"The Future of Hydrogen: Japan's Quest for a Sustainable Energy Solution"

This morning, I woke up around 5 am IST and took a walk to the local road with a cup of tea. I witnessed some electric vehicles that reminded me of a story about low or zero emission and green transport that I had read in a recent newspaper. I suddenly turned back home and looked for some old newspapers. The center of focus is green transport, and in reference to this, I am conducting a study on green hydrogen, natural hydrogen, and blue hydrogen.

Hydrogen is seen as the fuel of the future, one that can decarbonize the world economy and mitigate global warming if harvested in a sustainable manner. Natural hydrogen may provide a clean and potentially low-cost fuel to satisfy the world's energy needs with a considerable reduction in carbon emissions, and it is likely abundant in India too. However, the fuel is currently much costlier compared to electric vehicles, around 20-30% more expensive right now.

Hydrogen is mostly manufactured from natural gas through an energy-intensive and polluting process. Green hydrogen, made with renewable electricity, is still prohibitively expensive and would require vast amounts of wind and solar power to work out at scale. Natural hydrogen occurs as free gas in geology, produced by processes such as serpentinization, radiolysis of water by radioactive rocks, and from organic matter in depth.

While the presence of natural hydrogen has been known for decades, with discoveries of its presence in gas seeps, volcanic outgassing, and even in mine workings being well-documented decades ago, it was viewed as a geological curiosity. The majority of scientific opinion at the time proposed that hydrogen's small size and extreme reactivity would hinder the formation of substantial underground deposits.

Now, geological environments favourable to natural hydrogen generation and accumulation are being recognized worldwide. Although the total size of worldwide natural gas hydrogen reserves is still poorly known due to a lack of concentrated exploration, recent discoveries and current research indicate considerable potential. In India, natural hydrogen potential is mostly untapped but promising due to the existence of favourable geological structures like hard rock formations and basaltic assemblages.

Recent finds elsewhere in the world indicate the scale of these resources; hundreds of hydrogen seeps have been catalogued globally in various countries, including Australia, the US, Spain, France, and Canada. There could be sufficient hydrogen to supply the growing world demand for thousands of years, based on a model run by the US Geological Survey that was unveiled in October 2022 at the GSA meeting.

Scientists venturing into abandoned mines in France discovered naturally occurring hydrogen in May 2023, and further excavation in March 2025 in the adjacent Moselle region yielded more reserves. Together, the deposits are estimated to be about 92 million tons, worth about $92 billion, and about half of the current global hydrogen production.

The promise of so much renewable fuel sitting undiscovered beneath the surface has sparked a veritable gold rush. By the end of 2023, 40 companies, including start-ups, were searching for its deposits around the world, up from just 10 in 2020, according to a research firm, Rystad Energy. They are hunting for natural hydrogen worldwide. The American Association of Petroleum Geologists has founded its first natural hydrogen committee. It is attracting investors like Amazon Climate Fund and Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy Ventures, which is also investing in other natural hydrogen companies.

Japan is getting ready to make history by becoming the first country to use nuclear reactor heat for large-scale hydrogen production. This bold move comes from a partnership between the Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI). Together, they’re working on a ground-breaking project that uses high-temperature gas-cooled reactors (HTGRs) and the iodine-sulfur (IS) thermochemical process to produce hydrogen without spewing out carbon—an exciting milestone in the push for serious industrial decarbonization.

The JAEA and MHI partnership is more than a big science project—it’s a bold vision of what’s possible when you fuse innovation, energy independence, and environmental responsibility. If successful, this effort won’t just help power Japan’s future—it might just help lead the world there too.

In Japan's vision for 2050, a long queue of automobiles emits nothing but water vapor, thanks to hydrogen fuel cells. This is a vision shared by Japan’s government and its world-leading auto industry, which are together making a huge bet that hydrogen—not batteries—will provide power for the emission-free cars of the future.

Entrepreneurs and researchers worldwide are pursuing hydrogen. An industry-government collaboration in California targets 1 million hydrogen-powered vehicles by 2030. Anita Sengupta, co-founder of US aviation start-up Airspace Experience Technologies, sees hydrogen fuel cells as a viable option for longer-range commercial jets by 2050.

However, the big bottleneck is carbon capture and storage. “It’s not that it can’t be done. It’s the economics,” says Takeo Kikkawa, professor of management at the Tokyo University of Science.

The hydrogen vision published by Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry is expansive. It starts with brown coal in Australia, which will be gasified to produce low-cost hydrogen, with the carbon captured and stored underground. The hydrogen will then be shipped to Japan on vast tankers and distributed to a nationwide network of fuelling stations. Finally, it will be pumped into cars, buses, and trucks, all equipped with affordable fuel cells to convert the hydrogen into electricity to power their wheels. If successful, hydrogen offers a way to fully decarbonize Japan's transport sector, using fuel from a reliable strategic ally, while providing the automotive industry with a fresh source of competitive advantage over international rivals.

However, this visionary infrastructure does not yet exist. "One can't forecast whether there'll be a hydrogen society by 2050. It's in the realm of scenario planning," says Tetsuya Kaneko, a senior consultant on energy issues at Nomura Research Institute. "From a technological perspective, the biggest issue is large-scale provision of hydrogen."

Currently, hydrogen is mainly produced as a by-product in the chemical industry, during processes that emit carbon dioxide. It can also be produced by electrolysis from water, but if fossil fuels were burned to provide the electricity, this is not carbon-free either. The plan to import hydrogen from Australia is still in the pilot phase. The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry's roadmap calls for a hydrogen supply cost of ¥30 per normal cubic meter by 2030, down from a cost of several hundred yen during the pilot coal-to-hydrogen project.

"The big bottleneck is carbon capture and storage," says Takeo Kikkawa, professor of management at the Tokyo University of Science. "It's not that it can't be done. It's the economics." Getting the hydrogen to Japan still requires vehicles and fueling stations, and it's hard to justify building one until the other is in place.

The roadmap demands a fall in the price premium for fuel cell vehicles over hybrid vehicles from ¥3 million ($27,690) today to ¥0.7 million by 2025. It sets a target of 200,000 fuel cell vehicles on the road by 2025 and 800,000 by 2030, fuelled from a network of 900 filling stations, up around nine-fold from today. Analysts remain politely sceptical given the cost challenges and the lack of infrastructure. Toyota, one of the biggest backers of hydrogen, has recently stepped up its investment in battery-powered vehicles.

Despite this, Japan is unlikely to give up easily on the hydrogen dream. "I think Japan is the most advanced nation in the world for hydrogen," said Mr. Kaneko. "If you ask why, it's because Japan has so few other options to reduce its carbon emissions." Japan's small, mountainous, and densely populated islands are ill-suited to large-scale production of renewable electricity, and in the aftermath of the meltdowns at Fukushima Daiichi in 2011, the country has little appetite for nuclear power. If those constraints remain, some form of carbon-free import is all that is left.

In the gold rush for hydrogen, Japan is doing its best and emerging as a main player in hydrogen abstraction and production. However, the hydrogen dream is still too costly to implement on the road.