Green Hydrogen For Energy Was A Story We Told Ourselves

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Bruno Latour once said technology doesn’t succeed because it works. It succeeds because enough people act like it does. For nearly a decade, that’s exactly what happened with green hydrogen as an energy carrier. The story was so compelling, the coalition so wide, the urgency so real, that for a time, it barely mattered that the physics didn’t cooperate. Now, in 2025, the act is ending. Major energy firms are quietly walking away. Government strategies are being rewritten. Even the loudest champions of hydrogen-fueled futures have stopped performing certainty. And Latour would recognize every step of this collapse.

Actor-Network Theory, Latour’s signature contribution to science and technology studies, doesn’t look for simple causal chains. It doesn’t ask whether a technology is good or bad, efficient or wasteful. Instead, it traces how coalitions of people, tools, policies, expectations, and diagrams—actors, both human and non-human—come together to make something seem real, viable, and inevitable. When that network holds, the object becomes “blackboxed.” Its underlying complexity is hidden. Everyone just uses it, funds it, believes in it. When the network fails, the box opens. The myths spill out.

One well-known example is the case of the pasteurization of milk in France, which Latour analyzed in his book The Pasteurization of France. He showed how Louis Pasteur’s scientific work succeeded not merely because of laboratory discoveries, but because it aligned with the goals of public health officials, military hygienists, farmers, politicians, and media outlets. Pasteur became a central actor in a broad network that collectively transformed microbial theory into national infrastructure. The bacteria weren’t defeated by science alone, they were defeated by a network that enrolled everything from hospitals to dairies into a shared protocol of cleanliness and control.

Another example, widely analyzed through an ANT lens by others, is the adoption of electronic medical records (EMRs) in healthcare systems, something I was involved in professionally for a decade. In countries where EMRs failed to take hold, it wasn’t due to poor software design alone, it was due to a failure to align physicians, hospitals, insurers, IT departments, and regulatory frameworks into a coherent network. The technology, in effect, had no actors willing to perform it into widespread use. In contrast, in places where EMRs succeeded (like Estonia or parts of Scandinavia), the network included strong political will, patient buy-in, standardized interfaces, and legal frameworks that made digital records the obligatory passage point for healthcare interactions.

Green hydrogen’s rise between 2015 and 2022 was a textbook case of such network formation. It began with climate targets that demanded something—anything—that could decarbonize hard-to-electrify sectors. Industrial heat, long-haul transport, seasonal storage, aviation. Each problem became an actor in need of a solution. Hydrogen, long the bridesmaid of energy debates after the early 2000s hype cycle, fit the bill. Governments began publishing hydrogen strategies with cost targets and gigawatt dreams. Electrolyzer firms received infusions of capital. Startups promised hydrogen-powered trucks, ships, planes, even entire economies. Reports from respected agencies forecast dramatic cost declines. Roadmaps used 2030 as a kind of magical threshold, just far enough away to absorb the uncertainties. The European Commission, the Japanese government, the Australians and Koreans, as well as Californians, all signed on.

At the same time, oil majors saw in hydrogen a rare opportunity to stay relevant. Shell, BP, TotalEnergies, and others joined industry alliances and launched pilot projects. They saw a chance to repurpose gas infrastructure, rebrand fossil assets, and secure public subsidies in the name of climate progress. The Hydrogen Council, launched at Davos in 2017, became the face of this alignment. A forum where oil CEOs, automakers, and government ministers could all agree that hydrogen was the path forward. That unanimity wasn’t evidence of inevitability. It was evidence of enrollment.

Meanwhile, a host of non-human actors reinforced the narrative. Electrolyzer prototypes at trade shows. Shiny infographics showing hydrogen pipelines spanning continents. Funding mechanisms with lofty acronyms. Cost curves pointing downward with the confidence of gravity. Policy documents functioned like scripts in a play. If you were a policymaker, you had to say the lines. If you were a company, you had to audition for funding. If you were a journalist, you had to report the boom. By 2020, green hydrogen was not just a possibility. It had become an expectation. A technology made real through repetition.

And then, the disarticulation began. Not all at once, and not dramatically. That’s not how these networks unravel. Instead, they fray. BP quietly dissolved its hydrogen mobility unit. No press release, just a subtle change in direction. Airbus delayed its hydrogen aircraft program, likely permanently. The math didn’t work. The infrastructure didn’t exist. British Columbia, which had once flirted with seven major green hydrogen energy projects, walked away from all of them. In Australia, the government shifted from dreams of exporting green hydrogen to Japan and Korea to a more sober focus on domestic industrial use—steel, ammonia, chemicals. In Norway, the showcase hydrogen ferry ended up emitting more CO₂ than the diesel vessel it was meant to replace. The maritime pivot stayed for now, but the broader transportation ambitions faded.

Then came the signal moves in Europe and the United States. In France and Germany, top-level economic advisory bodies issued a joint recommendation: stop funding hydrogen in road transport. Focus on battery-electric trucks instead. The advice wasn’t controversial in economic circles. It just punctured the public narrative. In the United States, the Department of Energy under the Trump administration began considering cuts to four of the seven federally supported hydrogen hubs, including the one in California, which had been focused on hydrogen for transportation. Whether motivated by ideology or economic realism, the effect was the same: another leg of the hydrogen-for-energy stool kicked out.

Latour would not be surprised. These weren’t technical failures, strictly speaking. Electrolyzers still electrolyze. Pipelines still transport. Fuel cells still function. What changed was the willingness of actors to keep performing the alignment. When the financial returns didn’t arrive, when the infrastructure costs mounted, when alternative technologies outpaced hydrogen on key metrics, the incentive to stay in character disappeared. The performance unraveled.

And with it, the black box opened. Inside was a technology that made sense for some things—fertilizer production, chemical feedstocks, methanol synthesis—but not for many of the things it had been promised to revolutionize. The round-trip efficiency remained poor. The cost per kilogram remained stubbornly high. The competition, particularly from electrification, kept advancing. Every government that pulled back, every company that shifted focus, every analyst who updated projections was part of the same Latourian process. They stopped reinforcing the illusion. They exited the network.

What remains is a smaller, more stable version of the hydrogen story. Green hydrogen is still useful, but it is not universal. It is not the Swiss Army knife of decarbonization. It is a niche tool, appropriate for specific applications where no better alternative exists. Industrial use, not energy fantasy. The actor-network will persist in that narrower form. Fewer players, fewer speeches, fewer renderings of hydrogen planes and trucks. More spreadsheets. More quiet deployments. Less theater.

There’s a lesson here, and it’s not that hydrogen is bad or that its supporters were wrong. It’s that techno-economic narratives are not objective truths waiting to be discovered. They are constructed, maintained, and occasionally dismantled by networks of aligned actors. When everyone agrees, it’s often because disagreement has been designed out. And when the story collapses, it does so not with a bang but with a quiet shifting of feet, a few missing names on the conference agenda, a line item dropped from the budget.

Green hydrogen for energy was a compelling narrative. It enrolled resources, focused attention, and gave policymakers a sense of direction. But it wasn’t grounded in competitive fundamentals. It was performed into existence, and it’s now being performed back out. Not because it never had value, but because the value was always contingent on everyone believing at once.

For half a decade I’ve been one of the people on the wrong side of the narrative, along with people like BNEF founder Michael Liebreich, chemical engineer Paul Martin, road decarbonization expert David Cebon and many others that I know. We’ve been trying to tell people what was obvious to us because we looked at the reality, not just the story. But Latourian networks are self-healing. Until they aren’t.

The network is no longer holding. The actors are stepping away. And as Latour would remind us, that’s when you see what was keeping the whole thing alive.