Excellent analysis. Two points: what if 1) only surplus energy from offshore wind would be used for green H2 electrolysis and 2) the price would be at or below £/€/$ 1.50 per Kg?
Thanks. Both good questions, and they come up a lot.
To be clear, I'm fully behind decarbonising freight. It's one of the hardest sectors to clean up and it needs serious attention. But hydrogen for road transport requires jumping in with both feet (due to infrastructure requirements) when there are dozens of smaller, commercially proven steps that get you equivalent results. Better route planning, driver training, aerodynamic retrofits, hybrid and battery electric for shorter routes, even just reducing empty running.
These aren't exciting and they don't get press releases, but they compound. The industry could cut emissions meaningfully with changes that pay for themselves today, without waiting for a national hydrogen infrastructure that doesn't exist yet.
On surplus offshore wind: the economics only work if you assume the electricity is genuinely surplus, meaning there's literally no other use for it. In practice, the UK grid still runs gas plants for roughly 40% of generation. Every MWh of offshore wind that goes into an electrolyser instead of displacing gas is a missed decarbonisation opportunity. "Surplus" renewable electricity is a future state, not a current one, and even when we get there, interconnectors, grid storage, and demand response will compete for those MWh. The electrolyser only makes sense after all of those higher value uses are saturated.
On £1.50/kg: that would genuinely change the fuel cost picture, getting you to roughly 12-15p per mile which is competitive with diesel. But the distribution problem doesn't go away at any price point. You still need compression or liquefaction, transport, and a national network of dispensing stations. The UK has 11 public hydrogen stations. Even free hydrogen doesn't help if there's nowhere to fill up. The grid is already everywhere. Adding a charger to a depot is a transformer upgrade. Adding a hydrogen station is a £2-5M civil engineering project.
The place where cheap green hydrogen gets really exciting is exactly the applications where you can't just plug in: steel, ammonia, seasonal storage, maritime. Those don't need a distributed national refuelling network, they need point to point bulk delivery to industrial sites and ports, which is a much more tractable logistics problem.
The logistical nightmare of hydrogen makes its production price almost irrelevant. Using surplus wind energy for carbon capture to create synthetic fuels is much smarter because these liquids are compatible with our current global infrastructure. You bypass the need for expensive new pipelines and specialized tanks entirely. By binding green hydrogen into a stable synthetic hydrocarbon, you get a fuel that is easy to move, has high energy density, and won't leak through solid steel.
Very odd. When i use the link it comes up with this: "We assemble the first comprehensive sample of venture fraud cases involving 614 U.S. venture capital (VC)-backed startups founded since 2000. We find that VC-backed firms are 54% more likely to face fraud charges than comparable non-VC-backed firms within a subsample of newly public firms where detection likelihood is high and homogeneous. We then examine the role of governance in explaining venture fraud, focusing on two features that have risen in recent years—founder-friendly structures and cap table complexity."
Not even remotely what you're commenting on. Just wondering.
Likely the middlemen will pocket the difference depending on how the contracts between the shippers/distributers worked... "the people" who paid more at the market(s) for products won't be reimbursed.
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