RE: The 💧Hydrogen 💧 Path Is Here15 Jun 2025 21:45
The “I’m on your side” to Laurie line gave me a good laugh.
Yes, the hydrogen ecosystem isn’t fully built out — no argument there. But if your solution is “just make SAF in the outback and plug it into the fossil fuel system,” you’re kind of proving my point: that infrastructure exists because we spent a century building it. Of course hydrogen needs investment — so did oil, gas, and even electricity grids.
Also, producing SAF still requires hydrogen — and a lot of it. If you're making e-fuels using DAC and green hydrogen, you’re dealing with huge energy losses (efficiencies as low as 10–15%). So if the answer is “just use SAF,” you're not avoiding hydrogen — you’re just burying it further up the chain, and losing a big chunk of energy along the way.
Your point about making hydrogen on-site is totally valid — and already being explored in many sectors. But that doesn’t replace the need for scalable infrastructure across mobility, shipping, aviation, and heavy industry. If we’re serious about decarbonisation, we need to be investing in both distributed and centralised solutions, not picking one and writing off the rest.
So yes, we agree: the world will need a lot of green hydrogen. Where we differ is that I don’t think we need to funnel all of it through inefficient workarounds (like SAF and e-fuels) just because pipelines and storage tanks haven’t caught up yet.
If you’re on our side — great. But maybe ease off the “hydrogen’s too hard, let’s just work around it” line. That’s not backing the sector — that’s rebranding doubt.