Why China Is Building a HYDROGEN Highway Across the Entire Country (While America Still Debates Oil)

[Caribbeans]

China has already committed to 12,000 kilometers of hydrogen pipeline infrastructure by 2035. Not planned. Not proposed. Committed. And almost nobody covered it seriously.

This isn't an environmental story. It's an industrial competitiveness story — and the bill is already arriving. The EU's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism is now in effect. Chinese steel, aluminum, and chemicals exported to Europe carry an embedded carbon cost that gets calculated, invoiced, and paid. Estimates put the exposure for Chinese heavy industry at $4–7 billion annually by 2030. The hydrogen highway is Beijing's counter-move.

In this video, we trace the full cause-and-effect chain: from China's coal dependency and CBAM exposure, to its electrolyzer manufacturing dominance, falling green hydrogen costs, and a 246-project approval pipeline in a single year. We also go where the optimistic framing doesn't — the iridium supply constraint, the grey hydrogen problem, and why this buildout could leave a balance sheet crisis in the 2030s even if the technology works.

And we explain why America isn't actually China's target in this race. Europe is.

The pipeline doesn't care what you think about it. It just gets longer.

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# of public hydrogen stations in China in 2016: 0
# of public hydrogen stations in China in 2026? Over 500
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Link to tweet

# of hydrogen cars that have "blown up" in 10 years? ZERO

Welcome to Idiocracy

[NNadir]

1. Very few hydrogen cars have blown up because very few exist.

The hydrogen scam in China is driven by their access to coal, which is what they use to make it.

I don't think the scam is serious. My son spent months in China and traveled widely without ever seeing a hydrogen coal greenwashing vehicle.

It's a serious as Governor Hydrogen Hummer Arnie's car was decades ago.

Hydrogen is a dirty and dangerous fuel. It's an important industrial reagent for use by trained engineers but has remained a stupid fantasy elsewhere for good reason.

[OKIsItJustMe]

2. Hydrogen vs. Gasoline Leak and Ignition Test- which is safer?

[NNadir]

3. Oh cute, we should destroy exergy of fossil fuels and make the climate collapse faster because someone put together...

because of a staged video of a fire.

There are very few antinukes who understand thermodynamics, so there's that.

How about this one:

New video released in deadly hydrogen truck explosion in Colton

KABC logo Wednesday, March 4, 2026

...or...

California’s Hydrogen Infrastructure Collapse Proves What We’ve Known All Along

Late on the night of Tuesday, February 24, 2026, California’s hydrogen mobility market ground to a sudden halt when an explosion tore through an industrial truck storage yard located at 3994 Miguel Bustamante Parkway in Colton, California.

According to fire department reports, the blast occurred while two technicians were working on a trailer that contained compressed hydrogen tanks. The explosion instantly engulfed the hydrogen trailer and a nearby passenger car. Firefighters had the blaze under control in about 20 minutes, but the human cost was severe. One man was killed at the scene, and the second technician suffered serious burns.

Pilot company, the trailer’s owner, immediately suspended its compressed hydrogen gas operations to cooperate with the ongoing investigation.

The Network Collapse
That localized tragedy instantly triggered a statewide logistical nightmare. Because safety protocols dictate that hydrogen trailers are typically withdrawn from service across operators while an incident is investigated, the gaseous supply chain in California completely froze...

Hydrogen tank explosion in Paraguay hospitalises three workers

Trained workers at a plant in South Korea:

SK Energy pledges overhaul after fatal hydrogen explosion at Ulsan refinery

Hydrogen blast at Lyon chemical plant laboratory injures four

Korean police fail to explain Hyundai hydrogen bus explosion after year-long investigation: reports

Subtitle:

Case into the blast, which injured three, is now closed after initial suggestion that the bus was faulty

One could do this for hours.

Even the stupid google AI can tell anyone interested that the production of hydrogen is responsible for about 1 - 3% of the world's CO₂ emissions.

Hydrogen, as a form of energy storage, is not very different in its thermodynamic properties of exergy destruction than batteries, only it's worse because of the horrible physical properties of hydrogen: It has the third lowest critical temperature of any gas, the other two being the two isotopes of helium; it is incompatible with many metals; it has extremely low viscosity...so on and so on.

Of course, antinukes are disinterested in the vast death toll from fossil fuels, so it's not surprising that they're fine with making things worse. They'd rather whine insipidly about tritium releases at Fukushima which have harmed zero people.

I've worked with hydrogen, and did so for many years. I may have done hundreds of hydrogenations in my career,

Of course, I'm not a clown trying to greenwash fossil fuels; I'm a scientist.

It's easy to open a valve deliberately and make a torch and a video to satisfy a rube. Hell, I used to do it occasionally myself in order to prevent explosions in the lab.

It's rather different for consumers. The purpose of hydrogen is to greenwash fossil fuels from which hydrogen is overwhelmingly made. I put together a post with references to something called the "primary scientific literature" using only a small subset of available papers on the topic of hydrogen manufacture here:

A Giant Climate Lie: When they're selling hydrogen, what they're really selling is fossil fuels.

There are zero antinukes or "I'm not an antinuke" antinukes who give a rat's ass about fossil fuels of course, so there's that.

Some graphics from that post:

The caption:

Figure 1. Global current sources of H2 production (a), and H2 consumption sectors (b).

Progress on Catalyst Development for the Steam Reforming of Biomass and Waste Plastics Pyrolysis Volatiles: A Review Laura Santamaria, Gartzen Lopez, Enara Fernandez, Maria Cortazar, Aitor Arregi, Martin Olazar, and Javier Bilbao, Energy & Fuels 2021 35 (21), 17051-17084]

Some of our antinukes like to post graphics from the IEA to pretend to be "informed." Here's one:

The source for reference 11 in the paper is this one, from the IEA: IEA 2022 Global Hydrogen Review

The report there contains the following text:

Current status of hydrogen production

Demand for hydrogen is met almost entirely by hydrogen production from unabated fossil fuels. In 2021, total global production was 94 million tonnes of hydrogen (Mt H2) with associated emissions of more than 900 Mt CO2.30 Natural gas without CCUS31 is the main route and accounted for 62% of hydrogen production in 2021. Hydrogen is also produced as a by-product of naphtha reforming at refineries (18%) and then used for other refinery processes (e.g. hydrocracking, desulphurisation). Hydrogen production from coal accounted for 19% of total production in 2021, mainly based in China[. Limited amounts of oil (less than 1%) were also used to produce hydrogen.

Source: IEA: IEA 2022 Global Hydrogen Review, pg. 71.

Excepting the section title, I added the bold.

If one can read, one can easily understand how hydrogen is made, and therefore understand almost immediately without too much thought that hydrogen hype is nothing more, again, than greenwashing fossil fuels, about which antinukes and "I'm not an antinuke" antinukes couldn't care less.

Have a nice day tomorrow.