7 Projects Down In The Inevitable Death Of Hydrogen For Energy In B.C.

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It was never going to work. The CBC’s March 2025 freedom of information exposé confirmed what engineers, analysts, and every mildly numerate policymaker should have known: British Columbia’s grand hydrogen production ambitions were built on sand. According to briefing documents to B.C.’s then energy minister in September of 2024, at least seven large-scale hydrogen projects—each touted as transformational—have been either paused indefinitely or cancelled outright.

These weren’t speculative backroom ideas. These were the crown jewels of B.C.’s hydrogen strategy, publicly championed with photo ops, press releases, and words like “world-leading” and “clean energy superpower.” Together, they represented over $13 billion in proposed capital spending. Not a single one has reached final investment decision (FID). Not a single one is making steel or ammonia, or powering trucks. Most are now quietly erased from public communication, visible only in procurement archives and FOIA disclosures. The dream is dead. It just hasn’t been buried yet.

Let’s walk through the wreckage. Fortescue’s Project Coyote was a $2 billion green hydrogen and ammonia production facility proposed for Prince George. It aimed to use hydroelectricity to run electrolyzers, then synthesize ammonia for export. The scale was industrial: hundreds of megawatts of power demand, tens of thousands of tonnes of hydrogen per year. In September 2024, Fortescue formally withdrew it from the provincial environmental assessment process. Reason: cost of electricity, uncertainty around infrastructure, and—translated from PR-speak—no viable buyers. Fortescue is not stupid. They have projects in Texas, Brazil, and Western Australia. They’re pursuing U.S. subsidies under the IRA. When a company used to massive risk exposure walks away from a clean-energy project, it means the economics are beyond salvage. Expect Fortescue to be walking away from a lot more of its proposed hydrogen for energy deals in the coming year, with the brain dead Phoenix “green hydrogen in a drought-stricken desert” being high on the list.

Teralta Hydrogen’s project in Prince George was smaller but no less hyped. Premier David Eby himself flew in to declare it a model for B.C.’s hydrogen economy. It would capture byproduct hydrogen from a Chemtrade sodium chlorate facility and supply it to a Canfor pulp mill half a kilometer awy to offset fossil gas use. The idea was elegant: zero-carbon hydrogen, no new electrolysis required, no transport. It remains the only hydrogen for energy scheme I’ve seen that made the slightest sense, although electrifying would have made vastly more sense.

Then Canfor shut the pulp mill and Chemtrade closed their chlorate line. No pulp, no chlorate, no byproduct hydrogen. Teralta’s equipment works, but the project is dead. It wasn’t a hydrogen failure—it was an industrial fragility failure. And it shows just how thin the margin for error really is.

The McLeod Lake Indian Band and Mitsubishi’s MIXT Energy project was the most ambitious of all: $5 billion for a hydrogen and ammonia export complex on the Kerry Lake reserve. It had every buzzword—Indigenous ownership, green ammonia, Asia-Pacific markets, clean electricity—and none of the enabling infrastructure. It was supposed to start construction in 2024. As of March 2025, no permit applications, no EPC contracts, no feedstock agreements. Just an MoU and a concept drawing. The project is officially “paused.” The reasons are familiar: no electricity supply, no pipeline, no ammonia export terminal, and no buyers willing to lock in pricing for green ammonia that still costs 3× to 5× the fossil equivalent.

Shell Canada’s Aurora Hydrogen partnership in Port Moody was a demonstration-scale project for domestic use. It was going to use Aurora’s methane pyrolysis technology—microwave-driven, zero-carbon emissions, and promising hydrogen at 20–30% lower cost than electrolysis. It never broke ground. The FOIA documents list it as paused. Whether because of cost, regulatory inertia, or lack of offtakers, Shell’s silence tells the story. If a supermajor can’t justify a small clean hydrogen pilot in one of Canada’s greenest provinces, there’s your market signal.

TC Energy’s plan was to produce liquid hydrogen for export. The pre-feasibility study completed in early 2024. The result: production costs too high, offtake uncertainty too great, infrastructure risks unmanageable. The project was shelved. Liquid hydrogen requires cooling to –253°C, meaning energy losses of 30% just to make it storable. Add in electrolyzer losses of 30%, and your round-trip efficiency is below 25%. For what? To ship an unstable cryogenic liquid to a market that hasn’t committed to buying it? It was nonsense dressed up in PowerPoint, and the feasibility study proved it.

Kanata Clean’s blue hydrogen and ammonia project in Prince Rupert had big dreams and bigger hurdles. No natural gas supply. No CO₂ storage. No export terminal. And no way to move toxic ammonia overland without consultation with 26 First Nations and approval from Transport Canada. The company now says what it really needs is an “energy corridor”—a euphemism for a multibillion-dollar pipeline project with zero chance of approval in a 5-year horizon. Their CEO called it a “multi-party policy failure.” That’s not wrong. It’s just a very expensive realization to have after you’ve floated a few million dollars in concept drawings.

NorthRiver Midstream’s plan to produce blue hydrogen in Taylor for local use never left the study phase. Without a clear customer for hydrogen in northeastern B.C., the economics collapsed. Blue hydrogen depends on cheap gas and CO₂ storage. Even if the upstream gas is available, there’s no offtake for the H₂—no steel plant, no hydrogen-fueled transport corridor, no hydrogen-ready infrastructure. The project is on indefinite hold. The case study writes itself: even where natural gas is abundant, blue hydrogen isn’t a slam dunk without guaranteed industrial demand and long-term pricing support.

In total, that’s seven projects with combined aspirations of more than 1 million tonnes per year of hydrogen production, paused or canceled. Every project failed because it tried to leap directly into large-scale hydrogen for energy, either as export or as domestic fuel. None of them locked in demand. None of them built infrastructure. None of them secured firm offtake agreements. Every one of them depended on massive assumptions about price parity, policy alignment, and customer behavior. Every one of them failed those assumptions.

The remaining initiatives in B.C.—HTEC’s fueling network and FortisBC’s Hazer pilot—are still standing, but only just. HTEC’s network is expanding thanks to a $337 million federal loan, $133 million in provincial credits, and barely a few hundred kilograms per day in fuel sales. Hydrogen fueling stations cost over $2 million apiece. Each can dispense 1,000–2,000 kg/day, but actual demand is in the double digits. The utilization rate is under 10%. It only pencils out because of the carbon credit ecosystem and forward-looking public capital. It is infrastructure in search of a market.

FortisBC’s methane thermolysis pilot with Hazer Group is predatory delay. Turning natural gas into hydrogen and three times the mass of solid carbon waste has serious limits. It is intended to scale to 2,500 tonnes/year, which is a homeopathic quantity for any real use case, It’s supposedly for blending into gas lines, a dead end, or serving as a feedstock, where the volumes are far too low when a scaled ammonia plant requires hundreds of tons a day.

Globally, B.C. is not alone. Australia’s Port Pirie green hydrogen project was canceled by Trafigura after feasibility results. BP shelved its Teesside blue hydrogen project. The U.S. IRA has slowed project launches despite massive $3/kg production credits. Germany and Japan continue to sign MoUs and pilot deals, but few projects reach FID. The Hydrogen Council’s own data shows that of 1,000 projects announced globally, fewer than 4% have broken ground. The rest are vaporware. The problem isn’t that hydrogen is useless. It’s that hydrogen for energy is useless. Using electricity to make hydrogen to make electricity again is 3× less efficient than just using the electricity. Converting green hydrogen into ammonia, shipping it across the world, cracking it back into hydrogen, and feeding it to a fuel cell is a Rube Goldberg device powered by subsidies. The round-trip energy loss is 70% or more. You’d be better off mailing extension cords.

Where hydrogen does make sense is where we already use it: in refining, methanol, ammonia, and chemical production. That’s 90+% of global hydrogen consumption today. Thankfully refining, the biggest demand sector at 40% or so, is in structural decline so existing hydrogen manufacturing’s greenhouse gas emissions — in the same order of magnitude as all of aviation globally — are going to be declining regardless. Replace grey hydrogen in those processes with green or low-carbon hydrogen, and you cut emissions without changing the end market. That’s real decarbonization. That’s where hydrogen belongs.

Every dollar spent chasing hydrogen for transport or grid-scale energy is a dollar taken from where it could do actual good. Policymakers must end funding for hydrogen as an energy vector. No more hydrogen highway. No more heavy truck subsidies. No more province-backed ammonia exports with no port, no buyer, and no power supply. Every kilowatt-hour, every taxpayer dollar, every regulatory hour that is spent on hydrogen must go toward hydrogen for industrial feedstock decarbonization only. The rest is a distraction. B.C.’s biggest hydrogen projects are dead or paused. B.C.’s hydrogen dream was never viable. It was always theater. Time to bring down the curtain.