Moreover, more than 25% of US solar capacity is in the form of small-scale (e.g., rooftop) systems that are not reflected in FERC’s data. Including that additional solar capacity would bring the share provided by solar and wind to more than a quarter of the US total.
With the inclusion of hydropower (7.59%), biomass (1.05%) and geothermal (0.31%), renewables currently claim a 32.53% share of total US utility-scale generating capacity. If small-scale solar capacity is included, renewables now account for more than one-third of the total US generating capacity.
Solar soon to be No. 2 source of US generating capacity
FERC reports that net “high probability” net additions of solar between October 2025 and September 2028 total 90,614 MW – an amount almost four times the forecast net “high probability” additions for wind (23,093 MW), the second fastest growing resource.
FERC also foresees net growth for hydropower (566 MW) and geothermal (92 MW) but a decrease of 126 MW in biomass capacity.
Meanwhile, natural gas capacity is projected to expand by 6,667 MW, while nuclear power is expected to add just 335 MW. In contrast, coal and oil are projected to contract by 24,011 MW and 1,587 MW, respectively.
Taken together, the net new “high probability” net utility-scale capacity additions by all renewable energy sources over the next three years – the Trump administration’s remaining time in office – would total 114,239 MW. On the other hand, the installed capacity of fossil fuels and nuclear power combined would shrink by 18,596 MW.
Should FERC’s three-year forecast materialize, by mid-fall 2028, utility-scale solar would account for 17.3% of installed U.S. generating capacity, more than any other source besides natural gas (39.9%). Further, the capacity of the mix of all utility-scale renewable energy sources would exceed 38%. The inclusion of small-scale solar, assuming it retains its 25% share of all solar energy, could push solar’s share to over 20% and that of all renewables to over 41%, while the share of natural gas would drop to less than 38%.
In fact, the numbers for renewables could be significantly higher.
FERC notes that “all additions” (net) for utility-scale solar over the next three years could be as high as 232,487 MW, while those for wind could total 65,658 MW. Hydro’s net additions could reach 9,927 MW while geothermal and biomass could increase by 202 MW and 32 MW, respectively. Such growth by renewable sources would swamp that of natural gas (29,859 MW).
“In an effort to deny reality, the Trump Administration has just announced a renaming of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in which it has removed the word ‘renewable’,” noted the SUN DAY Campaign’s executive director Ken Bossong. “However, FERC’s latest data show that no amount of rhetorical manipulation can change the fact that solar, wind, and other renewables continue on the path to eventual domination of the energy market.”
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The Century is considered the most luxurious Toyota, and now it’s being spun off into its own high-end brand. Despite the rumors, the ultra-luxury brand won’t be as electric as expected.
Toyota sets new luxury brand up to fail with ICE plans
First introduced in 1967, the Century was launched in celebration of Toyota’s founder, Sakichi Toyoda’s 100th birthday.
The Century has since become a symbol of status and wealth in Japan, often used as a chauffeur car by high-profile company officials.
Toyota previewed the future of the ultra-luxury marquee at the 2025 Japan Mobility Show in October, launching it as a new standalone brand positioned above Lexus.
The new Century brand is set to rival higher-end automakers like Rolls-Royce and Bentley, but it won’t be as electric as initially expected. Toyota’s powertrain boss, Takashi Uehara, told CarExpert that the luxury brand’s first vehicle will, in fact, have an internal combustion engine.
Although no other details were offered, Uehara confirmed, “Yes, it will have an engine.” As to what kind, that has yet to be decided, Toyota’s powertrain president explained.
Like the next-gen Lexus supercar and upcoming Toyota GR GT, Uehara said the Century model could include a V8 engine.
The Century has been Toyota’s only vehicle with a V12 engine. In 2018, Toyota dropped the V12 in favor of a V8 hybrid powertrain for its third-generation.
Toyota’s Century launched its first SUV in 2023, currently on sale in Japan with a V6 plug-in hybrid system alongside the sedan.
Already widely considered the biggest laggard in the shift to fully electric vehicles, Toyota doubled down, developing a series of new internal combustion engines for upcoming models.
Century is one of the five global brands the Japanese auto giant introduced in October, along with Daihatsu, GR Sport, Lexus, and Toyota.
Electrek’s Take
It’s not surprising to see Toyota sticking with ICE for its ultra-luxury Century brand, but it will likely be a costly move.
Chinese auto giants, such as BYD and FAW Group, are quickly expanding into new segments, including high-end models under luxury brands such as Yangwang and Hongqi.
These companies are now expanding into new overseas markets, like Europe and Southeast Asia, where Japanese brands like Toyota have traditionally dominated, to drive growth.
Top luxury brands, including Porsche, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz, are already struggling to keep pace with Chinese EV brands. How does Toyota plan to compete with an “ultra-luxury” brand that still sells outdated ICE vehicles? We will find out more over the coming months and years as new sales data is released.
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SparkCharge has partnered with the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center (MassCEC) and Zipcar to launch the Northeast’s first off‑grid, mobile DC fast‑charging hub for shared EVs. The goal is to bring fast, reliable EV charging infrastructure into communities without having to wait for costly or slow grid upgrades.
The hub sits at Zipcar’s maintenance facility in East Boston, an Environmental Justice community. It’s funded through MassCEC’s InnovateMass program and gives onsite mechanics the ability to quickly recharge a rotating fleet of Zipcar EVs before they’re dispatched across Greater Boston. Members and rideshare drivers who rent Zipcars will get steadier access to charged EVs.
“Electrification should never be limited by where the grid is or how long it takes,” SparkCharge founder and CEO Joshua Aviv said. “With this program in East Boston, we’re showing how fleets can deploy at scale, in any community, and deliver clean mobility today.”
At the center of the setup is SparkCharge’s Mobile Battery‑Powered Trailer, which delivers 320 kW of DC fast charging without the delays and big price tags that usually come with fixed infrastructure. The trailer can recharge from Zipcar’s existing onsite power between sessions, topping up its high‑capacity batteries without stressing the local grid. Since it avoids major grid upgrades entirely, the model is designed to deploy quickly and at zero upfront cost for fleets.
MassCEC says the project shows what community‑first fast charging can look like. “Every resident deserves access to clean, reliable transportation,” said Leslie Nash, MassCEC’s senior director of Technology‑to‑Market. “By partnering with SparkCharge and Zipcar in East Boston, we’re showing how Massachusetts is leading the way in clean transportation innovation.”
The hub also plays into Massachusetts’ push to hit its net‑zero 2050 targets. As shared mobility grows, electrifying fleets will be key to cutting emissions in dense urban corridors. This project introduces a scalable charging option to a part of Boston that is underserved by public charging, helping to keep Zipcar’s EVs reliably on the road.
“For twenty‑five years, Zipcar has been a leader in shared mobility, and we’re proud to take another step toward a more sustainable future,” said Angelo Adams, Zipcar’s president. “Working with SparkCharge and MassCEC allows us to bring fast, reliable EV charging directly to our members and rideshare drivers.”
Zipcar, which is owned by car rental company Avis Budget, announced on December 1 that it was shutting down its UK operations by December 31, 2025. An Avis Budget spokesperson stated that the reason was “to streamline operations, improve returns, and position the company for long-term sustainability and growth,” adding that “all other markets remain unaffected.”
Read more: With a $30M raise, SparkCharge takes EV fleet charging off-grid
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Your personalized heat pump quotes are easy to compare online and you’ll get access to unbiased Energy Advisors to help you every step of the way. Get started here. – *ad
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
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