Why batteries win for everyday driving — full stop

Imagine filling a bucket with water to power a mill. If you use a battery-electric car, about 75 cents of every pound you spend on electricity actually moves the car. If you use a car running on hydrogen-derived synthetic fuel (made by splitting water with electricity, then converting the gas into a liquid fuel), only about 15 cents of that same pound does useful work. The rest is lost as heat at each conversion step. That five-to-one gap is not disputed by anyone — it is confirmed by Transport & Environment, the International Council on Clean Transportation, and multiple EU-level studies. For a commuter driving to work and back, batteries are simply the cheaper, more efficient choice. There is no serious argument against that for light vehicles.

This efficiency gap is really an argument about the cost of electricity. Every extra unit of renewable power wasted in making e-fuels is a unit that cannot light a home, charge a phone, or run a hospital. That is why most energy analysts say: for cars and vans, plug them in.

Where hydrogen genuinely has no rival

Batteries are superb for short, predictable journeys. They are far less suited to a 14-hour flight, a container ship crossing the Pacific, or a steel furnace running at 1,500 °C. A battery heavy enough to power a long-haul aircraft would weigh more than the plane itself. That is where hydrogen — or fuels made from it, like synthetic aviation fuel or e-methanol — steps in. The EU’s own aviation fuel rules (the regulation that requires airlines to blend in a growing share of non-petroleum fuel) exist precisely because aviation cannot simply switch to batteries. The approximately 1.4 billion combustion-engine vehicles already on the road also cannot all be replaced overnight; cleaner liquid fuels offer a way to cut their emissions without scrapping them.

Korean researchers announced in September 2026 that a new nickel-cobalt electrode can produce hydrogen at 99% lower cost than today’s platinum-based technology, matching or beating current performance. If that scales up, the electricity cost of making green hydrogen falls significantly — which in turn makes every hydrogen application cheaper, from ships to steel mills.

The honest answer: it depends on the job

There is also a third route to hydrogen that skips electricity entirely: natural hydrogen, seeping from ancient rocks deep underground. Scientists from the University of Toronto and the University of Ottawa measured the first sustained, directly quantified flows of hydrogen rising from billion-year-old Canadian Shield rocks near Timmins, Ontario, in May 2026. If geological hydrogen proves extractable at scale, the efficiency objection largely disappears — no renewable electricity is consumed to make it. That changes the calculation considerably, though the technology is still in early research.

So the honest scorecard looks like this. Batteries win for cars, vans, city buses, and short-range ferries — cheaper, cleaner, more efficient. Hydrogen and fuels made from it win for aviation, deep-sea shipping, heavy long-distance trucking, high-temperature industry, remote equipment, and the vast fleet of existing combustion engines that will be on the road for decades. Neither technology kills the other. They solve different problems.

Sources

• EU sustainable aviation fuel supply exceeds 2025 ReFuelEU Aviation target | EASA

Featured image via Unsplash.