From HyHaul To China: Why Hydrogen Transport Keeps Losing

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HyHaul was supposed to be a proof point. It was framed as the UK’s first serious hydrogen freight corridor, backed by public money, supported by major industrial partners, and aligned with national decarbonization narratives. It had all the visible ingredients of credibility: government grants, memoranda of understanding, press releases, and carefully staged announcements about future hydrogen refueling stations and fuel cell trucks.

What it never had was a closed commercial loop. Fleet operators did not sign binding commitments at scale. Refueling stations did not reach final investment decisions. Vehicles remained promised rather than delivered. By late 2025, HyHaul did not collapse in a dramatic way. It simply stopped. The program was dropped, the funding withdrawn, and the corridor quietly abandoned. That outcome matters not because HyHaul failed, but because it failed in exactly the way dozens of similar hydrogen transportation efforts have failed before it.

HyHaul is best understood not as a unique disappointment, but as the most recent data point in a long-running accounting exercise. Over the past year, I have been tracking 171 firms and projects that positioned hydrogen as a viable transportation solution across trucks, buses, trains, ships, aircraft, construction equipment, and light vehicles. The criteria are simple. If hydrogen was proposed as a meaningful propulsion or fuel solution for transport, it goes on the list. If that effort is later abandoned, cancelled, shelved by a parent company, or ends in bankruptcy, it is marked accordingly. I’m stringent about the quality of the data. The organization had to be working on hydrogen for transportation in 2025, meaning all the ones that went bankrupt or pivoted earlier are missing. There has to be a public announcement of pivoting or failure, or two years passing with no further announcements. That means the list of above is undoubtedly being far too generous to hydrogen for transportation, and it’s still damning.

Many of the ones that are left are in serious financial distress. For example, Plug Power and Fuel Cell Energy are burning money at a rate that gives them months left afloat, and both did reverse stock splits to keep them on the stock market. The space is awash in red ink and investor losses.

Since I last updated the data a month or so ago, several additional firms have either exited hydrogen transportation entirely or ceased operations, typical year end house cleaning in the business world. That pushes the cumulative attrition rate to 36%. That figure is not speculative. It reflects projects that no longer exist, companies that no longer operate, and transport strategies that have been explicitly or implicitly abandoned. It means people out of work, often people who had devoted their careers to hydrogen as an energy carrier. Some failed quickly and visibly. Others faded over several years after failing to convert pilot projects into repeatable deployments. The pattern is consistent across regions and transport modes. Hydrogen transportation initiatives rarely fail because the technology does not function at all. They fail because functioning is not the same as being competitive, financeable, or scalable.

The only good news out of this tale of bad strategy, lost governmental money, and wasted time is that many skilled and competent resources who now understand transportation, energy, and regulation are on the market. They are available for real transportation projects that have real fiscal and climate benefits instead of being stuck in the dead end working on thing that never stood a chance. Many of them are undoubtedly being picked up by firms doing battery-electric transportation, as they have useful skills and context, they were just stuck in an organization that couldn’t make them usefully productive.

The failure modes themselves are revealing. Some companies run out of cash and enter insolvency proceedings. Others survive as legal entities while their hydrogen transport ambitions are quietly removed from strategic plans. In several cases, parent companies simply drop the hydrogen mobility program and redirect capital elsewhere without formally shutting down the subsidiary. This quiet shelving is common in infrastructure and energy transitions, where reputational risk is managed by avoiding explicit admissions of failure. HyHaul fits squarely into this category. It was not restructured, sold, or pivoted into a new line of business. The hydrogen road transport effort was turned off.

Across these cases, the underlying causes repeat. Hydrogen vehicles require expensive fueling infrastructure that cannot be justified without guaranteed throughput. Fleet operators will not commit without reliable infrastructure and predictable fuel pricing. Infrastructure investors will not build without fleet commitments. This circular dependency is not theoretical. It shows up in project after project. Public subsidies can delay the reckoning, but they cannot remove it. When grant milestones require binding commercial commitments, most hydrogen transport projects fail to meet them.

Another recurring feature is the assumption that hydrogen is necessary because batteries cannot meet the operational requirements of certain transport segments. This claim has been made for buses, long haul trucks, refuse vehicles, port equipment, trains, and even regional aircraft. In each case, the justification rests on range, refueling time, weight, or duty cycle. In each case, battery-electric alternatives have progressed faster than expected, steadily eroding the original rationale for hydrogen.

China’s heavy truck market provides the clearest recent example. China is not a niche testbed. It is the world’s largest commercial vehicle market, operating at scale under competitive pressures that quickly expose weak business cases. In 2025, battery-electric heavy truck sales surged, expanding into applications that were previously assumed to be out of reach. Hydrogen fuel cell truck sales, already low, declined further. This occurred despite continued policy support and years of pilot programs. The result was not ambiguous. Where operators were free to choose, battery-electric trucks won on cost, reliability, infrastructure availability, and operational simplicity.

My analysis of China’s heavy truck market documents this shift clearly. Battery-electric trucks displaced diesel in urban freight, drayage, mining, and increasingly in regional haul. Charging infrastructure and battery swapping expanded alongside grid upgrades that were already underway for industrial electrification. Hydrogen trucks, by contrast, remained dependent on bespoke refueling stations, high fuel costs, and complex supply chains. The argument that hydrogen was needed because batteries would not cut it did not survive exposure to a real market with real buyers.

This pattern extends beyond China. In Europe, battery-electric buses have scaled while hydrogen bus deployments remain limited and subsidy dependent. In North America, battery-electric delivery vans and refuse trucks have expanded while hydrogen alternatives struggle to move beyond demonstration fleets. Even in rail, where hydrogen was promoted as a replacement for diesel on non-electrified lines, battery trains are increasingly competitive for the same routes. The same is true for ferries, where 2,100 passenger battery-electric ferries are on order, dozens or low hundreds of battery-electric ferries are in operation and a sole hydrogen ferry, Norway’s MF Hydra, is afloat. The common thread is not ideology. It is incremental improvement in batteries, power electronics, and charging systems that compound year after year.

Hydrogen’s disadvantages in transportation are structural. Producing hydrogen consumes electricity. Compressing or liquefying it consumes more. Transporting and dispensing it consumes still more. Each step adds cost, complexity, and points of failure. Battery-electric systems avoid most of these steps by using electricity directly. That efficiency advantage translates into lower operating costs and simpler infrastructure. No amount of branding or pilot projects changes the physics.

Another factor undermining hydrogen’s case in transportation is its propensity to leak and the climate consequences of those leaks. Hydrogen is the smallest molecule, diffusing easily through seals, valves, fittings, and materials that are adequate for natural gas or diesel. Leakage rates are not theoretical. They are observed across production, compression, transport, storage, and refueling, especially in distributed systems like vehicle fueling networks. Once released, hydrogen does not act as a greenhouse gas directly, but it has a potent indirect warming effect. Atmospheric hydrogen increases the lifetime of methane by consuming hydroxyl radicals, and it contributes to the formation of tropospheric ozone.

Peer reviewed research has shown that on a 20-year timeframe, leaked hydrogen has a climate impact in the range of 33 to 37 times that of carbon dioxide. This means hydrogen transportation systems must achieve low leakage across complex, decentralized infrastructure to break even on climate claims. Battery-electric systems avoid this risk entirely by keeping energy in the form of electrons rather than a highly diffusive gas, removing an entire category of emissions that hydrogen transport struggles to control in practice.

This does not mean hydrogen has no role in the decarbonization transition. Industrial feedstocks and chemical processes that need hydrogen because of its specific chemical characteristics, and right now that’s all coming from fossil hydrogen with high greenhouse gas emissions. Job one is replacing black and gray hydrogen, not finding new use cases for hydrogen. What it does mean is that transportation has consistently failed to justify hydrogen outside of rockets going into orbit (and even there the industry is moving to methane). The attrition rate across hydrogen transport firms reflects this reality. When pilot funding ends and commercial discipline begins, most projects do not proceed.

HyHaul’s story matters because it was not marginal. It was well connected, well funded by public standards, and well aligned with policy narratives. Its failure to launch should be taken seriously. It adds to a growing body of evidence that hydrogen transportation initiatives are not being overtaken by better hydrogen projects, but by battery-electric systems that keep expanding into territory that was supposed to remain inaccessible.

Tracking these outcomes is not about scoring points, although I will freely admit to a sense of schadenfreude simply because I’ve been pointing out hydrogen’s shortcomings for transportation for years. It is about learning from repeated market signals. When 36% of tracked firms exit or abandon a strategy, the appropriate response is not to double down on the same assumptions. It is to reassess where public money, corporate capital, and engineering effort are best applied. The energy transition will not be won by preserving narratives. It will be shaped by technologies that continue to deliver when subsidies fade and markets decide.

Source: cleantechnica.com