BP’s Exit Is Part Of A Broader Collapse In Hydrogen For Transportation Among Majors

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BP quietly dissolved its low-carbon mobility team recently, and almost no one noticed. No flashy press release. No somber CEO video explaining a pivot to shareholder value. Just an internal memo, a few reassigned employees, and the slow realization that the company was backing away from its hydrogen transport dreams. This wasn’t a pivot. It was a retreat under cover of darkness.

To anyone still clinging to the idea that hydrogen has a future in transportation, this should be a sobering moment. BP wasn’t exactly a first mover in the hydrogen space. It dabbled, announced partnerships, promised 25 hydrogen refueling stations for trucks by 2030, joined the usual suspects in hydrogen corridors and mobility alliances. But when it came time to put real money behind those promises, the enthusiasm ran out faster than a Mirai’s tank on a February morning. The hydrogen mobility team shrank from 30 people to 9 before getting dissolved entirely. The internal quote that surfaced said the quiet part out loud: “We need to revert to the old BP — more oil and gas — and old-fashioned retail — petrol, diesel.” Translation: the hydrogen future is not profitable, not scalable, and no longer interesting.

This isn’t just about BP. Shell has also thrown in the towel, only a little more dramatically. The same company that once plastered its brand across hydrogen stations in California, partnered with Toyota and Honda to evangelize fuel-cell cars, and promised a cleaner mobility future for everyone with a driveway and a desire to be an early adopter, finally read the spreadsheet. In 2023, Shell disbanded its hydrogen light mobility unit. In 2024, it closed all of its hydrogen stations in California. Not mothballed. Not paused. Shut down. Permanently. The official excuse? Supply chain issues and external factors. The real reason? There’s no business model here.

The simple truth is that light-duty hydrogen transportation has always been a fantasy wrapped in a grant application. Fuel cell vehicles are expensive to build, expensive to refuel, and operate in a fueling ecosystem that might charitably be called patchy and more accurately described as “haunted wasteland with one open pump between Los Angeles and San Francisco.” The California experiment, once a shining beacon of hydrogen hype, has become a cautionary tale about what happens when infrastructure precedes demand and demand never materializes. Shell, to its credit, cut its losses.

Chevron is still playing the game, albeit cautiously. It didn’t jump into hydrogen until 2021. Now it’s building out 30 stations in California with Iwatani, a Japanese hydrogen supplier with actual technical chops. Chevron’s strategy is deeply tethered to California’s subsidy machine. The state pays to build the stations, Chevron gets to look innovative without taking on much risk, and everyone plays along as if hydrogen passenger cars are still coming. Spoiler: they’re not.

Chevron’s hydrogen bet isn’t really about cars anyway. Like everyone else, it’s pivoting to the newest niche that still sounds futuristic enough to sell to investors: heavy-duty trucking. The problem, as always, is physics. Battery-electric trucks are already on the road, already hauling freight, and already undercutting hydrogen on operating costs. You don’t need to invent a new fueling infrastructure if you already have a grid and wires. The Tesla Semi, which was once dismissed as vaporware, is now hauling loads across state lines. In contrast, hydrogen trucking is still hosting ribbon-cutting ceremonies for refueling stations and pretending that the economics will work out eventually. They won’t.

TotalEnergies is the last true believer in this space. The French major is aggressively building hydrogen infrastructure in Europe through its joint venture with Air Liquide. They’re planning more than 100 hydrogen stations for trucks, focusing on freight corridors and logistics hubs. On paper, it looks strategic. On the ground, it looks like another overbuilt solution waiting for vehicles that will never roll up. The EU loves to fund these corridor projects, and TotalEnergies loves to cash the checks. But the fundamentals haven’t changed. Hydrogen is still less efficient, more expensive, and harder to scale than battery-electric alternatives.

TotalEnergies also dabbles in maritime shipping fuels, especially ammonia. Ammonia is toxic, corrosive, and carries less energy per unit volume than methanol or diesel. Bunkering it requires specialized infrastructure and additional training for crews. Any spill becomes an emergency. The best case scenario is that ammonia gets used in a handful of niche shipping applications where no other fuel is viable. The worst case is that it becomes another blind alley for capital investment, tied up in subsidies and regulatory loopholes instead of actual demand.

ExxonMobil has taken a different path. It’s not building hydrogen stations, not rolling out trucks, not investing in transport infrastructure at all. Instead, it’s going all-in on hydrogen production. Baytown, Texas, is the site of what Exxon claims will be the world’s largest blue hydrogen facility. Blue hydrogen, for the uninitiated, is just fossil hydrogen with a layer of carbon capture frosting on top. Exxon plans to produce hydrogen at scale for industrial customers, which is reasonable, and maybe someday sell it into synthetic fuel markets. It has a partnership with Porsche for synthetic gasoline. It’s talking about low-carbon aviation fuels. But it’s not touching hydrogen mobility with a ten-foot pole. That, at least, is economically honest.

Equinor followed a similar trajectory. It had grand plans for a hydrogen pipeline from Norway to Germany. Billions in investment, hydrogen-ready gas infrastructure, CCS to clean it up — and then it quietly shelved the whole thing in 2024. Why? Nobody on the other end wanted to buy the hydrogen. Demand wasn’t real. Commitments weren’t signed. The math didn’t work. Now Equinor is focusing on smaller regional hubs and keeping its hydrogen ambitions tied to industrial decarbonization and maybe a little shipping. But it’s not rolling out refueling stations, it’s not buying fuel-cell trucks, and it’s not pretending hydrogen is a transportation fuel for this decade.

When the oil majors start pulling back from hydrogen transport, it’s not because they lack capital. It’s because they’ve finally done the math. Light-duty hydrogen was always dead on arrival. Heavy-duty hydrogen is just the next transportation market that’s going to be crushed by cheap batteries. Shipping and aviation might tolerate hydrogen-derived fuels at the margins, but the economics will never rival direct electrification or drop-in biofuels. The infrastructure costs are astronomical, the energy losses are unacceptable, and the operational complexity is a nightmare. Hydrogen for transport is a distraction, not a solution.

This isn’t a case of market immaturity. It’s not that the technology needs more time. We’ve had hydrogen vehicles on the road for over two decades. The infrastructure has been piloted, the grants have been written, the alliances have been formed. And still, no one wants the product. Hydrogen doesn’t have a scaling problem. It has a fundamental viability problem.

The oil majors aren’t stupid. They know how to read a balance sheet. They’ve played along with the hydrogen narrative because it kept investors happy and politicians off their backs. But now the charade is wearing thin. BP dissolved its hydrogen mobility team and didn’t even bother issuing a press release. Shell shut down its California stations and blamed the supply chain. Chevron is clinging to California subsidies. TotalEnergies is building corridors no one drives. ExxonMobil and Equinor are standing off to the side, producing hydrogen and waiting to see if anyone actually shows up to buy it.

This isn’t strategy. It’s inertia. And it’s slowly giving way to reality. The only rational play left is to stop pretending. Low-carbon hydrogen is absolutely required to displace gray and black hydrogen as an industrial feedstock for refining oil and making ammonia for fertilizers and mining explosives. It might have a role in green steel, although steel majors keep walking away from it because hydrogen didn’t get cheap. But as a transportation fuel? It’s over. The oil majors know it. The smart money knows it. The only people still pretending are the ones with grant deadlines to meet.