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EVs might have killed the hydrogen car, but trucking is a different story.
The hydrogen car lost.
Not long ago, it seemed like hydrogen fuel cells would power the next generation of climate change-fighting vehicles. Instead, batteries won the future. Americans now buy hundreds of thousands of electric vehicles each year, while only a couple of mass market hydrogen fuel cell cars can be found, and only in a select few places with enough hydrogen stations to make them driveable. The 20-year-old dream of a “hydrogen highway” across California never quite materialized, and hydrogen’s ascent toward becoming the fuel of the future remains stuck in limbo.
Yet hydrogen just keeps humming in the background. Researchers are not giving up but plugging away, trying to refine the chemistry of producing commercial hydrogen to make it better and cheaper. Most of the attention it attracts goes to how it might be put to use in heavy industry, but there are glimmers of potential in transportation as well. Advocates plan for hydrogen to be used in places where it makes more sense than a battery-electric vehicle, from warehouse forklifts up to semi trucks.
It may be that hydrogen is not, as it was once hyped, the answer to everything. But it’s going to pop up in more places than you might think.
Here is a hydrogen fuel cell refresher: Like a battery, a fuel cell has two electrodes — a negatively charged anode and a positively charged cathode — plus an electrolyte, the electrically conducting medium. Each atom of hydrogen contains a single proton and electron. When the fuel cell separates those two components, electrons travel one way to create a flow of electricity, while the protons go another way to be reunited with oxygen in the air to create water and heat. Given that those are the fuel cell’s only byproducts, it has the potential to be a very clean energy source (depending upon how the hydrogen itself was created).
Hydrogen’s other strength is that it’s a fuel, one that, compared to charging a battery, more closely resembles our pump-and-go experience of the gas station. But there is a flip side to that feature. If America wanted to become a hydrogen economy, a new nationwide hydrogen infrastructure of pipelines and substations would be needed to create and distribute the stuff all around the country, which is even more ambitious than the current movement to fill the country with high-speed EV chargers.
That’s why hydrogen projects have gone local. In Northern California, a group of Hyundai XCIENT Fuel Cell semis — which the company claims to be “the world's first mass-produced, heavy-duty truck powered by hydrogen” — are about to begin an experiment in green trucking backed by the University of California, Berkeley, the Center for Transportation and the Environment (CTE), and state agencies including the California Air Resources Board (CARB). Later this year, the NorCAL Zero project will see 30 hydrogen semis moving goods between the Port of Oakland and inland destinations such as Sacramento, Stockton, Modesto, and Fresno.
There are battery-powered big rigs on the way, including Tesla’s much-ballyhooed semi. But there are several reasons to be gung-ho for hydrogen, says P.J. Callahan, CTE’s project manager for the NorCal Zero project. Battery semis, when weighed down with a full load of cargo, would deliver only 150 to 200 miles of range, he says. Hyundai’s hydrogen trucks already promise at least twice that much, and Callahan expects fuel cell trucking to reach much higher as the technology develops.
“The ultimate kind of range goal that we expect for these types of trucks is between 700 miles and a thousand miles,” he says. “That's extremely challenging with battery electric.”
Fuel-cell semis can also carry more volume because there aren’t batteries eating up cubic feet of space that would otherwise go to cargo, Callahan says. Hydrogen also has the potential to deliver minimal refueling times that clock-conscious truckers are accustomed to. Eventually. With today’s technology, he says, it might take a half-hour to fill a semi with hydrogen, but that’s because existing systems are slow and conservative, built with small passenger vehicles like the Toyota Mirai in mind. With standardized equipment made for trucking, he says, fill-up times could drop to five to ten minutes.
There is still the issue of new hydrogen infrastructure. But running trucks on familiar paths between the Port of Oakland and popular inland destinations negates the need to build new refueling stations everywhere. “We are going to need a refueling network of stations, but … you can just be smarter about the way that we plan it,” Callahan says.
Plenty of other vehicles beyond big rigs have quietly turned to or experimented with hydrogen. Amazon now runs its small army of warehouse forklifts on fuel cells and has signed billion-dollar deals for the hydrogen supply. Establishing a green hydrogen pipeline for small uses like forklifts, as well as 800 heavy-duty trucks, is meant to help the company use hydrogen to meet its net-zero by 2040 goals.
Some U.S. cities run municipal buses on fuel cells. Hydrogen is considered a strong candidate to decarbonize the cargo shipping industry. Experiments have shown that it’s possible even to fly airplanes this way, though Hydrogen Airlines is a long way off.
Where hydrogen will continue to find a home depends a lot on how it will be made in the future. Nearly all the commercial hydrogen used in America today is created via the process called steam methane reformation, in which the methane in natural gas is subjected to high-temperature steam. The conversion creates free hydrogen but also the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide as a byproduct. That’s why scientists are racing to find ways to bring down the cost of green hydrogen solutions such as electrolyzers. They apply current to water to separate it into its component elements of hydrogen and oxygen, but they remain more expensive than current technology.
“It's a major goal of the state of California. It's a major goal of the federal government through the Department of Energy. Their hydrogen hub initiative wants to reduce the carbon impact of hydrogen and to get to green electrolyzed hydrogen from renewable resources so that there's no carbon involved in any part of the value chain,” Callahan says.
If such a goal could be achieved, hydrogen fuel could be used for a lot more than moving vehicles. For instance: One of the problems of a power grid running mostly on renewables is the need to store solar or wind energy when it’s available to use when it’s not. We could give old EV batteries a second life as energy storage for the grid, but it’s possible to imagine using liquid hydrogen to do the same job.
Perhaps the fuel of the future is still the fuel of the future.
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Smothered, covered, and recharged.
Picture, if you will, the perfect electric vehicle charging stop. It sits right off a well-traveled highway. It has decent bathrooms, preferably ones that are open 24/7. It gives drivers and road-tripping families a simple way to occupy themselves during the 15 to 30 minutes it takes to refill the battery, the most obvious solution being a meal that can be consumed within that time window.
In other words, it is a Waffle House.
The beloved chain of budget restaurants spread across the American South said last week that it would begin to install DC fast chargers in 2026. Built by BP, the charging stalls will be able to deliver up to 400 kilowatts of electricity and will include plugs with both the Combined Charging System standard (the plug used by most non-Tesla EVs to date) and the North American Charging System standard (the formerly proprietary Tesla plug that is slowly becoming the standard for the industry at large). At last, Americans can get their hash browns smothered, covered, and recharged.
We won’t see every Waffle House in the country become an electron depot overnight. BP said it is planning installations at about 50 sites right now; Waffle House has around 2,000 locations in the United States. Yet the addition of charging — and not just charging, but high-speed charging — at the Waffle House is just what the American EV experience needs.
Where fast chargers are built has been driven by a few factors. Notably, there is necessity from the EV driver’s point of view and practicality for the charging company. Charging depots along major highways and interstates make electric road trips possible, but many prime pit stops between big cities are in the middle of nowhere, which makes it a challenge to provide amenities to resting drivers. In the empty California desert between L.A. and San Francisco, for example, Tesla built Superchargers at iconic steak restaurants and at existing travel plazas with your expected array of gas stations and fast food restaurants. I’ve also stopped numerous times at an impromptu, formerly unpaved site rushed together to accommodate holiday traffic; for months it featured nothing but plugs and portable bathrooms sitting in the dirt.
In cities and suburbs, it’s not uncommon to find charging stations at outlet malls and shopping centers. It makes sense: These places have lots of parking spaces, room for the necessary electrical infrastructure, and stores and restaurants to provide some level of amusement or distraction. If it so happens that you need to go to the REI or Sephora anyway, then so much the better. Mercedes-Benz is trying to class up this setup by putting its luxury charging sites at high-end malls and providing primo, covered parking spaces.
But the game changer is the Waffle House. Businesses have long realized the benefit of adding EV chargers, either as a serendipitous perk for customers who arrive in electric need, or as an enticement for EV owners to patronize their business rather than the competitor with no plugs. Mostly, though, those businesses install Level 2 “destination” chargers that are roughly equivalent to what drivers get in their garage if they pay for the upgrade: 240 volts, or enough to provide 20 to 30 miles of range per hour.
That’s perfect for a hotel, where patrons who snag a charger can wake up the next morning with a full battery, just as they would at home. I made it across sparse Utah country this way. At a grocery store or a restaurant it’s less useful. It’s a pleasant bonus to add a few miles of juice during an errand. What would be better would be filling up the whole battery while you’re inside the Whole Foods.
The problem, however, is timing. Chargers are a shared resource. For optimal EV charging that works for everybody, drivers move their cars as soon as they’re done to open the stall for someone else, which is why many fast-charging operators ding drivers with idle fees if they stay plugged in. So not every activity is a perfect match. It’s pretty annoying to leave your half-filled cart inside Trader Joe’s to go move the car, or to rush through shopping so you finish by the time the battery does. I’ve been through plenty of situations where I couldn’t get back to my Model 3 right away, and so even though it was about to finish charging at 80%, I used the phone app to bump up the limit to 90% or higher to keep the session going.
You know what is a decent match? The Waffle House. You can probably finish your All-Star Special in time, and if you can’t, no problem. This isn’t fine dining; you can leave the table a moment to hop out to the parking lot and unplug the EV.
Putting chargers at the places Americans love to go anyway, whether road tripping or not, would be a wonderful little way to boost their desirability. My native Nebraska has Superchargers co-located with Runzas at towns along the interstate, a welcome trend that must expand. Let Wisconsinites fill the battery while crushing a frozen custard at Culver’s. Give us chargers at the Cracker Barrel so I can finally solve that unholy peg game. Continue the California trend of putting plugs at the In N Out. If the charging stop is someplace you want to go anyway, the minutes required melt away.
Current conditions: The first U.S. heat wave of the year begins today in the West, with a record high of 107 degrees Fahrenheit possible in Redding, California • India is experiencing its earliest monsoon in 16 years• Power was largely restored in southeast Texas by early Wednesday after destructive winds left nearly 200,000 without electricity.
The global average temperature is expected to “remain at or near” the 2-degree Celsius threshold within the next five years, the World Meteorological Organization shared in a new report Wednesday morning. The 2015 Paris Climate Agreement set a warming limit to under 2 degrees C above pre-industrial times, although the WMO’s prediction will not immediately mean the goal has been broken, since that threshold is measured over at least two decades, the Financial Times reports. Still, WMO’s report represents “the first time that scientists’ computer models had flagged the more imminent possibility of a 2C year,” FT writes. Other concerning findings include:
You can find the full report here.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has been in disarray since its acting administrator was fired in early May for defending the agency before Congress. His successor, David Richardson, began his tenure by threatening staff. According to an internal FEMA memo obtained by The Handbasket, however, the picture is worse than mere dysfunction: Stephanie Dobitsch, the associate administrator for policy and program analysis, wrote to Richardson last week warning him that the agency’s “critical functions” are at “high risk” of failure due to “significant personnel losses in advance of the 2025 Hurricane Season.”
Of particular concern is the staffing at the Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center, which The Handbasket notes contains the nuclear bunker “where congressional leaders were stashed on 9/11,” and which, per Dobitsch, is now “at risk of not being fully mission capable.” FEMA’s primary disaster response office is also on the verge of being unable to “execute response and initial recovery operations and may disrupt life-saving and life-sustaining program delivery,” the memo goes on. Hurricane season begins on Sunday, and wildfires are already burning in the West. You can read the full report at The Handbasket.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected a religious liberty appeal by the San Carlos Apache Tribe to stop the mining company Rio Tinto from proceeding with its plan to build one of the largest copper mines in the world at Oak Flat in Arizona, which the Tribe considers sacred land. Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas said in a dissent that they would have granted the Tribe’s petition, with Gorsuch calling the court’s decision a “grave mistake” that could “reverberate for generations.” The Trump-appointed justice argued that “before allowing the government to destroy the Apaches’ sacred site, this Court should at least have troubled itself to hear their case.”
I traveled to Superior, Arizona, last year to learn more about Rio Tinto’s project, which analysts estimate could extract enough copper to meet a quarter of U.S. demand. “Copper is the most important metal for all technologies we think of as part of the energy transition: battery electric vehicles, grid-scale battery storage, wind turbines, solar panels,” Adam Simon, an Earth and environmental sciences professor at the University of Michigan, told me of the project. But many skeptics say that beyond destroying a culturally and religiously significant site, there is not the smelting capacity in the U.S. for all of Rio Tinto’s raw copper, which the company would likely extract from Oak Flat and send to China for processing. According to court documents, Oak Flat could be transferred to Rio Tinto’s subsidiary Resolution Copper as soon as June 16. In a statement, Wendsler Nosie Sr. of Apache Stronghold — the San Carlos Apache-led religious nonprofit opposing the mine — said, “While this decision is a heavy blow, our struggle is far from over.”
MTA
New York won a court order on Tuesday temporarily preventing the Trump administration from withholding funding for state transportation projects if it doesn’t end congestion pricing, Gothamist reports. The toll, which went into effect in early January, charges most drivers $9 to enter Manhattan below 60th street, and has been successful at reducing traffic and raising millions for subway upgrades. The Trump administration has argued, however, that the toll harms poor and working-class people by “unfairly” charging them to “go to work, see their families, or visit the city.”
The Federal Highway Administration warned New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority that it had until May 28 to end the program, or else face cuts to city and state highway funding. Judge Lewis J. Liman blocked the government from the retaliatory withholding with the court order on Tuesday, which extends through June 9, arguing the state would “suffer irreparable harm” without it. Governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, celebrated the move, calling it a “massive victory for New York commuters, vindicating our right as a state to make decisions regarding what’s best for our streets.”
European Union countries agreed on Tuesday to dramatically scale back the bloc’s carbon border tariff so that it will cover only 10% of the companies that currently qualify, Reuters reports. The scheme applies a fee on “imported goods that is equivalent to the carbon price already paid by EU-based companies under the bloc’s CO2 emissions policies,” with the intent of protecting Europe-based companies from being undercut by foreign producers in countries that have looser environmental regulations, Reuters writes. The EU justified the decision by noting that the approximately 18,000 companies to which the levy still applies account for more than 99% of the emissions from iron, steel, aluminum, and cement imports, and that loosening the restriction will benefit smaller businesses.
The famous “climate stripes” graphic — which visualizes the annual increases of global average temperature in red and blue bands — has been updated to include oceanic and atmospheric warming. “We’ve had [these] warming estimates for a long time, but having them all in one graphic is what we’ve managed to do here,” the project’s creator, Ed Hawkins, told Fast Company.
And coal communities and fracking villages and all the rest.
Amid last month’s headlines about departures from the Department of Energy, the exits of Brian Anderson and Briggs White received little attention. Yet their departures foreshadowed something larger: the quiet dismantling of federal support for the economic diversification of fossil fuel–dependent regions of the country.
Anderson and White led the Energy Communities Interagency Working Group, created by a 2021 executive order to coordinate the federal strategy to support coal–reliant regions through a global transition to cleaner energy. This Biden-era strategy recognized that communities where employment opportunities and tax bases depend on fossil fuels face serious risks — local levels of prosperity generally rise and fall with production levels — and they require support to build new engines of economic activity.
In contrast, President Donald Trump’s prescription for fossil fuel communities is to produce more fossil fuels. In addition to cutting clean energy incentives, the budget reconciliation bill passed by the House of Representatives last week seeks to directly support fossil fuel production by accelerating leasing and permitting, lowering royalty rates, and repealing the methane emissions fee.
History suggests that Trump’s ability to help fossil fuel communities by boosting production is limited — similar efforts in Trump’s first term failed to significantly alter the trajectory of coal, oil, or natural gas output. But the funding cuts codified in the current reconciliation bill could do real harm by dismantling federal programs that support economic diversification. Communities that depend on fossil fuel industries will be vulnerable to severe economic shocks when demand for their products eventually declines.
The need to help transitioning regions isn’t new, but federal support for struggling communities has long been stigmatized. In 1980, a federal commission urged policymakers to focus less on struggling places and more on helping individuals move to where opportunity existed. President Ronald Reagan used this report to justify cutting federal economic development programs, including proposing to eliminate the Appalachian Regional Commission. Congress did not fully abolish the ARC, but its budget was slashed nearly in half, leading to staff reductions and the phasing out of the programs designed to bolster the economy of the persistently struggling region.
In the decades that followed, manufacturing towns were largely left to fend for themselves as globalization accelerated. A study by MIT’s David Autor and colleagues showed that 86% of the manufacturing job losses from trade shocks in the early 2000s were still reflected in depressed local employment rates in 2019. Most workers didn’t find new jobs or migrate.
If the loss of dominant employers causes “miniature Great Depressions” in local economies across the country, then a rapid decline in fossil fuels spells acute risks for communities that depend on these industries for jobs and public revenues. We see this happening already in coal-reliant regions. In Boone County, West Virginia, coal production declined by over 80% from 2009 to 2019, causing the county’s gross domestic product to decline by over 60%. Three of Boone’s 10 elementary schools were forced to close.
President Trump entered office in 2017 pledging to “bring the coal industry back 100%” with a deregulatory strategy much like the one his administration is pursuing today. But during his first four-year term, domestic coal mining employment fell by 26%, and coal-fired power plant capacity declined by 13%, demonstrating the futility of doubling down on an economic model when macroeconomic forces are working against it.
These outcomes are not inevitable. Four-hundred miles west of Boone, the far more economically diverse Hopkins County, Kentucky was able to weather its own 75% decline in coal production without a comparable economic crash. In Germany’s Ruhr Valley, the German government paired a coal phase-out with over €100 billion in long-term investments — new universities, industrial incentives, environmental restoration, and worker retraining. While some towns in the region are still struggling, the Ruhr Valley’s shift from a coal powerhouse to a more diverse, knowledge-based economy shows that fossil fuel regions can reinvent themselves.
Recent policies in the U.S. began to take similar steps. As part of a broader federal place-based economic strategy, the American Rescue Plan dedicated hundreds of millions to rebuilding coal communities in 2021. Then came the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which included billions for cleaning up abandoned mines and orphaned oil wells and funding large-scale demonstration projects for carbon capture and hydrogen production. The Inflation Reduction Act added bonus tax credits and carve-outs to grant programs that target fossil fuel communities.
The now-defunct Energy Communities Interagency Working Group helped knit these efforts together. It served as a clearinghouse for funding opportunities, published “how-to” guides for local leaders, and deployed “rapid response teams” to coal regions.
To be sure, the strategy had limitations. Most programs focused narrowly on coal regions and clean energy solutions, and the IWG had minimal funding for its coordinating efforts. But the strategy shift marked real progress and has generated promising early signs, such as an iron air battery manufacturing facility at an old steel mill in Weirton, West Virginia, carbon capture projects in North Dakota and Texas, and “hydrogen hubs” in the Gulf Coast and Appalachia.
Under the Trump administration, that progress is at risk. Government efficiency initiatives have already led to the gutting of federal programs best positioned to support investments in fossil fuel communities, including the Loan Programs Office, the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations. and the Federal Thriving Communities Network Initiative.
Trump’s budget proposes severe cuts to the federal support for regional economic development, including eliminating the Economic Development Administration, the federal agency dedicated to helping communities strengthen their local economies.
The reconciliation bill passed by the House of Representatives is a step toward codifying those cuts — with reductions in non-defense discretionary annual spending of $163 billion (over 20%) — and it would also eliminate most of the tax credits and grant programs that encourage investments in energy infrastructure projects in fossil fuel communities. Certain policies that are especially well suited for fossil fuel communities, like incentives for enhanced geothermal energy, may be phased out before ever really getting off the ground.
Rolling back support for fossil fuel communities will curb these regions’ opportunities to build new engines of economic prosperity. Without credible, lasting commitments from the federal government, many fossil fuel communities have little choice but to stick to the economic model they know best, despite their vulnerability to the eventual end of fossil fuels.