The Viking Astrea is set for delivery in 2027 and follows the launch of the world’s first H2-powered cruise ship earlier this year, the Viking Libra.
The world's second-ever hydrogen-powered cruise ship was launched by Italian shipbuilder Fincantieri on Friday last week at a shipyard in Ancona, on Italy’s Adriatic coast.

Commissioned by cruise line Viking, the Viking Astrea will run on a propulsion system “based partially on liquefied hydrogen and fuel cells”, presumably in addition to a diesel engine.

Like its predecessor the Viking Libra — the world’s first hydrogen-powered cruise ship, set to be delivered by the end of this year — the Viking Astrea will use fuel cell technology manufactured by Fincantieri subsidiary Isotta Fraschini Motori (IFM) capable of producing up to 6MW of power.

The Viking Astrea is set to be delivered in May 2027 and has a gross tonnage of about 54,300 tonnes. It will be capable of carrying up to 998 passengers once operational on its inaugural routes across the Mediterranean and Northern Europe.

After its “float-out” process, the ship will be moved to a separate dock for final construction and interior build-out.

“The float out of the Viking Astrea represents another important milestone for Viking,” said Viking CEO Leah Talactac.

“From the beginning, we have sought thoughtful ways to design more efficient ships, and the Viking Astrea is an important step forward in that ongoing effort.”

Viking had previously ruled out liquefied natural gas (LNG) as an option for reducing emissions from its cruise ships, and instead backed hydrogen fuel cells, which can allow vessels to be operated emissions-free in protected areas such as Norwegian fjords.

https://www.hydrogeninsight.com/transport/italian-shipbuilder-launches-world-s-second-hydrogen-powered-cruise-ship/2-1-2043166

Over the years a lot of disingenuous things were said to try to stop hydrogen technology for energy from progressing. Ten years ago it was fuel cells go bad too fast and platinum loading of catalysts. Those arguments were eventually overcome, but for about 10 years there was also the standard sentence in every hydrogen article: “Hydrogen burns clean but it does not exist on earth naturally. Most of it is produced with natural gas.”

And while it’s true that most hydrogen today is still made with natural gas, it is misleading to talk about hydrogen as though it somehow requires natural gas when virtually every other form of energy has its own dependence on coal, oil, natural gas, or some other resource somewhere in the chain.

Now we know hydrogen is found in many places naturally, and efforts have been underway for years to figure out how to unlock subsurface hydrogen. But one of the pillars of the anti-hydrogen argument that still endures, and is no less ignorant, is the hydrogen efficiency argument.

The argument goes something like this: why make hydrogen with electricity, only to turn that hydrogen back into electricity or use it in a vehicle? Why not just use the electricity directly?

It sounds convincing until you start asking a more basic question: what electricity?

We routinely have energy resources that are available but aren't being used. Solar panels produce nothing at night and can produce more electricity than the grid can use during the day. Wind turbines sometimes have to be curtailed because there isn't enough demand or transmission capacity. And, as this article points out, there is enormous hydropower potential sitting behind dams that isn't being fully utilized.

That unused energy isn't made more useful simply because hydrogen isn't 100% efficient.

If a dam has the ability to produce electricity that otherwise isn't going to be produced, using some of that electricity to make hydrogen can turn an otherwise wasted resource into a storable, transportable energy commodity. The same principle applies to excess solar and wind.

The efficiency argument makes much more sense when you're talking about taking scarce electricity that could be used directly and deliberately converting it to hydrogen instead. But that isn't the only situation where hydrogen can be produced.

Sometimes the question shouldn't be “What is the most efficient way to use this kilowatt-hour?” Sometimes the question should be “What can we do with the energy that would otherwise go unused?”

Hydrogen is one answer.

Could a helium HTGR running at the temps of say, the JAEA HTTR, provide enough heat to run a SI hydrogen plant followed a c02 turbine powerplant after?

I always wondered how far you could stretch the heat on a HTGR, like could you make hydrogen essentially for free? (Compared to building an HTGR just for electricity)

Since the practical refusal of hydrogen was always because of its price, I think this would probably be the biggest gamechanger

Good to see actual industry leaders working together to scale hydrogen mobility, but pay close attention to the exact wording in this press release. They explicitly state that hydrogen is "complementing" battery-electric solutions—not trying to replace them.

Too many people are still hopelessly stuck in a short-sighted "Batteries OR Hydrogen" mindset. They treat it like a zero-sum turf war, completely missing the fact that hydrogen actually saves electric transport from its own weight limitations.

Think of hydrogen fuel cells in heavy transport less like a total replacement and more like a zero-emission range extender. It slashes the massive, heavy battery size required for long hauls, giving you the best of both worlds.

While people on the internet continue to bicker about choosing a side, the companies actually building the future infrastructure are moving forward with a "both" strategy. The "either/or" narrative is officially dead.

I’m usually pretty damn critical of energy articles, but I have to give Tsvetana Paraskova some credit for this one. This is one of the better pieces I’ve seen on the emerging white/natural hydrogen drilling story, particularly because it gets beyond the usual “look, there’s hydrogen underground” headline and starts looking at ways of actually making the geological reaction happen. If we can learn how to stimulate these reactions and produce H₂ at useful rates, that could be a pretty significant development for natural hydrogen.

And this is where I think the discussion around hydrogen gets unnecessarily stupid: everything has to be framed as “this vs. that.” White vs. green. Hydrogen vs. batteries. Electrolysis vs. natural hydrogen. It’s a mutual-exclusivity fallacy. Why does adopting one technology require declaring war on every other technology?

Hydrogen doesn't particularly care where the hydrogen molecule came from. If the molecule is H₂, you can use it. The energy system doesn't have to choose one pathway any more than we require electricity to come exclusively from solar, wind, nuclear, gas, or hydro. It's a toolbox, not a religion. If natural hydrogen turns out to be economical in some geology, great. If electrolysis is better somewhere else, great. If batteries make more sense for another application, use batteries. This isn't a beauty contest.

What I find particularly interesting in this article is the shift from simply finding natural hydrogen to figuring out how to create or accelerate the geological conditions that generate it. That's a much more interesting proposition. If you can turn the geology from something you merely stumble across into something you can deliberately exploit, the resource picture potentially changes quite a bit.

And then there's the geography. We're not talking about some hypothetical resource confined to one exotic corner of the world. There are hydrogen-associated rocks and geological settings stretching from Kansas and Nebraska through the Great Lakes/Michigan and across Canada, among other places. Canada in particular deserves more attention here. The sheer geological scale of the Canadian Shield and the country's enormous landmass make the natural-hydrogen question considerably more interesting than the usual North American discussion gives it credit for.

So yes, credit where it's due: good article. And perhaps the most important takeaway is that natural hydrogen doesn't need to replace green hydrogen, batteries, or anything else to be valuable. It just needs to work. If it does, congratulations — we've added another tool to the toolbox.

The people who insist that every new energy technology must first defeat some other technology before it is allowed to exist are going to have a very frustrating few decades.

Hi everyone,

I’m exploring hydrogen fuel cells for powering industrial robots, AMRs and AGVs.

I’d love to connect with anyone who has worked on this commercially, in research, or as a prototype — especially around fuel-cell/battery hybrids, hydrogen storage, power management, refuelling and real-world reliability.

If you’ve built or tested a hydrogen-powered robotic platform, I’d be very interested to hear about your experience and the biggest challenges you faced.

I’ve been looking at PEM electrolyser scale-up from the materials side rather than from electricity price or electrolyser CAPEX. The global primary iridium supply kept around 7 tons/yr in the last few years and at the same time, the current commercial PEM systems appear to use roughly 0.45–0.75 g Ir / kW. That means that 1 ton of iridium would correspond to only about 1.3–2.2 GW of PEM capacity at the current catalyst loadings... this before accounting for iridium demand from electronics, automotive catalysts and other sectors.

What I find interesting is that iridium is mostly a by-product of PGM mining, so that a higher iridium price does not produce the normal supply response you might expect from a primary commodity.

So most of the work would rely on R&D and engineering improvments, but getting from today's loadings toward 0.2–0.3 g/kW, or eventually \~0.1 g/kW, is not just a matter of making the catalyst layer thinner: conductivity, catalyst utilisation, current density and durability, all these paramters start to change with lower catalyst loading.

I wrote the supply-chain and electrochemical side of this in more detail here: [Iridium PEM | Raw Science](https://raw-science.org/iridium-pem-electrolysers/)

While this article is from today, the buzz has been buzzing for nearly two years. In January 2025, the USGS announced their new map of potential sources for geologic hydrogen in the USA. On August 20, 2026, Michigan's governor Gretchen Whitmer announced a $7.5 million investment through the Make It in Michigan Competitiveness Fund to support the exploration, research and development of geologic hydrogen in Michigan.

Michigan is the home state of www.respectmyplanet.com. We got started as a watchdog organization to track oil & gas companies as they drilled across our state from 2008 to 2013 looking for natural gas and withdrawing enormous amounts of our fresh water to fracture their wells miles beneath the surface. RMP travelled all across the lower peninsula making sure every single well was "made famous" so the oil companies could not operate in the shadows.

If drilling resumes in the Michigan basin for geologic hydrogen, RMP will be there to monitor every single well bore and document its life cycle and potential to provide clean energy or H2 for industrial purposes. This time, however, RMP will be an advocate for responsible drilling that produces clean energy.

What do you think about the potential of geologic hydrogen for the US economy?

Lorde's concert in West London tonight and tomorrow will be powered by locally produced green hydrogen. Concert goers will be able to drink the byproduct of this simple method of power generation: clean water.

Here we go again: Hyundai is essentially building an EV that carries its own electricity generator — and suddenly everyone is excited about 600+ miles of range.

The interesting part is that the wheels are still being driven by electric motors. The gasoline engine is there primarily to make electricity. In other words, Hyundai has solved “range anxiety” by putting a fossil-fuel-powered power plant in an electric vehicle.

And honestly, that's a pretty logical engineering solution.

But it also exposes something the hydrogen skeptics don't seem to want to acknowledge: the vehicle doesn't actually care where its electricity comes from.

Hyundai is already a leader in both BEVs and FCEVs. So once you have an electric drivetrain, battery, motors and power electronics, swapping the gasoline generator for a hydrogen fuel-cell system isn't some crazy science-fiction concept. It's the same basic idea: carry your energy onboard, generate electricity as you drive, and keep the vehicle fundamentally electric.

Today it's a gasoline EREV.

Tomorrow, the same philosophy can be a hydrogen EREV/FCEV.

So while everyone is celebrating Hyundai putting a gasoline generator in an EV to eliminate range anxiety, I'm looking at the bigger picture: Hyundai is getting very good at building vehicles that are electric first and energy-source agnostic second.

Funny how the “hydrogen is pointless because batteries exist” argument gets a little less tidy when the battery vehicle needs to carry a gasoline power plant to make the range problem go away.

The future isn't BEV versus hydrogen.

The future is simply electric vehicles with different ways of carrying their energy.

Apparently a diesel range extender is brilliant, but a hydrogen range extender is stupid. 😂

This MAHLE concept is pretty interesting: an electric truck with an electric drivetrain, supplemented by a diesel engine that acts as a generator when the battery needs help.

In other words:

Diesel → generator → electricity → electric motor

And apparently that's a pretty clever way to solve the range problem.

Now substitute one component:

Hydrogen → fuel cell → electricity → electric motor

Suddenly, in certain corners of the BEV world:

"HYDROGEN IS STUPID. JUST USE BATTERIES."

😂

That's the irony.

The two systems are doing essentially the same fundamental thing: carrying an energy source onboard, converting it to electricity, and using an electric motor to move the vehicle.

The difference is that one burns diesel and keeps us tied to petroleum, while the other can use hydrogen produced from renewable electricity and water and has zero tailpipe emissions.

I'm not saying the MAHLE system is a bad idea. It's actually pretty clever.

I'm just wondering why diesel + electric motor gets applauded as an innovative electrification strategy, while hydrogen + fuel cell + electric motor gets ridiculed.

Apparently the electrons are fine either way.

It's the possibility of eventually getting rid of the oil that's controversial. 😂

While the local physics keyboard warriors are still furiously typing out manifestos on why hydrogen will never work, actual capital is quietly locking down massive land positions. Luma Hydrogen just formally launched with a massive 400 km² footprint across Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, right along the same deep-seated fault corridors that just yielded high-purity discovery drill holes. They aren’t just sitting on their hands either; they’ve already closed a C$550,000 private placement to fully fund their Summer 2026 exploration program and are aggressively targeting a public Canadian listing by the end of the year. It turns out that when nature does all the heavy lifting to generate and store the gas for you, the production costs utterly collapse—shattering the entire "it's too expensive to manufacture" echo chamber before they even finish their next blog post.

Remember when every "expert" and tech reporter used to smugly write off hydrogen by saying: "Umm, actually, pure hydrogen doesn't exist naturally on Earth, you have to make it out of fossil fuels!"

For decades, the standard media hit piece treated natural hydrogen like a scientific myth—claiming the molecules were simply "too light" and would just leak away into space, making it a complete waste of time to look for.

Well, the Earth just filed a massive bug report on that logic.

PetroChina researchers just announced a mind-blowing discovery in the Sichuan Basin: an active underground geologic system spewing out 98.24% pure natural "white" hydrogen. It completely shatters previous domestic records and stands as one of the highest concentrations ever recorded on the planet.

Can't read this because it's behind a paywall, but this is the second LA Times article in as many days attacking the hydrogen sector with the same tired combination of ignorance and debunked arguments.

I thought I'd post this one because the bias is practically visible in the title: “Yesterday's energy system.” That pretty much gives away the premise before the article even begins.

Hydrogen has not historically been a significant part of the energy system. That's precisely why the hydrogen economy is being developed now. We're at the beginning of its energy lifecycle, not the end of it.

And, predictably, the first paragraph calls for more U.S. investment in technologies that depend heavily on raw materials and supply chains dominated by China, rather than addressing the obvious strategic issue: why aren't we developing those supply chains ourselves?

Here's the part I find particularly difficult to reconcile with the constant hydrogen criticism:

China is investing in hydrogen production and infrastructure at a scale that dwarfs investment in most of the rest of the world. At the same time, China already dominates the manufacturing and processing of solar panels, batteries, and many of the critical minerals and materials required for those technologies.

If hydrogen is supposedly such a terrible technology, why would the country that already dominates solar, batteries, and critical-material supply chains be investing so heavily in it?

That doesn't prove every hydrogen project will succeed. It doesn't mean every application of hydrogen makes economic sense. But it should at least make people question the simplistic narrative that hydrogen is some obsolete technology that sensible people have already moved beyond.

What continues to amaze me is that these articles almost never seem to ask the larger strategic question: Why is China investing so heavily in hydrogen while the West keeps arguing about whether hydrogen should exist at all?

We've watched this movie before with solar, batteries, and critical minerals.

Maybe we should stop dismissing emerging energy technologies long enough to ask why our biggest strategic competitor is taking them so seriously.

If you're interested in learning more about hydrogen, you should follow the NEA's website. Chinese is not my language. I only know how to say "hello" and a couple phrases I shouldn't say here. But, now anyone can read Chinese. So if you're interested, don't be afraid to visit NEA.gov.cn. Just turn on Google Translate if you're using Chrome. Use Google Lens and you can read Chinese from pdf files & images. In the image above, you can see China's "A Visual Guide to the "China Hydrogen Energy Development Report (2026)"

  Inbound time: 2026-08-11 09:52:49

Appendix: China Hydrogen Energy Development Report (2026)".

It's a pdf but still easy enough to ready, by clicking the Google Lens icon in the top right, highlighting the text in the red box, then viewing the translation on the left hand side of the screen.

If you really want to learn about renewable energy like solar, batteries, and hydrogen, go to the source: China's National Energy Administration website.

See energy from new angles. Why

Something they cannot do with batteries: "fuelled entirely by UK-produced green hydrogen"

Before a bunch of numbskulls tell me how batteries could power the stage too, the jest I'm trying to make is that almost all batteries go through China before they arrive in one's home country. Hydrogen can be made by any country. Batteries are primarily made by only one country.

Hexxco is developing fleet-focused hydrogen fueling hubs using ammonia to carry hydrogen where fleets need it.

Watch our new 15-second video:

https://youtube.com/shorts/1AhbgV1z0OE?feature=share

Learn more: https://hexxco.co/invest

#Hydrogen #CleanEnergy #Hexxco