Pajarito Powder CEO Prof. Dr. Christian Mohrdieck joined the German podcast Over the Air to discuss whether hydrogen mobility is fading — or simply maturing into the applications where it actually makes sense.

Is hydrogen in retreat as a mobility solution, or is the technology only now entering thephase where it concentrates on the use cases it’s genuinely suited for? That’s the question host Andreas Hentschel put to Prof. Dr. Christian Mohrdieck, one of Germany’s most experienced hydrogen experts, in the July episode of Over the Air, titled “Ende des Wasserstoff-Hypes: Hat die Brennstoffzelle noch eine Zukunft?” (“End of the Hydrogen Hype: Does the Fuel Cell Still Have a Future?“).

Mohrdieck is well positioned to answer that question. Before becoming CEO of PajaritoPowder, he led Mercedes-Benz Fuel Cell and later held a C-level role at cellcentric, giving him a rare vantage point spanning both the automotive OEM side of hydrogen and, now, the catalyst materials that make fuel cells and electrolyzers work.

Hydrogen hasn’t failed — it’s finding its lane

Mohrdieck’s central argument: hydrogen is not a universal replacement for the combustion engine or the battery, and it was never going to be. It belongs in applications with especially high daily energy requirements — vehicles that need to move a lot of energy, a lot of the time. Heavy-duty, long-haul trucking is the clearest example: trucks hauling heavy loads over long distances simply need more energy than a practical battery pack can deliver without an unworkable weight and charging-time penalty.

He pushed back hard when Hentschel suggested this makes hydrogen a passenger-car afterthought. High daily energy use shows up outside trucking too — think taxis that need to run almost continuously for two hours or more and then refuel quickly, or larger, heavier vehicles that simply draw more power. He pointed to BMW’s hydrogen activity in the SUV segment and Hyundai’s Nexo as examples of manufacturers already targeting exactly this kind of vehicle. And when Hentschel pressed further, “isn’t that still a tiny niche, given the low production numbers involved?” — Mohrdieck disagreed directly: that mid-size SUV segment sells in the high five- to six-figure range annually worldwide. That’s not a niche by any reasonable definition; those vehicles are simply built today with conventional drivetrains, and are strong candidates for hydrogen conversion as the technology matures. He was careful to add that no single powertrain will fully displace the others — expect a genuine mix of battery, hydrogen, and combustion for the foreseeable future, shaped as much by regional energy availability as by vehicle class.

The price target — and why it’s closer than it looks

The conversation’s most concrete thread was cost. Citing figures from European energy regulators, Mohrdieck noted the current average production cost for green hydrogen sits around €8 per kilogram — well above what’s needed for hydrogen trucking to be competitive on a total-cost-of-ownership basis against diesel. His number for that competitive threshold: €4–6 per kilogram at the pump in Europe. In the US, where diesel and gasoline are already structurally cheaper, the bar is even lower — closer to €3–4 per kilogram.

That range isn’t wishful thinking, he argued: non-green hydrogen production methods already deliver hydrogen at €1–2 per kilogram today, proving the cost floor is achievable —green hydrogen simply hasn’t caught up yet. He drew a direct parallel to batteries: 15–20 years ago, batteries weren’t cost-competitive with combustion drivetrains either; today they arguably beat them on operating cost. His view is that hydrogen is on the same curve, just a generation or so behind, and that the same economies-of-scale effect that brought battery costs down will do the same for hydrogen once volumes rise.

Germany’s own price history illustrates the volatility along that path. The H2 Mobility station network — a joint venture between automakers, energy companies, and infrastructure firms, backed by federal funding — launched hydrogen at €8–9 per kilogram at the pump. Then the energy crisis and the war in Ukraine hit: because most hydrogen is still produced from natural gas, prices spiked to €13–14 per kilogram, well outside any competitive range. Mohrdieck says there are now signs of prices heading back down — but the episode is a reminder that as long as production is tied to fossil gas, hydrogen’s cost is tied to fossil gas prices too, which is exactly why the shift to renewable-based production matters.

Why isn’t every wind turbine already paired with an electrolyzer?

If Germany already gets over half its electricity from renewables, and surplus wind power sometimes has nowhere to go, why isn’t that surplus routinely being converted to hydrogen? Mohrdieck pointed to two separate obstacles.

The first is regulatory: under current EU rules, hydrogen can only be certified “green” if it’s produced by a renewable installation built specifically and additionally for that purpose — a principle known as “additionality.” That means an existing wind turbine that’s simply being curtailed because the grid doesn’t need its output at that moment can’t legally have its otherwise-wasted electricity converted into certified green hydrogen. Mohrdieck says there’s a serious and, in his view, promising policy discussion underway to relax that rule specifically for curtailed renewable capacity — energy that’s generated whether or not it’s used, and currently gets thrown away instead of converted.

The second obstacle is more fundamental: demand. No one builds a multi-million-euro electrolyzer without reasonable confidence there’s a buyer for the hydrogen it produces, and today there simply aren’t enough hydrogen offtakers to justify that investment at scale. It’s the same chicken-and-egg problem that held back refueling infrastructure for years.

Mohrdieck’s answer for breaking that cycle is the same one that worked for refueling stations: coordinated action across the value chain. When H2 Mobility was formed, automakers and infrastructure companies sat down together and deliberately built early stations in the regions where vehicles were actually being deployed, rather than waiting for the market to solve the problem alone. He noted this kind of coordination has to stay within antitrust law — it can’t become market-allocation collusion — but that regulators have historically allowed this kind of open, non-exclusionary coordination during a technology’s “market preparation phase,” before it’s genuinely established. He sees no reason the same model couldn’t apply to hydrogen production and electrolyzer siting.

Where the demand could actually come from

Asked where large-scale hydrogen demand might materialize first, Mohrdieck pointed beyond mobility entirely: heavy industry, and steel in particular. German steelmakers are already running projects to shift toward CO2-free or CO2-reduced production processes, and would represent exactly the kind of large, steady offtaker that could justify major electrolyzer investment.

He also offered one of the episode’s more striking data points. Hydrogen is already produced today as a byproduct of certain industrial chemical processes — chloralkali electrolysis, used in plastics manufacturing, is one example — and at many German chemical sites, that byproduct hydrogen currently goes unused and is simply flared off. By his estimate, capturing that existing, already-being-produced hydrogen could power around 600,000 fuel cell vehicles — compared with perhaps 10,000 such vehicles on German roads today. It’s a reminder that scaling up hydrogen use doesn’t have to start with building new production from scratch; some of the supply already exists and is currently being wasted.

Zooming out further, he cited EU-wide studies suggesting the European continent could theoretically produce enough hydrogen to cover all mobility-sector energy needs on an energy-equivalent basis — including shipping, aviation, and road transport combined.That’s a theoretical ceiling, not a plan: he was clear that not every one of those applications will actually end up running on hydrogen. And even in an optimistic long-term scenario where Europe’s whole energy system runs on renewables, he expects the continent will still need to import hydrogen-based energy from elsewhere, simply because full self-sufficiency at that scale is a long way off.

The catalyst technology behind the cost curve

Pressed to explain where Pajarito Powder’s own technology fits into this picture — and the roughly 20% cost advantage Hentschel referenced — Mohrdieck described the core idea in fairly plain terms. Fuel cells and electrolyzers rely on precious-metal catalysts: platinum, and in electrolyzers, iridium as well — both expensive by weight. The catalytic reaction can only happen at the catalyst’s surface, so the more usable surface area you can expose for a given amount of metal, the more efficient the reaction becomes.

Pajarito’s approach is to engineer the support material the catalyst sits on to be highly porous, riddled with internal pore structure. That gives the precious metal far more surface area to spread across without clumping together — clumped catalyst particles waste material, because much of the metal ends up buried and never participates in the reaction at all, a known problem with today’s standard electrodes. By raising how much of the platinum is actually put to work, Pajarito’s materials let manufacturers reach the same electrochemical performance with meaningfully less precious metal — which is where the direct cost reduction in both fuel cells comes from. Cheaper hardware feeds directly into cheaper hydrogen, whether it’s being produced by an electrolyzer or converted back to electricity in a fuel cell — one more piece of the puzzle on the road to that €4–6 per kilogram target.

Talk to action

The episode closes on a note that sums up its overall tone: the pieces needed to make hydrogen work — cheaper catalysts, coordinated infrastructure investment, regulatory reform on additionality, using otherwise-wasted renewable power and industrial byproduct hydrogen — mostly already exist in some form. What Mohrdieck argues for now is less new technology and more the will to combine what’s already understood, citing Germany’s own”sector coupling” policy conversations as an example of an idea that’s been discussed for years and is now overdue for actual implementation.

It’s a conversation about technology, economics, and the honest question of what role hydrogen can actually play in the future of mobility and the energy transition — not hype in either direction, but a clear-eyed look at where the technology fits.

Listen to the full episode: Over the Air — “Ende des Wasserstoff-Hypes: Hat dieBrennstoffzelle noch eine Zukunft?” (in German)