Fuel-to-Power: Rethinking hydrogen availability
Power Generation
12 minute read
By Dr. Andreas Bodén, Chief Technology Officer; Dr. Lisa Kylhammar, Chief Product Development Officer; and Richard Berkling, Chief Executive Officer, PowerCell Group
Editor’s note: This article brings together complementary perspectives developed over more than two decades. Dr. Andreas Bodén and Dr. Lisa Kylhammar contribute deep expertise in fuel cell technology, hydrogen systems, fuel reforming and industrial product development. Richard Berkling contributes more than two decades of leading technology shifts through the principles of Industrialized Innovation, bridging emerging technologies, industrialization and commercial scale. Together, they explore how hydrogen availability is evolving and why Fuel-to-Power has the potential to accelerate the energy transition.
One of the strongest arguments against the hydrogen economy today is also one of the most reasonable. The green hydrogen economy has not developed as quickly as many expected, an observation that is both fair and important. At the same time, we believe it risks leading the industry to ask the wrong question. Instead of asking How quickly can green hydrogen scale? The question should be: How quickly can hydrogen availability scale? The development over the last couple of years has not only seen a delay in green hydrogen projects, but a real uptick in different pathways to hydrogen production making hydrogen available where customers need reliable power. That is what we describe as Fuel-to-Power.
Technology shifts rarely progress through one perfect pathway. When one pathway develops more slowly than expected, others emerge that create the same customer value through different technical, economic and environmental characteristics.
Green hydrogen remains central to the long-term transition. But the transition itself is increasingly being enabled by a broader portfolio of hydrogen pathways than many anticipated only a few years ago. Hydrogen availability is no longer dependent on a single production route. Increasingly, it can be created through electrolysis, industrial hydrogen, existing pipeline infrastructure and reforming technologies based on natural gas, methanol and ammonia.
Fuel-to-Power is defined by its ability to create customer value through the most appropriate hydrogen pathway for each application.
Customers rarely ask for hydrogen. They ask for resilient power. They ask for faster deployment. They ask for operational flexibility. They ask for lower emissions.
It is worth being honest about something here. Many technologies can convert fuel into power, and fuel cells are not automatically the right answer for every application. They earn their place where their particular combination of efficiency, dynamic response, low local emissions, quiet operation and modularity creates superior value in the customer’s specific context. The starting point is therefore never the technology. It is the application.
Fuel-to-Power therefore starts with the customer’s application rather than a preferred hydrogen production technology. The objective is not to identify the perfect fuel. It is to identify the most appropriate pathway for each application, one that delivers reliable power today while allowing the carbon footprint to improve as technologies and infrastructure continue to evolve.
Different fuels. Different pathways. Different applications. One objective: creating customer value through reliable power.
Our perspective is shaped by experience. More than a decade ago, long before hydrogen became part of today’s public discussion, we were already exploring Fuel-to-Power concepts based on reforming conventional fuels into hydrogen, developing small auxiliary power units for trucks and for remote telecom towers. For these applications the most promising approach was diesel reforming, and both the laboratory results and the early field trials were encouraging.
Industrial reality and market adoption proved considerably more demanding. Diesel quality varies significantly between markets, blends and sulphur levels, and those variations placed heavy demands on fuel processing and system design.
The deeper lesson went beyond any single fuel. The hard problem was not only making the chemistry work, but creating a Fuel-to-Power architecture that could scale across power levels and customer applications without constant re-engineering. In the process, we learned how fuel cell stacks and systems need to be designed for clean integration with reformers, and that scaling without redesigning the solution for every application is itself a core engineering capability. It was a genuinely elegant piece of engineering. It was not yet an industrial product.
That distinction is the lesson we carry forward: a technology that works is not the same as an industrial solution that scales. Producing hydrogen is only one part of the challenge. Creating an industrial Fuel-to-Power solution that performs reliably over many years in demanding customer environments is something entirely different, and those experiences continue to shape how we evaluate hydrogen pathways today.
The engineering landscape has changed. Reforming technologies have matured, gas cleaning has improved and system integration has advanced. Perhaps more importantly, different fuel pathways are beginning to demonstrate distinct advantages depending on the application.
Rather than competing, these pathways complement one another by expanding the range of practical Fuel-to-Power solutions available to customers.
Perhaps most importantly, customer demand has changed. Ten years ago, engineers were searching for applications. Today, applications are searching for practical Fuel-to-Power solutions. That represents a fundamental shift.
PowerCell will not develop reforming technologies. Many companies already possess world-leading expertise in reforming, gas processing and hydrogen production, and their innovation continues to expand the number of practical hydrogen pathways available to industry.
Connecting those technologies to fuel cells creates another critical engineering challenge. Reformate must be cleaned and purified to the hydrogen quality a PEM fuel cell requires, and that purification capability must itself be able to scale industrially, reliably, across power levels and applications. It is precisely the kind of interface where a laboratory result and an industrial product are furthest apart, and it is one of the places our own history has taught us to look first.
Our role is different from the specialists. We work closely with customers and technology partners to explore how different fuel pathways can be integrated into complete Fuel-to-Power solutions that accelerate deployment while supporting the long-term transition towards progressively lower-carbon hydrogen.
We believe this creates a significant opportunity, not only for fuel cell companies, but for an entire ecosystem of reforming specialists, hydrogen suppliers, infrastructure providers, EPCs, system integrators and technology partners to expand hydrogen availability across a growing range of commercial applications. Together, these complementary capabilities can accelerate the deployment of practical Fuel-to-Power solutions far beyond what any single technology could achieve alone.
We see our role as connecting deep expertise across the ecosystem into customer-specific Fuel-to-Power solutions: understanding how hydrogen purity influences fuel cell performance, how different reforming technologies affect system architecture, and how system integration, energy management, operational profiles, lifecycle performance and application-specific requirements together determine customer value. In other words, helping customers navigate an increasingly diverse Fuel-to-Power landscape.
There is a practical lesson in this that is easy to underestimate. In the first industrial installations of any new technology, the most important engineering problems, and the most valuable learning, tend to appear at the interfaces between technologies, not inside any single one. Success therefore requires suppliers and technology partners to work across the traditional boundaries of their own scope of supply. That willingness, as much as any individual component, is what makes an ecosystem real rather than a slogan.
No single company will build the hydrogen economy. It will be built through ecosystems where each participant contributes deep expertise within its own field.
Few applications illustrate this more clearly than AI datacenters. Many projects today are constrained less by computing technology than by access to electrical power. Grid reinforcement often takes years and customers cannot always wait. For many AI datacenter projects, the question is no longer simply the cost of electricity; it is increasingly the cost of waiting for electricity. That changes the economics of energy infrastructure. We are now seeing applications where hydrogen-based power can become commercially attractive without waiting for policy support or subsidies, because the value of reliable and immediate power can justify the investment on its own merits.
Existing natural gas infrastructure, combined with increasingly mature reforming, gas purification and carbon-capture technologies, has the potential to provide access to large volumes of hydrogen close to where power is needed provided these technologies can be integrated with the reliability, efficiency and economics the application requires.
That does not replace the grid; it complements it. The same principle increasingly applies to ports, maritime applications and industrial facilities. Different applications, different hydrogen pathways, the same Fuel-to-Power philosophy.
Green hydrogen remains the long-term ambition for many applications. Blue hydrogen has the potential to accelerate that transition where carbon capture is viable. Grey hydrogen has a higher carbon footprint and is not the destination many of us aspire to. But engineering transitions are rarely accelerated by waiting for one perfect solution. They are accelerated by creating enough customer value to justify continued investment, infrastructure development and innovation.
That is how a positive transition cycle can develop, not by decree, but through customer value compounding into investment. The implication is important: hydrogen availability may no longer be constrained by the pace of one technology, but enabled by the combined progress of many. Rather than asking which hydrogen pathway should win, we believe the more productive question is how different pathways can work together to accelerate deployment while continuously reducing emissions over time.
Our recent projects reflect this evolution. In one application, hydrogen is produced from natural gas; in another, from methanol. We are also seeing increasing customer interest in ammonia as a future hydrogen carrier. These are not competing technologies. They are complementary Fuel-to-Power pathways.
Each application starts with different conditions, different infrastructure, different economics and different operational requirements. The engineering challenge is therefore not to identify one universal solution. It is to identify the most appropriate solution for each application. That requires three complementary capabilities:
Hydrogen availability therefore has the potential to scale considerably faster than current sentiment suggests, not because one technology suddenly becomes dominant, but because multiple hydrogen pathways are beginning to mature simultaneously, supported by existing infrastructure, industrial know-how and growing customer demand.
Perhaps that is the next phase of the hydrogen economy: complementary pathways, creating customer value.
That is Fuel-to-Power.
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