BY TETSUJI TOMITA
NOTE: This continues from our April 20, 2026 analysis that focused on ammonia-fired power generation in Japan.
The future of hydrogen power generation in Japan may ultimately depend on two major engineering firms pursuing very different visions for the market. Yet those differences are becoming complementary rather than directly competitive.
Kawasaki Heavy Industries (KHI) sees hydrogen primarily as a fuel supply and infrastructure business. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI), by contrast, treats hydrogen as a way to decarbonize existing thermal power generation. Both are developing hydrogen combustion technologies, but they differ sharply in where they expect value to emerge and how hydrogen is ultimately likely to be used.
That distinction matters because Japan’s hydrogen ambitions depend on solving two separate problems at once: securing large-scale hydrogen supply and creating commercially viable demand for it in hard-to-abate sectors such as power generation. Without cheap and reliable fuel imports, hydrogen-fired power plants will struggle to expand. Without large-scale downstream demand, meanwhile, investment in hydrogen supply infrastructure becomes difficult to justify.
The result is an emerging industrial symbiosis. While KHI is focusing on liquefied hydrogen transport, storage, and distributed hydrogen utilization, MHI is concentrating on large-scale hydrogen turbines and thermal power systems – effectively leaving endusers to determine how and where hydrogen will ultimately be consumed.
Despite persistently high costs, Japan continues to position hydrogen as a long-term decarbonization option. The interaction between KHI’s supply-chain strategy and MHI’s power-generation strategy may prove just as important as the individual technologies.