Energy
How AI Could Accelerate Green Hydrogen Production
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Green hydrogen is the missing keystone of a fossil-fuel-free future. The reason is that electricity alone cannot fully decarbonize industries that depend on fuels and chemical feedstocks. This includes gigantic sectors of the economy, like heavy-duty trucking, shipping, air travel, production of chemicals, steel-making and other metallurgy, mining, etc.
For all of these activities, green hydrogen directly, or transformed into ammonia or renewable fuels, can help power activities that require liquid fuel, but without depending on fossil fuel resources.
The potential of this technology was recently analyzed in a study by researchers at McGill University (Canada) and the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Bhopal (India). In it, they discuss the various possible sources of green hydrogen, as well as the electrochemical methods that can be used to create sustainable liquid fuels and other hydrocarbon products.
They published their findings in Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews1, under the title “Electrochemical energy technologies: Current progress and future opportunities for sustainable energy transitions”.
Why Gaseous And Liquid Fuels Matter
The key reason for pursuing decarbonization is climate change, fueled by the rise in greenhouse gas emissions, of which the most important is CO2, followed by methane (CH4).
“Failure to reverse negative climate change poses risks related to economic instability, extreme weather events, and growing social inequalities ”
As a result, reforming our fossil-fuel-based energy system is crucial. Unfortunately, this is far from done, even with the recent rise in renewables, as this has mostly affected only electricity production. But the bulk of mankind’s primary energy consumption is not using electricity. Instead, this energy consumption is used for heating, industrial production, shipping, flying, trucking, etc. As a result, the immense majority of energy sources are still fossil fuels, with coal, oil, and gas making up more than 80% of global energy sources.
Source IEA
Decarbonizing these activities can be difficult for a few reasons:
- Existing systems cannot run on electricity, and it will take at best multiple decades to replace the existing fleet of trucks, ships, planes, factories, foundries, etc, with electrified alternatives.
- Many of these systems simply do not have an electric alternative to liquid fuel and combustion to keep performing efficiently enough.
- Green fuel alternatives have so far been too expensive to economically compete with fossil fuels.
So there is a need for green hydrocarbons, molecules mainly made of carbon and hydrogen atoms, that are chemically identical to fossil fuels, allowing for the existing energy, logistical, and industrial facilities to be decarbonized without having to quickly electrify, a task that, depending on the case, can be very difficult (trucking, heating) to outright impossible (air transport).
Moving To A Sustainable Energy System
The Importance Of Green Hydrogen
Hydrogen is an abundant element, especially in the form of water (H2O), but cannot be found in its pure form (H2) in nature. So, to be used for the production of green hydrogen, it first needs to be produced, which consumes energy.
For hydrogen to contribute meaningfully to decarbonization, its production must also have a low carbon footprint. Renewable electricity-powered electrolysis is the most familiar pathway, while emerging techniques could also extract hydrogen from biomass-derived molecules at substantially lower voltages.
When using electricity to produce hydrogen to make useful green hydrocarbons, such methods are generally referred to as “Power-to-X”, where “X” can be replaced by gas, oil, or any other chemical, where electrochemical conversion turns pure hydrogen and CO2 or other carbon source into useful, easy-to-use & store products.
An additional advantage of converting hydrogen into other compounds is that hydrogen is notoriously hard to store and transport. Methane or liquid fuels are by comparison a lot easier.
Lastly, the intermittent nature of renewable electricity production means that at times, energy production is higher than demand, and production of hydrogen can absorb such a surplus that is for now mostly wasted.
“Methanol produced by electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide can be an eco-friendly energy carrier with higher energy density compared to hydrogen reducing the cost and challenges such as storage and transportation. Methane can be produced from electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide and it can be stored in existing natural gas pipelines”
The Many Paths To Sustainable Fuels
The study identifies no less than 16 different value-added chemicals that can be made through the use of green hydrogen, such as carbon monoxide (major component of syngas), formic acid, methanol, methane, ethanol, ethylene, and propanol. In many cases, this is a multi-step process with equally useful chemical intermediary products.
Another possibility for green hydrogen from an electrolyzer is hydrogen produced from biomass. Initially, some strategies using bacterial decomposition have been pursued, but yields proved too low.
A new promising technology is the anodic generation of hydrogen directly from biomass platform molecules. This can be done at a significantly lower voltage than the usual techniques based on oxygen evolution reactions (OER).
Copper-based catalysts are predominantly used for this method, but still need improvement to avoid deactivation of the catalyst. Adding other metals or elements, or adding advanced nanostructure to the bulk copper can improve performance radically.
AI, Electrolyzers, And Hydrogen
Electrolyzers, to break down water into hydrogen or to process biomass into more useful compounds, are a promising field for green energy and hydrogen production.
For now, the improvement of catalysts for this process has been mostly achieved by trying many new combinations of different elements, types of catalysts, nanostructure, and charge transfers. This, however, creates an almost infinite number of combinations, with no simple mathematical model to predict how a new catalyst design will behave in the real world.
AI could help solve this issue, as it is already used this way in other fields of green energy. For example, in the development of photovoltaic devices, AI has been utilized to predict the correct band gaps and defect energies in the optoelectronic materials, which helps to accelerate the discovery of new materials.
Similarly, AI has been successful in the discovery of new redox electrolytes for redox flow batteries through a thorough sampling of the large chemical space for active organic molecules to identify suitable electrolytes, or for novel electrode materials for solid-state Na-ion and Li-ion batteries.
For electrochemical energy technologies, AI could make a complex picture simpler to handle for researchers.
“AI can provide the information on the surface activity, location of active sites on the surface with bond distances, binding energies of the reactants, products and intermediate species of the electrochemical reactions based on the quality of the data used for training the AI models”
This method can remove a lot of guesswork and quickly provide new and more promising candidate materials that can then be tested in labs.
Another usage of AI is to design the process so that, in addition to green hydrogen, it also provides electrochemical valorization of biomass, resulting in useful acids, aldehydes, furans, and alcohols.
“Robust AI models can be employed on both experimental and simulation data to capture the structural-property relationships for the rational design of the electrochemical reaction set up to attain good selectivity, control, and high Faradaic efficiency of the desired products.”
Reaching Commercialization Is Never Easy
While promising and likely to become more profitable and useful thanks to AI, electrochemical production of hydrogen by electrolyzers, from water or from biomass, is still to be achieved at scale at a very low price per kilo. Only then will it efficiently compete with fossil fuels.
Further deployments of this technology are needed, and not just improvement of the promising concepts in labs.
Durability, selectivity, current density, and pilot-scale economics will all need to be improved to make the lab-scale promising method into something that can be deployed in the terawatt-scale required to start significantly displacing coal, gas, and oil from the global energy systems.
It is nevertheless likely coming soon, especially as improving the economics of electrolyzers and green fuels is likely somewhat easier than somehow managing the electrification of most of the technologies and infrastructures built by modern civilization in the past 100 years.
For investors, many of the electrochemical pathways discussed above remain too early-stage to provide direct public-market exposure. A more practical approach is to look at companies already commercializing the underlying infrastructure needed to produce and use hydrogen at scale. One of the more established publicly traded options is Bloom Energy (BE ), whose solid-oxide electrolyzer and fuel-cell technologies provide exposure to the broader buildout of electrochemical energy systems.
Investing In Renewable Fuels
Bloom Energy
BE Price Chart
Bloom Energy is a global leader in electrolyzer technology and fuel cells.
Currently, the main market for the company has been in fuel cells that transform fuel into high-efficiency electricity without combustion, producing high-temperature air and a high-concentration CO2 stream. The design is inherently modular, with more power just requiring more cells, up to the megawatt scale.
Source: Bloom Energy
From 2024 to today, Bloom Energy has been refocusing from its initial market of hospitals, remote sites, and backup power generation to data centers, leading to a massive boom in both sales and its stock price.
This is also helped by the turn of AI data centers to full DC architecture (instead of the current AC/DC mix), saving space and equipment for AI data center infrastructure.
Bloom started a partnership to combine its fuel cell technology with carbon capture technology, so that the produced energy is essentially carbon neutral even when it’s powered by natural gas. And since 2022, the company has started to produce high-efficiency hydrogen solid-oxide electrolyzers.
This gives Bloom relevant expertise in scaling electrochemical systems, even though the biomass-electrolysis and CO2-conversion pathways discussed in the study remain outside its core commercial offering today.
Still, investors should mostly invest in Bloom Energy’s future success in the data center market, as this will much more determine its immediate success than future potential expansion in hydrogen and green fuels markets.
(You can read more about Bloom Energy in our investment report dedicated to the company)
Latest Bloom Energy (BE) Stock News and Developments
Study Referenced
1. Ignacio Aguilar at al. Electrochemical energy technologies: Current progress and future opportunities for sustainable energy transitions. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews. Volume 242, December 2026, 117313. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2026.117313
