What if we missed the industrial innovation of 2025?

Some announcements generate significant buzz. Others, more discreet, could nonetheless have greater industrial consequences. This may be the case for Air Liquide, which in November 2025, announced the commissioning in Antwerp-Bruges of the world's first industrial-scale ammonia cracking plant, capable of converting 30 tonnes of ammonia per day into hydrogen without direct CO2 emissions.

On the day of this announcement, we reported the news without fully grasping its implications. Yet, by tackling one of the primary weaknesses of the green hydrogen thesis - its transport - Air Liquide is reshaping part of the future of decarbonized energy.

Now, I know ammonia cracking is not as "sexy" as photovoltaic panels on the moon or orbiting datacenters (not a bad idea, by the way), but as you will see, it is well worth your attention.

In practice, hydrogen has always been somewhat complicated. The gas is light, voluminous, flammable, embrittles metal alloys, and its large-scale handling imposes heavy technical constraints.

This is where ammonia enters the scene. For several years, it has been considered one of the most credible carriers for transporting hydrogen over long distances, leveraging production, storage, and transport chains that are already extensively developed globally (as ammonia is used for fertilizer production).

The theoretical advantage is well-known: produce hydrogen in regions where solar or wind power is abundant and cheap, convert it into ammonia, transport it by ship (in adapted LNG carriers, a nod to GTT), and then reconvert it into hydrogen upon arrival, without emitting CO2. This model has long been studied by the industry and international agencies, precisely because ammonia benefits from logistics infrastructures that are far more mature than those for hydrogen.

The idea of using ammonia as a medium for hydrogen transport is therefore not new, but until now, there was a technical bottleneck: the return to hydrogen. Efficiently cracking ammonia at scale with a robust industrial process is a genuine challenge. This is precisely where Air Liquide claims to have reached a turning point. And if this milestone is confirmed industrially and economically, the implications are considerable.

The scenario then becomes much more concrete. Tomorrow, hydrogen could be produced in very low-cost energy zones - India, South Africa, Australia - from solar or wind power. This hydrogen would then be transformed into ammonia to be shipped to Western markets. Once it arrives, part of it will certainly be used for agriculture, and another part will be re-transformed into hydrogen near industrial consumption sites. Such a supply chain would bypass some of the logistical hurdles currently hindering the hydrogen economy.

It is for this reason that Air Liquide's announcement probably deserves more attention than it has received.

Of course, unknowns remain. The actual yield of the process, the purity of the hydrogen produced, and, more broadly, the full economics of the ammonia-hydrogen chain. We must also not forget that ammonia is no silver bullet: it brings its own constraints, particularly regarding safety, with which we in Toulouse and Lebanon are all too familiar.

But one thing is clear: if hydrogen transport is the problem, then ammonia cracking is an essential part of the answer. And if the process becomes credible at scale, the green hydrogen thesis suddenly regains a much more tangible dimension.