Really.

🌍 The war in the Persian Gulf hit something most people were not thinking about while watching the news: food. The chain is short and brutal — gas, ammonia, nitrogen fertilizers, harvest. Remove the first link or make it unreliable, and everything else collapses. Qatar was one of the world's largest ammonia producers not because it wanted to feed the planet, but because it had cheap gas right next door. Now routes are in question, and supplies are unstable. And the problem is not that fertilizer prices will rise. The problem is that there simply will not be enough fertilizers. Higher prices do not create more ammonia. They only determine who gets what exists and who gets nothing. Those with less money — no harvest. No harvest — hunger. The 21st century, satellites, smartphones — and hunger.

Here is a number that rarely gets mentioned: approximately 50% of the world's population is alive today because of the Haber-Bosch ammonia synthesis process. That is roughly 4 billion people. Without this chemistry, the planet simply cannot feed itself at its current size. Global mineral fertilizer consumption exceeds 200 million tons per year, and a significant portion is nitrogen-based. Ammonia is NH₃: one nitrogen atom and three hydrogen atoms. No hydrogen — no ammonia. No ammonia — no harvest for half of humanity. That is the real scale of this topic. Not the boom, not the forums, not the exhibition stands — half of humanity. And that is where the question comes from.

❓ Why do you need hydrogen?

Most people who want it have not asked themselves the next question: what specifically will you do with it? Use it as fuel? Here is a fact that rarely gets said out loud: when you burn hydrogen, you get back roughly half the energy you spent producing it. The full cycle efficiency — electrolysis plus combustion — is 30–40%. You took 100 units of electricity, made hydrogen, burned it — and got 30–40 back. For comparison, a heat pump delivers 300–400% efficiency from the same kilowatt-hour. In other words, hydrogen heating is 8–10 times worse than a standard heat pump at identical electricity costs. This is not an opinion. It is thermodynamics, and it does not negotiate.

What about producing it more cheaply through water electrolysis? Electrolysis costs $4–8 per kilogram of hydrogen. From natural gas, the same kilogram costs $0.50–1.50. A 6–8 times difference. That is why 95% of the world's hydrogen comes from hydrocarbons. Not because everyone is an enemy of the environment, but because numbers do not lie. Now look at China — the Qatar problem does not affect them at all. They have coal. Hydrogen through coal gasification: cheap, large-scale, around 33 million tons per year, roughly 30–35% of global output. No forums about clean energy, no beautiful presentations. Just coal, a reactor, and hydrogen. And the same question remains unanswered: why? For ammonia. For fertilizers. For chemicals. Not to heat homes with the fuel of the future.

🇨🇳 And yet China — the world's largest hydrogen producer, around 33 million tons per year, roughly 30–35% of global volume — is the country least likely to talk about a hydrogen boom. It simply makes it and uses it. For ammonia. For chemicals. They have an answer to the question "why." Everyone else does not — yet. Although even that path is a dead end. Hydrogen can be produced in even greater volumes, more easily, and more cheaply. But even then, the core question remains unanswered: are you certain you need hydrogen itself — or can what you actually need be done differently, with 21st century technology? Are you sure?

💰 But today hydrogen is surrounded by boom. Subsidies, exhibition stands, headlines, forums. The EU has planned 10 million tons of domestic green hydrogen by 2030, supporting this with around €400 billion through various mechanisms. Four hundred billion euros. And here is the strange part: nobody clearly explains what this boom actually is. Where is the consumer? Where is the infrastructure? Where is the economics? There are no hydrogen refueling networks at scale. No hydrogen heating at scale. No hydrogen electricity generation at scale. There are pilots, promises, and grants. There is a vast number of people saying "hydrogen" who cannot answer how it will actually reach the end consumer, in what form, and at what price. Demand of unknown origin. A boom without an address.

Someone will say: energy storage. Summer has excess solar, winter has a deficit. Make hydrogen in summer, store it, and use it in winter. Sounds elegant. But there are details that usually go unmentioned. To store hydrogen as a liquid, you need to cool it to minus 253°C — just 20 degrees above absolute zero. The liquefaction process alone consumes around 30% of the hydrogen's own energy content. That means one third of what you produced is burned trying to preserve it. There is more: hydrogen is the smallest molecule in the universe. It permeates through any metal wall. Pump it into a standard steel cylinder and by morning the cylinder will be empty. It seeps through the metal and disappears. Proper storage requires specialized composite tanks or cryogenic systems — extraordinarily complex and expensive engineering. Meanwhile, the Strategic Research Institute has developed ARBOK-MULTIPLIER — an inertial energy storage and amplification system. No chemistry, no cryogenics, no leaks. Losses under 0.1% over 30 days. Stores from hours to months. That is real storage. Making hydrogen and struggling to contain it when the problem can be solved in a fundamentally different way — that is not engineering, it is a detour for the sake of a detour. 🔋

Someone else will say: synthetic aviation fuel. Hydrogen plus CO₂ — and there is your e-fuel for aircraft. A real direction, but far from the main one. Hydrogen is not the only path to synthetic fuel, nor the simplest. The Institute and Arbok can produce such fuel from organic waste and even from water — the technologies are proven, and all that remains is completing testing and R&D to bring certified fuel to market. The aviation fuel question is being solved through other, simpler and safer methods, without dependence on the hydrogen supply chain. And even so — this is a specific case, not the foundation of a boom.

⚙️ And there is one segment where hydrogen genuinely has no substitute — steel. Steel production accounts for 7–9% of all global CO₂ emissions. A blast furnace runs on coke: carbon reduces iron from ore. You cannot replace coke with a battery physically. But you can replace it with hydrogen. It reduces iron chemically, and instead of CO₂, the output is steam. Here hydrogen is not burned — it is used to reduce metal. That is an honest argument. But steel is a specific industry with a specific task, not a "hydrogen economy" and not what people have in mind when they say "boom."

❓ Why do you need hydrogen?

If the goal is fertilizers, there is a more direct and shorter path. The Strategic Research Institute and Arbok developed CRONA PULSE technology. No gas, no Qatar, no ammonia plant. A farmer takes their tractor, attaches a trailer module with a water tank and generator. During a standard field pass, a short powerful discharge hits the freshly tilled soil — literally a lightning strike into the ground. Hundreds of megawatts in microseconds. The soil immediately produces NO₂ and NO₃ — the same compounds the farmer normally buys in bags. Here they appear directly on the field during the tractor pass. Nitrogen comes from the air — the atmosphere is 78% nitrogen. Up to 600 grams of nitrogen is fixed per ton of water. Energy consumption: 25 kWh per hectare. Module cost: €12,000–35,000. One unit is equivalent in output to 40,000 tons of fertilizers per year. Yield increase: 100–350%. No bags, no suppliers, no dependence on what is happening in the Gulf. 🌾

And when organic and municipal wastewater is processed through AZOW technology — vacuum evaporation at 1 kPa, at ambient temperature, without chemicals — ammonia does not disappear into a pipe. It is captured in an acid scrubber. The reaction: 2NH₃ + H₂SO₄ → (NH₄)₂SO₄. The output is ammonium sulfate: 21% nitrogen, 24% sulfur. A unit serving a community of 1,000 people produces 20–80 kg of ready fertilizer per day. From sewage. What yesterday was a disposal cost today sells for €150 per ton.

Now, directly about hydrogen. If there is a real buyer with a real price — the Institute has four hydrogen production technologies, and that is not the limit. TRISTONE — from seawater through evaporation and steam decomposition on a thermally expanded graphite membrane, production cost $0.35 per kilogram, net grid consumption 0.8–1.5 kWh/kg through internal recirculation, CAPEX for a unit producing around 8,000 tons of hydrogen per year — $250,000. CHG — through a proprietary metal catalyst with graphene cartridges, no electrolysis, no pressure or elevated temperature, under $0.50 per kg, self-sustaining after startup. Fo-Pro — from sorted waste and water, 0.125 kWh per kilogram, at room temperature. ARBOK-Ammonia — ammonia extraction from wastewater, cracked into hydrogen when needed. And yes, the Institute has developed a new fuel cell catalyst — several times cheaper than platinum — making hydrogen-to-electricity conversion a real, rather than a loss-making, proposition. But only when hydrogen is practically free as a byproduct. Not when you spent $6 producing it and heroically got back $2 in electricity. I guarantee: the moment a technology for nearly free hydrogen actually hits the market, all interest in hydrogen will vanish immediately. Because business prefers the excitement of the chase, not the mundane reality of the result. 💡

In the Bible, miracles involve manna from heaven, fish raining from the sky, and water turned into wine. In the modern world, those tricks do not work. What you need now is a fishing rod or a plow. That is exactly what we do.

❓ So why do you need hydrogen?

There is one argument that holds up, and it is honest in its own way. There is a buyer who does not particularly ask why their client needs hydrogen. They simply know the EU is allocating €400 billion in subsidies for its procurement — and they want a piece of that. A standard speculative transaction. The money is real, the demand is artificially created by regulators, so the goal is to get in line. Fair enough as business logic. But it is not an argument for hydrogen as a solution to a real problem. It is an argument that subsidies corrupt markets and generate demand for things that are entirely avoidable. Specific tasks — fertilizers, steel, fuel — should be solved directly, not through a hydrogen intermediary just because someone is paying from a public budget. All of this is cargo cult. Bamboo runways and coconut-shell headsets, waiting for the planes to return. And the people building them are completely sincere. That is precisely what makes it so hard to cure. 🎋