The Hydrogen Economy Reinvented: Materials and Hardware Markets, Technology 2025-2045

Hydrogen Economy Reinvented: New Materials Opportunities

The hydrogen economy reinvented will call for many new high-added-value materials and devices. This report is now available on just this.

If you cannot beat them then join them

It is now realised that hydrogen will have large new markets when it is redirected to enhance electrification, not pitched as a futile attempt to destroy electrification. For instance, it can succeed as fusion power for electricity grids. Indeed, it some designs, it will directly produce electricity. That may power the electric drives of large ships. Investment in fusion power is rocketing, with over $10 billion yearly in prospect for commercialisation, mostly 2035 and beyond, and much of this spent on specialist materials. Meanwhile, as solar wins for lowest cost electricity generation, regular hydrogen in salt caverns is front-runner for seasonal storage needs arising. Indeed, the modern equivalent of strategic oil reserves may be green hydrogen stored in underground caverns for much longer. In addition, there is considerable potential to grow the use of green hydrogen as a chemical feedstock, all of these options being far more realistic than the earlier doomed attempts to pipe hydrogen into our homes and cars.

Big reversals: different opportunities

Learn how there are big reversals here. Fusion power will need tiny amounts of hydrogen but at massively high prices for the deuterium and tritium isotopes. It will need highly sophisticated, high-priced materials, mostly inorganic. The volume demand for regular hydrogen will heavily involve chemical intermediary and fuel blends rather than the original idea of pure hydrogen everywhere. Because of its fundamental properties, we shall minimise the distribution of hydrogen, not maximise it.

Your new addressable markets

This commercially-oriented, 340-page report starts with a 50-page Executive Summary and Conclusions sufficient in itself for those in a hurry. Here are 51 key conclusions, 27 forecast lines, roadmap in three lines by year 2025-2045, three SWOT appraisals and many lucid new infographics making it easy to grasp your new opportunities. Among the new needs, learn why nickel, iron, copper and lithium-based materials are so prominent alongside biological materials. What are the many types of sophisticated membranes now needed?

Which chemistries?

Why are chemistries of B, Ba, Be, Co, Nb, Pt, V, Zn and, to a lesser extent, Ir, La, Mn, Zr important? Which organics and why, including many membrane composites emerging? Many 2025 research papers and latest industrial advances are analysed throughout the report.

Chapter 2. “Introduction to hydrogen: business opportunities and materials involved” takes 44 pages to cover actual and potential uses of green hydrogen, hydrogen isotopes and their primary uses, actual and targetted, and evidence that the industry is starting to pivot towards different objectives. Many of the resulting, different, hardware needs are introduced here.

Production is changing

The 46 pages of Chapter 3. “Hydrogen production and storage technologies and materials reinvented” concern regular hydrogen, particularly green hydrogen, reasons for current strong investment in hydrogen production and hydrogen hubs, ten hydrogen production methods and their materials then specifically electrolyser technologies compared, materials opportunities emerging. See new focus on geologic “natural” hydrogen, solar hydrogen panels, bio-fermentation and hydrogen made where it is needed. Will there be over-production of green hydrogen due to cost and other factors? Understand hydrogen storage materials: addressing life, size, weight, leakage and safety issues. What hydrogen transport and storage methods, materials, challenges are your opportunities? One particularly important aspect then gets its own chapter.

Electricity grids come center stage

Chapter 4. “Electricity grids: Hydrogen Long Duration Energy Storage LDES” (54 pages). Mostly underground in salt caverns, this will mainly involve massive surplus wind and solar power making green hydrogen with storage then subsequent discharge (GWh divided by GW) of three months or more. Again the coverage is both up-to-date and critical with 2025 research and honest, numerate presentation of the serious conversion efficiency, leakage and other issues for you to solve.

Hydrogen fusion power

It is deeply significant that proof of principle has recently been repeatedly demonstrated with generation of electricity by hydrogen fusion and many amply-funded private companies are promising to demonstrate it providing grid electricity well within the 2025-2045 timeframe. Chapter 5. “Electricity grids: Nuclear fusion power from hydrogen” (57 pages) critically inspects a profusion of 2025 research and industrial advances in this, particularly surfacing your exciting equipment and materials opportunities. Specialist steels, lithium breeder blankets, diamond hydrogen targets, high temperature superconductors pinching hydrogen plasma, deuterium, tritium and helium3 and are examples that are potentially highly profitable.

Growth in use as chemical reactant

Chapter 6. “Hydrogen feedstock reactant and intermediary in chemical, steel, food manufacture” (28 pages) sees growth in this substantial existing use of hydrogen as a chemical feedstock but this situation is complex. For example, there will be more green hydrogen use to make ammonia notably to make fertilizer. However, on a 20-year timeframe, farming is increasingly going indoors with aquaponics, hydroponics and cell culture needing little fertilizer - sometimes 95% less. Use in steelmaking is likely to be a largely new market and more hydrogen will be used in oil refineries until they are hit by a decline in number due to electrification of homes and vehicles. Over-arching all this is adoption of green hydrogen in place of dirtier forms and to make higher value materials such as carbon nanotubes. All is explained and predicted in this chapter, including relevance of hydrogen to cement decarbonisation.

Hydrogen as a niche fuel

Chapter 7. “Niche fuel where full electrification is inadequate or impracticable: some aerospace, ships, trains, on-road, off-road vehicles, microgrids” in 40 pages addresses what remains after the original dream is abandoned - battery-electric vehicles and electricity equipment in our homes being much simpler, safer, more affordable and longer-lived. We find that industrial heating, off-road vehicles, trains and ships are among the niches that may adopt some hydrogen solutions but affordable MW-level mining vehicle and ship batteries and faster improvement of battery-electric powertrains are a threat, including very fast charging. Hydrogen adoption niches will sometimes be aided by being a marginally costed part of a hydrogen ecosystem because total cost of ownership is a major impediment in stand-alone transport and microgrid systems.