Competing expectations: the case of hydrogen storage technologies

Abstract

The development of a wide range of hydrogen technologies is linked to the promise of hydrogen as a sustainable energy carrier and the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era. These promising technologies, however, have to compete among each other in terms of visibility and credibility. The paper introduces and discusses the notion of competing expectations. To trace the competition between three on-board storage technologies, 263 articles on ‘hydrogen’ and ‘storage’ are analysed with the help of Stephen Toulmin’s scheme of argumentation. The paper concludes with a characterisation of the ‘expectations’ phase of competing technologies.