Featured Article

Hyundai’s hydrogen Hail Mary

Hydrogen is turning into automakers’ latest geopolitical pawn

Comment

Chemical formula for hydrogen is displayed on a Hyundai fuel filler door.
Image Credits: SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg / Getty Images

When was the last time you watched an automotive company wax poetic about diesel engine controllers for Class 8 trucks? Or a tech conference keynote that touts the benefits of oxygen enrichment in blast furnaces to make steel? Or how to burn low-sulfur bunker fuel in oceangoing container ships?

Probably never.

So why did Hyundai devote half its CES keynote to a technology that’s best suited to long-haul trucking, steelmaking and maritime shipping?

The simple answer is greenwashing. It’s true that Hyundai has invested in hydrogen fuel cells for decades, but it has also been one of the more successful legacy automakers at navigating the electric transition. It’s odd that a company with so much momentum on its side would throw a hydrogen Hail Mary.

But maybe Hyundai’s EV rollout isn’t going as planned. Maybe the vehicles aren’t as profitable as the company would like. Maybe the company is having a hard time securing batteries. Or maybe it realizes that over 90% of its sales are still powered by fossil fuels and that by EV market share, the company is lagging. It might be the world’s third largest automaker overall, but it’s only in eighth place when it comes to battery EVs.

Enter hydrogen, a sector with a green aura about it, a useful distraction from more polluting realities. And since meaningful progress is still a decade or more away, it’s hard to hold the company to its claims.

Yet the claims made onstage won’t be particularly impactful, even if Hyundai follows through. The company says it will produce 3 million tons of hydrogen for its steel mills by 2030. That will give Hyundai Steel the capacity to produce 60,000 metric tons of green steel, or 0.0025% of the subsidiary’s 24 million metric ton capacity. Hyundai also said it will use some hydrogen in drayage trucks at ports and factories, an odd choice given that drayage is one of the easiest forms of trucking to electrify with batteries.

If that wasn’t enough, Hyundai also says that it will generate it from biogas and waste plastic. Because economically splitting water is too easy?

The biogas would come from digesters containing bacteria that chomp on food and other organic waste (and landfills, presumably). The methane in the resulting mélange then has to be separated from the other resulting gases, and the hydrogen cracked off the methane molecules. Each step requires energy and drives up cost.

Chang Hwan Kim, head of battery and fuel cell development at Hyundai, didn’t detail how the company would strip hydrogen from methane, but the most widely used method is steam reformation, an energy-intensive process that produces about 9 kg of CO2 for every kilogram of H2, according to Argonne National Lab. Hyundai might call the scheme clean, but no one would call it green.

The hydrogen-from-plastic technique, which Hyundai said it has patented, is similarly complex. In it, plastic is melted and gasified so the hydrogen can be cracked off the gaseous hydrocarbons. Each step would be energy intensive, and the whole endeavor will produce numerous and probably unpredictable pollutants. If the process has any hope of being cleaner than simply burning diesel, it will have to scrub or capture those pollutants, adding more complexity and cost.

Together, waste-to-hydrogen and plastic-to-hydrogen have to be two of the most convoluted, energy-intensive ways to make the gas. They’re practically the chemical equivalent of Rube Goldberg machines. Until we see life cycle analyses detailing the climate and environmental impacts of these hydrogen production methods, they’re little more than fodder for splashy YouTube titles.

But greenwashing isn’t the only reason Hyundai has launched a hydrogen PR blitz.

Behind closed doors, Hyundai is almost certainly worried about China’s stranglehold on the lithium-ion battery supply chain. Though South Korean companies are major manufacturers, Chinese companies dominate the markets for many components, including cobalt, graphite and lithium itself. Hyundai is dependent on Korean battery giants who themselves are at the mercy of Chinese suppliers. (Fuel cells also require expensive metals like platinum, but Hyundai has said it’s made progress reducing the amount required.)

On the other side of the equation, Korean automakers received an unwelcome surprise when the Inflation Reduction Act required certain levels of American content and assembly to qualify for EV rebates. Suddenly, Hyundai’s Ioniq 5 and Ioniq 6 became a lot more expensive relative to the competition.

Squeezed between China and the U.S. on EVs, Hyundai would no doubt like to free itself from geopolitics of critical minerals, but it knows it can’t go running back to fossil fuels, either. Jaehoon Chang, Hyundai’s CEO, said as much: “Hydrogen is fair. Hydrogen ensures global fairness through its high accessibility. It dissolves the divisions through the countries, resolves the energy imbalance caused by geographical disparities.” (I probably don’t have to point out that Chang’s plan for energy freedom relies heavily on one particular South Korean company’s fuel cells and electrolyzers.)

It’s not hard to see why Hyundai executives view the world through a geopolitical lens: For decades, the company has felt pressure from myriad stakeholders, like from OPEC, from countries anxious to tackle climate change, and now from the great powers struggling for control over the lithium-ion battery supply chain. For all I know, Hyundai execs might find hydrogen to be a useful delay tactic, stalling the decarbonization of their fleet, while also thinking that it could be their geopolitical trump card when the world finally phases out fossil fuels. To those execs, I say good luck. Geopolitical machinations don’t always work out as planned.
Read more about CES 2024 on TechCrunch

More TechCrunch

Strava announced a slew of features, including AI to weed out leaderboard cheats, a new ‘family’ subscription plan, dark mode and more.

Strava taps AI to weed out leaderboard cheats; unveils ‘family’ plan, dark mode and more

We all fall down sometimes. Astronauts are no exception. You need to be in peak physical condition for space travel, but bulky space suits and lower gravity levels can be…

Astronauts fall over. Robotic limbs can help them back up.

Microsoft will launch its custom Cobalt 100 chips to customers as a public preview at its Build conference next week, TechCrunch has learned. In an analyst briefing ahead of Build,…

Microsoft’s custom Cobalt chips will come to Azure next week

What a wild week for transportation news! It was a smorgasbord of news that seemed to touch every sector and theme in transportation.

Tesla keeps cutting jobs and the feds probe Waymo

Sony Music Group has sent letters to more than 700 tech companies and music streaming services to warn them not to use its music to train AI without explicit permission.…

Sony Music warns tech companies over ‘unauthorized’ use of its content to train AI

Winston Chi, Butter’s founder and CEO, told TechCrunch that “most parties, including our investors and us, are making money” from the exit.

GrubMarket buys Butter to give its food distribution tech an AI boost

The investor lawsuit is related to Bolt securing a $30 million personal loan to Ryan Breslow, which was later defaulted on.

Bolt founder Ryan Beslow wants to settle an investor lawsuit by returning $37 million worth of shares

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, launched an enterprise version of the prominent social network in 2015. It always seemed like a stretch for a company built on a consumer…

With the end of Workplace, it’s fair to wonder if Meta was ever serious about the enterprise

X, formerly Twitter, turned TweetDeck into X Pro and pushed it behind a paywall. But there is a new column-based social media tool in the town, and it’s from Instagram…

Meta Threads is testing pinned columns on the web, similar to the old TweetDeck

As part of 2024’s Accessibility Awareness Day, Google is showing off some updates to Android that should be useful to folks with mobility or vision impairments. Project Gameface allows gamers…

Google expands hands-free and eyes-free interfaces on Android

A hacker listed the data allegedly breached from Samco on a known cybercrime forum.

Hacker claims theft of India’s Samco account data

A top European privacy watchdog is investigating following the recent breaches of Dell customers’ personal information, TechCrunch has learned.  Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) deputy commissioner Graham Doyle confirmed to…

Ireland privacy watchdog confirms Dell data breach investigation

Ampere and Qualcomm aren’t the most obvious of partners. Both, after all, offer Arm-based chips for running data center servers (though Qualcomm’s largest market remains mobile). But as the two…

Ampere teams up with Qualcomm to launch an Arm-based AI server

At Google’s I/O developer conference, the company made its case to developers – and to some extent, consumers –  why its bets on AI are ahead of rivals. At the…

Google I/O was an AI evolution, not a revolution

TechCrunch Disrupt has always been the ultimate convergence point for all things startup and tech. In the bustling world of innovation, it serves as the “big top” tent, where entrepreneurs,…

Meet the Magnificent Six: A tour of the stages at Disrupt 2024

There’s apparently a lot of demand for an on-demand handyperson. Khosla Ventures and Pear VC have just tripled down on their investment in Honey Homes, which offers up a dedicated…

Khosla Ventures, Pear VC triple down on Honey Homes, a smart way to hire a handyman

TikTok is testing the ability for users to upload 60-minute videos, the company confirmed to TechCrunch on Thursday. The feature is available to a limited group of users in select…

TikTok tests 60-minute video uploads as it continues to take on YouTube

Flock Safety is a multibillion-dollar startup that’s got eyes everywhere. As of Wednesday, with the company’s new Solar Condor cameras, those eyes are solar-powered and using wireless 5G networks to…

Flock Safety’s solar-powered cameras could make surveillance more widespread

Since he was very young, Bar Mor knew that he would inevitably do something with real estate. His family was involved in all types of real estate projects, from ground-up…

Agora raises $34M Series B to keep building the Carta for real estate

Poshmark, the social commerce site that lets people buy and sell new and used items to each other, launched a paid marketing tool on Thursday, giving sellers the ability to…

Poshmark’s ‘Promoted Closet’ tool lets sellers boost all their listings at once

Google is launching a Gemini add-on for educational institutes through Google Workspace.

Google adds Gemini to its Education suite

More money for the generative AI boom: Y Combinator-backed developer infrastructure startup Recall.ai announced Thursday it has raised a $10 million Series A funding round, bringing its total raised to over…

YC-backed Recall.ai gets $10M Series A to help companies use virtual meeting data

Engineers Adam Keating and Jeremy Andrews were tired of using spreadsheets and screenshots to collab with teammates — so they launched a startup, CoLab, to build a better way. The…

CoLab’s collaborative tools for engineers line up $21M in new funding

Reddit announced on Wednesday that it is reintroducing its awards system after shutting down the program last year. The company said that most of the mechanisms related to awards will…

Reddit reintroduces its awards system

Sigma Computing, a startup building a range of data analytics and business intelligence tools, has raised $200 million in a fresh VC round.

Sigma is building a suite of collaborative data analytics tools

European Union enforcers of the bloc’s online governance regime, the Digital Services Act (DSA), said Thursday they’re closely monitoring disinformation campaigns on the Elon Musk-owned social network X (formerly Twitter)…

EU ‘closely’ monitoring X in wake of Fico shooting as DSA disinfo probe rumbles on

Wind is the largest source of renewable energy in the U.S., according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, but wind farms come with an environmental cost as wind turbines can…

Spoor uses AI to save birds from wind turbines

The key to taking on legacy players in the financial technology industry may be to go where they have not gone before. That’s what Chicago-based Aeropay is doing. The provider…

Cannabis industry and gaming payments startup Aeropay is now offering an alternative to Mastercard and Visa

Facebook and Instagram are under formal investigation in the European Union over child protection concerns, the Commission announced Thursday. The proceedings follow a raft of requests for information to parent…

EU opens child safety probes of Facebook and Instagram, citing addictive design concerns

Bedrock Materials is developing a new type of sodium-ion battery, which promises to be dramatically cheaper than lithium-ion.

Forget EVs: Why Bedrock Materials is targeting gas-powered cars for its first sodium-ion batteries