The rarer a substance is, the more expensive it is, and the more likely it is that a black market will spring up to supply it. Think drugs, human organs, or counterfeit handbags. Or, more recently, hydrogen—which has a wild new black market springing up in California in which people are — perhaps illicitly — selling “fills.”
Hydrogen was supposed to be the fuel of the future. It seemed to be the perfect way to run green cars—cleaner than gasoline while retaining the benefit of fast refueling. Cut to 2025, though, and the hydrogen dream hasn’t quite panned out. Conventional battery-powered EVs have gone from strength to strength, while charger networks have improved rapidly in recent years. Meanwhile, hydrogen remains an oddball fuel for oddball cars, only available in a handful of obscure locations on the west coast.
With hydrogen prices skyrocketing, owners of fuel cell cars have been feeling the pain. With no relief in sight, some enterprising individuals have started selling the universe’s lightest gas… on the sly.
Hydrogen Cars Cost More To Run Than A Dodge Viper Or Ford F-250
Back in 2021, there was hope in the hydrogen world. More cars were hitting the streets, and fuel was affordable. You could score hydrogen for as little as $13 a kilogram. True believers bought fuel cell cars like the Toyota Mirai and Honda Clarity, aiming to help the environment while avoiding the inconveniences of a pure EV. Sales have largely been limited to California, which is the only state with more than one hydrogen filling station.
Sadly, the economics have since turned sour for fuel cell vehicles. Recent years have seen the hydrogen price nearly triple, with many owners stuck paying up to $36/kg for fuel. Adding insult to injury, fueling stations often suffer breakdowns or run out of fuel, leaving owners scrabbling to get a fill. Without access to hydrogen, their cars soon become little more than attractive paperweights. Since Shell abandoned its hydrogen stations in 2024, the market is largely split between three major players—Iwatani, Air Products, and True Zero—with prices regularly exceeding $30 across the board.
Do the maths, and it’s obvious that hydrogen car owners are now in an awful situation. Take the Toyota Mirai, for example. It will drive about 72 miles per kilogram of hydrogen. At current prices of $36/kg, you’re paying 50 cents per mile in fuel alone. If you drive 10,000 miles a year, you can expect to pay $5,000 for gas. Hydrogen gas, that is.
Compare that to an old Dodge Viper, which achieves 12 mpg in the city with its 8.0-liter V10. Presently, premium gas is sitting around $4.80 a gallon in California. That pencils out to 40 cents per mile, making it $1000 cheaper to run those 10,000 miles than the Mirai. Alternatively, you could get a Nissan Versa, which does 32 mpg, and run it on regular gas for $4.40 a gallon. You’d be spending less than 14 cents a mile on fuel, saving over $3 grand a year on fuel!
Hydrogen refueling equipment is a little more complex than traditional gasoline pumps. Uptime is poor at pumps across California.
The Cars Come With $15,000 Fuel Cards
Automakers are not entirely oblivious to this situation. To help entice customers to make the change to hydrogen, Honda, Hyundai, and Toyota have all offered $15,000 fuel cards with their new hydrogen cars at times. Toyota has even offered the same for certified pre-owned used models, too. At current rates, owners can expect a $15,000 fuel card to get them somewhere between 25,000 to 30,000 miles assuming prices remain stable at current highs.
The idea behind the fuel cards was simple. Automakers would ease motorists into the hydrogen world by covering their fuel costs. However, they’ve inadvertently created a black market for hydrogen amongst owners desperate for cheaper fuel.
People Are Selling ‘Fills’
The way it works is remarkably simple. There are people out there with hydrogen fuel cards that they’re not using. Maybe they’ve parked up their fuel cell car and started using another car. Maybe their vehicle was crashed and is now off the road. Left with a card for thousands of dollars worth of fuel, they’re doing the only thing that makes sense. They’re selling the fuel to owners in need. With 18,000 or so hydrogen cars sold and leased in the US, are more than a few people looking for hydrogen on the cheap.
Like any good black market, if you want to buy illicit hydrogen, you have to know where to look. Head over to Reddit, and you’ll find a handful of people “selling fills.” The business case is simple. You message them, and arrange to meet at a hydrogen filling station. They fill your car, and swipe their fuel card to pay at the pump. You pay them—via cash or Venmo—at a reduced rate.
Where California’s hydrogen pumps are currently charging $30 to $36 a kilogram, you can buy hydrogen from these enterprising individuals for much lower prices. Rates sit at around $20 to $22 a kilogram—a discount of roughly a third.
Meanwhile, for the seller, they’re pocketing straight cash. As an example, the Toyota Mirai has a 5.6-kilogram fuel tank. An average fill-up of 3 to 4 kilograms could see them pocket $60 to $80. The fuel cards are otherwise valueless if you don’t want the fuel for yourself, so it’s easy to see why some are trying to cash them out in this fashion. It makes a lot of sense in cases where the owners are running up against the 3- or 6-year time limit on their cards, if they’ve still got thousands of dollars worth of credits to use.
Anyone needing to sell hydrogen?
byu/Longjumping_Matter_9 inMirai
Some desperate owners seek underground hydrogen sellers online, hoping to keep their cars on the road.
The problem is that you’re not really supposed to do this. Toyota specifically states that its fuel cards are not transferable. If you sell the vehicle back to Toyota or another buyer, or the vehicle is totaled in an accident, the fuel card is supposed to be deactivated. Hyundai says much the same, as does Honda. However, much of the legal boilerplate specifically refer to transferring the card itself. The shortform disclaimers don’t specifically say anything about meeting someone at the pumps and using your card to fill up their vehicle. The Autopian has contacted the relevant automakers regarding this situation.
Selling The Cards
Indeed, for the above reasons, it’s rare to see posts about selling fuel cards outright. The chances of a card being deactivated are nonzero, which could make a card with thousands of dollars of value instantly worthless. That’s not to say nobody tries, however. Here’s someone on Reddit:
Here’s a listing on OfferUp:
The description, in case you can’t see the image directly above, reads: “Hydrogen fuel card with appx. $1900 left on it. Sodl my Toyota Mirai and no longer need it. I’ll take $900. That’s $1000 free fuel. My loss your gain.”
I even found a listing on Craigslist:
“Hydrogen fuel card with balance $11000. Asking 6900 for it. It is good until 6-1-2027” reads the post. Then there’s the site hydrogenfuelcard.com. There’s not much info on who runs it or whether it’s actually operational, but there do seem to be a few fuel cards for sale:
It’s Not Clear How These Deals Actually Go Down
It’s also funny to contemplate how these deals must go down. Were I based in California, I’d have done some real investigative journalism and bought some bootleg hydrogen to tell you what it’s really like. Instead, we can only speculate.
The full terms of service of these cards aren’t publicly available. Regardless, in any sort of cashback or subsidy scheme like these, there are always rules and regulations to stop you profiting out of the deal. Cardholders that are reselling their fuel allowance likely risk the deactivation of their cards and forfeit of existing balances, or worse.
Without the subsidized gas card, Mirai owners are finding themselves hundreds of dollars out of pocket just to drive a few hundred miles.
One assumes you’re meeting these backstreet hydrogen vendors at a filling station, or nearby. Do they get in your car and roll up to the pumps with you to keep it looking natural? Or do they just stand by a pump waiting for their customers to show up?
Either way, it seems likely they’d be spending a lot of time at various filling stations to serve those in need. Maybe they just lurk around in an overcoat and dark shades, walking up to drivers as they pull in. “Hey, buddy…” a gravelly voice calls over from the shadows. “You wanna buy some hydrogen?”
Can You Make Money On This?
All this got me curious. What are the numbers like on this gambit? Can you make real money by selling expensive hydrogen at a discount, or are you wasting your time? Sure, it makes sense that you might sell some hydrogen off your card if you’ve got a Mirai you’re not driving anymore, just to recoup a few bucks. But could you buy a Mirai just for the card, and then come out ahead by selling the hydrogen?
I started by hunting for the cheapest possible Toyota Mirai that still came with a fuel card. Forget buying new—while the current Mirai can be had for around $17,000, you’re not gonna make that back with a $15,000 fuel card. Instead, you need to look at the certified pre-owned models.
Down in El Monte, California, I found what I was looking for. A 2019 Toyota Mirai for just $6,788, which comes complete with a full $15,000 hydrogen fuel card. It’s cheap, but by no means an outlier. You can find plenty of certified pre-owned examples for under $8,000 all over California. It makes sense—nobody wants to pay $8,000 for a car that will be more expensive to run than a Viper as soon as the fuel card runs out.
But let’s pretend we don’t care about driving the vehicle. We’re just interested in selling $15,000 worth of hydrogen on the black market. If prices remain steady at $36 a kg, you could get 416 kg of hydrogen out of your fuel card. Let’s then assume you’re charging punters a discount rate of $20/kg to fill up their cars. That comes out to $8,320—or $1532 more than the purchase price of the vehicle.
That’s a slim profit, and doesn’t take into account your time. Let’s pretend you were super efficient at dealing with random people on Reddit and Craigslist, and you could book in two fills an hour at 4 kg each. It would take 52 hours to cash in your card, so you’d be working for about $29 an hour. The figure gets worse if you factor in travel time and however long you got stuck at the dealership filling out paperwork to buy your Mirai in the first place. It sounds like a lot of fuss.
It’s not a bad job, but it’s probably not very stimulating either. The business case is also very fragile. If you get stuck waiting around at the pumps for owners to show up, your hourly rate is shot. Empty or malfunctioning pumps will also ruin your day, and that’s pretty common in the hydrogen world.
The figures get a little better if you can find a better price on hydrogen. There are a handful of pumps that will sell you hydrogen for $30 a kg, which would get you 500 kg out of your $15,000 card. Selling at $20/kg would then net you $10,000, for a $3,212 profit. You’d have to work 62.5 hours to drain the card at two big fills an hour, but you’d be earning closer to $51 an hour. Not bad!
Sadly, unlike a normal job, it’s unlikely you could do this eight hours a day, five days a week. Instead, you’re probably going to have to do little fills here and there depending on the customers you can rustle up online. Plus, you’ll have to go where the hydrogen is. Stations are always going offline or running empty. At the time of writing, just 37 out of 65 stations are currently listed as “up” by H2-CA.com. Eight are empty, seven are out of order, and one is in limited operation, with a further 12 of unknown status.
There’s also the case of what to do with your Mirai when your fuel card runs out. Your best bet is to sell it to whoever will take it—but they’re fairly worthless without a fuel card. Nobody wants a middling luxury sedan that costs more to run than a Ford F-250. You might get $4000 selling it third party, or maybe you could trade it back to the dealer. Even if you got half of that, it would significantly up your profit in the exercise. People are getting wise, however—there are stories all over the Internet of Mirai owners ruing the day they took a bet on hydrogen.
You might be excited to pursue this course of action, but I would by no means condone that behavior. I don’t need to be a lawyer to tell you this is a bad idea.
Chances are your fuel card would quickly be flagged for suspicious activity, and there would be some term or condition that would see it suspended in short order. You might even risk accusations of fraud or chicanery. Would you go to jail? Maybe, maybe not. But will you get rich selling bootleg hydrogen? I highly doubt it.
In The End, It’s A Bit Sad
Fifteen years ago, the world was a very different place. We had only the limpest electric cars, lacking in both range and rizz. Hydrogen fuel cells seemed to offer so much more—clean emissions and decent range without the hassle of long recharge times.
Today, though, the world looks very different. EVs can go fast and far, and you can recharge them all over the country and all over the world. Meanwhile, you can barely sell a new hydrogen car even at $30,000 off, because the fuel is so expensive and you can hardly it anyway.
These conditions have created a very strange and twisted world, where a small handful of “gas-gophers” are “selling fills” on the cheap. Expect the hydrogen black market to last for a while yet—at least until hydrogen gets cheaper, or automakers abandon the concept entirely.
Image credits: Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, Hydrogen Fuel Cell Partnership
This leaves me thinking of what the best use for these useless hydrogen vehicles.
I mean they still have good bodies, suspensions and electric motors. It’s just the hydrogen part that makes them useless.
Could it make sense to ditch the hydrogen bits and convert them to BEVs?
Or would it make more sense to strip them of stuff that could be used in any BEV conversion project such as using their electric motors and some of their electronics to convert a classic car to a BEV?
I think the best use case anyone has had so far has been this:
https://www.theautopian.com/ukrainian-forces-claim-to-have-used-a-hydrogen-toyota-to-blow-up-a-russian-position/
I’d love to see a BEV swap done but I read it wasn’t economical last time I did a search online, but I bet it’ll make for a great YouTube video
Yeah, typically a BEV swap doesn’t make financial sense in the same way that an LS swap doesn’t make financial sense. You do it because you want to, which makes a Mirai a poor candidate.
Now, an RX-8 with a bad engine? That sounds like a fun BEV swap.
Slap a couple of harbor freight generators/motors and you just made a EREV.
Probably a skilled electrical engineer/mechanic could make a decent business turning all these dirt cheap Mirais into BEV conversion kits. Or at least the electric motor assembly will be a good salvage for such an application
There are a variety of used batteries for sale just for such applications
I remember that Honda was working on a home hydrogen electrolysis setup. I guess they never got around to selling it
So is electrolysis from excess green power (solar/wind) not a reasonable way to make hydrogen? Is that a scale issue? Is water too scarce right now?
It’s almost all scale, electrical cost, and transport issues. Water is cheap.
Maybe in the future when there is way too much photovoltaic production in the day hydrogen might have a different future.
There already is a massive surplus of renewable electricity production, at least in CA.
The water’s not too bad, but it takes a lot of power end-to-end. In most cases, it’s a choice between:
I think option 1 is something like 5x more energy input than option 2, which makes it pretty impractical for most applications compared to BEV.
It is a feasible way to make hydrogen, but it’s not terribly efficient. The problem is that it’s more efficient and generally cheaper to use the electricity to charge the battery in a BEV.
TBH, I think using hydrogen to even out renewable power production is the most likely place for it to be useful. When you have excess solar or wind production you can use that to fill hydrogen tanks, and when the sun goes down or the wind stops blowing you can generate power from the stored hydrogen. Same principle as the places that pump water uphill into a reservoir for later use in a hydroelectric plant, except it works in places that don’t have the necessary geography for that.
Edit: And it largely eliminates the infrastructure problem of transporting hydrogen, a notoriously difficult to contain substance, all over the world.
Slightly OT. Anybody here need to buy some clean urine? Special discount for federal employees. Also available with traces of ketamine.
The biggest problem with hydrogen in California is that it is dependent on oil refineries, who use that hydrogen for an profitable purpose. This correlates the hydrogen price to the refinery spread, the amount of profit an oil refinery can make processing oil. When the oil companies make more money refining oil with that hydrogen, they would rather make more money than make less. They are also trying to get money out of California by selling assets, not making new investments in a state they are trying to leave.
I think that a big reason for these massive price swings is oil refineries being bought and converted to producing renewable diesel. Renewable diesel is produced by treating vegetable oil in a reactor with hydrogen, and distilling the products. There are two refineries in the Bay area, in Martinez and Rodeo, that have completed this process. These conversions use the existing hydrogen production equipment but require building a new reactor that takes 18-24 months. This means that hydrogen can still be sold during the conversion process, but once reactor construction is complete they have a much more profitable use for that hydrogen so the price goes up.
Got to love Californians. Food for fuel! It’s been fun watching The Green terrorists realize that nuclear power is the only way to deal with global warming.
“The Autopian has contacted the relevant automakers regarding this situation.”
Snitches get stiches!
More like the NARCtopian!
That’s some serious grift going on there… $36/kg? Do these slimy hydrogen station operators think that the motoring public doesn’t know that hydrogen is literally the most abundant element in the entire universe?
It’s not about the overall supply, it’s the ability to put it in your car. I mean, why does oil cost more than $5 a quart now – there’s plenty of it in the planet. Oh yeah, you have to get it in a form cars can use, and access quickly.
Coming after the break: Electrons and Water – Why do we have to pay for them in our power and water bills when they’re literally everywhere?
A former co-worker at our water utility once told a customer that water is indeed free. All we charge for is shipping and handling. I thought that was a pretty solid line of reasoning.
Early adopters always pay a price
Zune?
BetaMax?
Compliance EV?
The one issue with hydrogen is that when the supply of fuel runs out, your car is literally a paperweight. At least with a compliance EV you can still charge it at home or at a public charger to keep it running.
I thought the Zune was late to the party (although your point stands otherwise).
Hell, I’ve heard Zunes were actually pretty great quality.
Had one, can confirm. I had an iPod before it and hated that Apple didn’t allow me to pull the music back off once I installed it on the iPod. Zune allowed me to use the device more or less like a hard drive. What was the point of having 250gb of music storage if I also needed to keep it on the computer? I still refuse to buy apple to this day because of their screwy permissions on the ipod
Long time PC developer here. My brother loves Apple because it suits his needs within the family. Apple is great until it’s not great or you want to tinker in places that are outside of its ecosphere.
God I miss my Zune HD. Those were genuinely great products!
Isn’t the only reason hydrogen is being pushed so heavily by Honda and Toyota is thanks to Japanese government subsidies? Methinks even Hyundai is in on it given their return to the JDM was with the hydrogen Nexo and a few Ioniq EVs.
New title is much better. Much more Autopian-y. Good job!
The obvious solution is to fit the Mirai with a Bussard collector.
Magnets, bitch!
The hydrogen vehicles still probably make sense because of the ZEV credits.
VHS won out over Betamax not because it was better, but because it was less expensive and tapes were easier to find. Some goes here.
And because they could hold a full 2-hour movie where Betamax couldn’t.
Also because porn.
You could fit a movie on a Beta if you used Beta III speed, which was pretty slow and resulted in a non-optimal picture quality.
But Beta I looked great! For like 90 minutes.
If I was making porn movies, I’d probably have opted for the better image quality over the running time. I don’t know about you, but 90 minutes is way more than enough for one, uh, sitting.
Seriously what’s the point of those movies being longer than 15 or 20 minutes?
Yeah! 15 or 20 minutes! (or 5…)
Ironically, Hollywood finds that the 90-minute format is suitable for the movie theater business model.
In an alternate universe, we’d still be playing movies on records, and the CED (Capacitance Electronic Disc) would be top dog. Not even the might LaserDisc would have beat out CED.
Huh, here I was, thinking it was because VHS permitted certain kinds of content that Betamax didn’t
Psssst, hey you.
Yeah, you.
Wanna buy some *looks both ways* Hydrogen?
*Opens coat*
Yeah, that’s the real stuff. Real smooth.
Police knock on the door.
“Sir, we’ve noticed an inordinate amount of electricity being used at this residence. We suspect marijuana being grown in large amounts.”
“Not at all, Officer. Just electrolysis. Way more profitable.”
Now that’s funny. Or just ironic. He would then arrest you for global warming.
So if you total a Mirai how much does the insurance pay?
Approximately 75% of the universe’s mass is hydrogen, so it’s not a scarcity problem, it’s a distribution problem.
If you can make a tube to the sun to get it more directly, I’ll invest. I have three dollars.
Well I’m telling you now, it’s all a bunch of tubes so you’re on
How hard would it be to engine swap one of these?
Asking for a youtuber…
In California – probably can’t due to emissions.
Maybe swap out the hydrogen stuff and put in batteries?
Man when Hydrogen was announced I was so bullish on the tech. Clean energy and the only emission is water?! Sign me up for the future. But somewhere along the way the tech and companies that offer the fuel dropped the ball. It should have been so much easier to sell this than an EV and they failed miserably.
That oversimplifies the challenges and oversells the benefits of hydrogen, though. It’s hard to package, hard to transport, hard to contain. I think anyone that had been keeping an eye on those aspects should have been healthily skeptical at best. The benefits being so positive are just the cart going before the horse has been born.
I mean, fusion energy is pretty much the best we can ever hope to achieve, too, but that doesn’t mean it’s without considerable challenges that keep it from being feasible, at least at present.
Yes, people should watch Engineer Explained’s youtube video on it. He puts it into persepctive. To get anywhere near the range, let alone cost, of a gasoline vehicle, basically the whole car has to be a tank.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJjKwSF9gT8&ab_channel=EngineeringExplained
Hold up, then how did they get a Mirai to go 845 miles on 5.6kg of hydrogen?
https://www.topgear.com/car-news/electric/toyota-mirai-drives-845-miles-tank-hydrogen-sets-world-record
Yes, that’s hypermiling which isn’t for everyone(especially me) but I can’t see real world range being less than half that. 422.5 miles/tank ain’t bad. Current cost is BS, but it doesn’t have to be like that. We can overcome transport, and solar to hydrogen just works. All of the hydrogen plants don’t have to be clustered in New Jersey.
Yeah, sorry, I did not explain myself very well originally. I was referring to using hydrogen in an ICE. I couldn’t care less about a fuel cell. I want to keep driving ICE’s because I’m a bit of a Luddite.
Here’s another EE video on liquid vs gaseous hydrogen talking about all of the issues of hydrogen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGL5g91KwLA&ab_channel=EngineeringExplained
Ah, I see.
Hydrogen at best is a crummy way to store electricity, and the dumbest way imaginable to move it around.
Sure you could put it in pipes, but not in the existing pipes.
Maybe it makes sense in spacecraft, but the trade offs in that application is kind of different much less the economics.
“That comes out to $8,320—or $1532 more than the purchase price of the vehicle.”
Lessee.
Buy heavily discounted Mirai with $15,000 fuel card
Insure Mirai with low deductable.
Park Mirai out in a field somewhere remote
Sell fuel as quickly as possible without raising suspicion
When fuel is gone drive Mirai off a cliff making sure it explodes on impact.
Collect full BB value
Profit!
Alternatively just part out the car. I’m sure that FC, high pressure tanks, electronics and motor alone are worth quite a few bucks. Then sell off the carcass to a YouTuber for an entry in a series of LS swaps.
Make sure it’s not all gone when you do that. It’ll make your plan a little easier.
I am pretty sure you can not get a Mirai tank to explode by driving the car off of a cliff even with full tanks. That is why the tank is so expensive.
I was thinking more along the lines of “park Mirai at the bottom of a steep, icy hill, and wait for someone else to total it” but that probably wouldn’t work super well in southern CA. Maybe parking it next to a drainage below a burn scar would be more location appropriate.
New plan: Just park it in the path of the nearest wildfire.
Problem solved.
Hydrogen cars have always been a red herring.
Well, so were EVs, until the weirdest guy imaginable decided to lean into the problem.
This week: Some geniuses figured out a way to make Mirai ownership something other than a pit of despare
Next week: Toyota cuts off Mirai owners fuel cards over “unusual purchase activity”, leaving owners stranded.
“I vill buy every outstanding card from everyone, I have a brilliant new idea!”
-Count von Zeppelin
The guy who stole all the Delta Blues and repackaged it as British Rock?
Yeah, we’re not gonna let them get away with that again!
The Germans? Maybe the third time is a charm.
Hmmm, is there some reason these were the specific two vehicles chosen?
Linden Berg, yuk yuk. Oh, and Jenny. I see you Pete!
After you buy that used Mirai just part out the car too.
How do you say “NOPE, Mirai!”
I think it’s Japanese, so maybe Miraku nai! Yes, indeed. Miraku nai desu nee.
Oh the Supply&Demandity!
mirai ga nai = No Future
Oooh, I didn’t even think about the literal angle. Nice. TIL more vocab 🙂
The fuel card is just the bait, the loss leader. Where you make your real money is showing them your fine collection of organs, small arms, prescription drugs, and my personal favorite, teeth. There’s always money in teeth.
Thanks Toyota!