Why Air Products Investors Revolted Against Clean Hydrogen
After a proxy fight, a successful shareholder revolt, and the ousting of a CEO, Air Products, the largest hydrogen company in the world, is floundering. In early May, it posted a $1.7 billion net loss for the second quarter of the fiscal year. While Air Products produces an array of industrial gases, the newly appointed CEO, Eduardo Menezes, told investors on the company’s recent Q2 earnings call that he blamed its investments in clean hydrogen projects for its recent struggles.
“Over the past few years Air Products moved away from its core business in search of growth,” Menezes said. (That core business would be traditional industrial gases such as oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen, produced sans newfangled clean technologies.) “We deployed capital to complex, higher risk projects with first-of-a-kind technologies — and, more importantly, without committed offtake agreements in place.” The company took on significant debt and increased its headcount to try and carry out its ambitious agenda, he explained. “This had a negative impact on both cost and execution quality, leading to significant project delays.”
This is, of course, in line with the overall downward trend in fortunes for clean hydrogen. Demand has long lagged behind production capacity, and projects have fallen apart left and right as uncertain economics, the Trump administration’s fossil fuel-friendly agenda, and the future of the clean hydrogen tax credit threaten to reverse what early-stage progress producers have made to date. But while these hurdles could be expected to flatten the hopes of some emergent startups or oil and gas industry tourists, it’s a more telling signal when the world’s biggest hydrogen supplier can’t make an expedient transition to clean energy work.
“I think that they’re just at the forefront of the industry pulling back,” Krzysztof Smalec, an equity analyst at Morningstar, told me. Air Products has committed $15 billion to the energy transition overall, making a more aggressive push into the low-carbon hydrogen space than its competitors such as Linde and Air Liquide. “They’re the most exposed, so it’s the most high profile, but it’s not unique to Air Products,” Smalec said.
The company has been facing investor pushback over its ostensibly risky investments in this space for some time now. In January, shareholders voted to replace three of the company’s board members, including former 81-year old CEO Seifi Ghasemi, who drove the company’s enthusiastic expansion into the clean hydrogen market. This was a major win for activist hedge fund Mantle Ridge, which holds a nearly 2% stake in Air Products. The investor spent much of last year ginning up support for the idea that Air Products needed new voices in the boardroom to scale back its clean energy projects, many of which had not yet secured buyers. (Air Products did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
The Mantle Ridge campaign — called Refreshing Air Products — backed Menezes for CEO. On last week’s call, he was frank with investors as he echoed his supporters’ — and much of the industry’s — perspective when he emphasized “the importance of refocusing” on tried and true outputs. This refocusing means major layoffs. The company employs about 23,000 people, and Menezes told investors that 1,300 layoffs are already “in process.” Between next year and 2028, the company intends to eliminate another 2,500 to 3,000 positions.
Air Products is also scaling back its plans for a controversial blue hydrogen project in Louisiana. This means the hydrogen is made from natural gas, with the resulting CO2 emissions captured and stored underground. Initially, Air Products had planned to turn about 80% of the hydrogen from this project into ammonia; now it’s looking to sell off the ammonia portion of the business, as well as the plant’s carbon capture and sequestration operations. The goal is to reduce the project’s costs from around $8 billion to $5 billion or $6 billion. All funding will be paused while the company pursues this “derisking strategy,” and will restart only once firm offtake agreements are secured. As of now, none have been announced.
This comes on the heels of three project cancellations Air Products announced in February, two of which were hydrogen-related. One was a sustainable aviation fuels project in California that proposed using hydrogen to convert diesel into jet fuel. The company nixed it due to “challenging commercial aspects.” The other was a planned green hydrogen facility in New York that would use clean electricity to produce hydrogen. That decision followed the January release of final hydrogen tax credit rules, which mandate that projects buy energy from new renewable sources (Air Products had planned to use existing hydropower facilities), as well as slower than anticipated development of the market for hydrogen-powered vehicles.
“I think Air Products just went out on a limb and just took a bet that they’ll be able to finish these projects, be the first mover, and be able to charge a premium,” Smalec told me. “And that was a lot of additional risk.”
The difficulty of deploying new technologies is certainly not confined to the hydrogen industry. “A lot of energy transition industries are struggling at the moment,” Murray Douglas, the head of hydrogen research at Wood Mackenzie, told me. No kidding. “That’s a result of many different factors, not least higher borrowing costs, high rates of inflation across much of the world.”
There is one hydrogen project that the new leadership appears to be relatively happy with, though perhaps predictably, it’s not domestic. That’s a green hydrogen complex in Saudi Arabia, expected to come online in 2027. On its website, Air Products boasts that the facility is “based on proven technologies,” running counter to the new leadership’s narrative that this novel tech might be too risky a bet. While Menezes told investors that from the outside he was “very concerned with this project” he’s been pleasantly surprised that it appears poised to produce low-cost green ammonia from hydrogen. As for the upfront costs, he told investors that Air Products has “successfully limited our spend on this project through partnership and project financing.”
The fact that a green hydrogen project — said to be the world’s largest — is taking root in a fossil fuel-rich nation like Saudi Arabia could be seen as a ray of hope. But on the whole, Douglas isn’t surprised that Air Products is pulling back. So many companies — be they industrial gas behemoths or oil majors — are winnowing down their once robust clean energy project pipeline now that political and economic realities have shifted. BP, for example. stopped work on 18 early-stage hydrogen projects last year and shut down its hydrogen-focused low carbon transportation team. Similarly Shell is scaling back its hydrogen ambitions, scrapping its hydrogen vehicles division.
“They’ve had to probably accelerate the narrowing of that portfolio a bit quicker than what we were expecting because the market just isn’t maturing quickly enough,” Douglas told me. “Maybe the rules are a bit more difficult, cost escalation, inflation has really got in the way.”
But while the tide is certainly out for clean hydrogen, Smalec reads Air Products’ pullback as more of a push towards prudency than a companywide disavowal of the category. Under the right conditions, including manageable costs and secure offtake agreements, “my sense is that they would definitely be willing to invest,” Smalec said. That’s how the company’s competitors are approaching things, he added.
For the near future, though, expect the drama around Air Products to simmer down. “For the next three years or so, I would not expect any major announcements,” Smalec told me. “I think that they have a pretty straightforward path to really improve their performance.”
Unfortunately for the clean hydrogen industry, the path to profitability has changed significantly in recent months, and green and blue hydrogen might be more of a side quest these days.
