H2 View: The Cornwall-Based News Service Giving the Hydrogen Industry Its Own Voice
H2 View is a news, analysis and events service dedicated entirely to hydrogen, launched in 2019 by gasworld, the industrial gases publisher based in Truro, Cornwall. It describes itself as the first and only global publication for the hydrogen energy industry, and it was created at the moment hydrogen moved from a long-discussed idea to a funded priority for governments and energy companies. Built around three pillars — mobility, power and technology — H2 View publishes daily news, a print magazine, webinars, conferences and, later, a training platform called Class of H2. Its readers are the companies, investors, policymakers and engineers building the hydrogen economy, and its editorial mission, stated at launch, was to give that emerging sector a dedicated voice in the clean-energy debate rather than leaving its coverage scattered across gas, transport and power publications.
Launched by gasworld in 2019
gasworld announced the launch of H2 View in September 2019, with the service dating its launch to July 2019, and a first print edition appeared alongside the digital platform. The parent publication brought decades of industrial-gases expertise to the venture: hydrogen had long been an industrial commodity, produced and distributed at scale, before it became a clean-energy cause. Rob Cockerill, gasworld's Global Managing Editor, explained the reasoning at launch: the team had followed the hydrogen energy sector closely as it broke out of its longstanding chicken-and-egg problem — vehicles waiting for refuelling infrastructure, infrastructure waiting for vehicles — and concluded that the time was right for a whole new platform that would play a part in advancing the cause. H2 View, he said, was intended as a new voice pressing home the progression in hydrogen technologies and championing both the challenges and the opportunities the sector faces.
Why Hydrogen Needed Its Own Publication
The editorial bet behind H2 View was that hydrogen had become too large and too cross-cutting for general energy media. Hydrogen is proposed as a low-carbon fuel and feedstock capable of decarbonising parts of the economy that electricity reaches awkwardly: heavy transport, shipping, steel, chemicals, high-temperature industrial heat and long-duration energy storage. Producing it cleanly — by electrolysis using renewable power for green hydrogen, or from natural gas with carbon capture for blue hydrogen — involves electrolyser manufacturers, gas companies, oil majors, utilities, vehicle makers, ports and governments simultaneously. Before 2019, each of those audiences encountered hydrogen news inside its own trade press. A dedicated title could aggregate the whole value chain in one place, giving a fuel-cell start-up, a gas major and a transport policymaker the same front page. The surge of national hydrogen strategies and public funding announced from 2020 onwards, as governments built hydrogen into pandemic-era recovery and net-zero plans, vindicated the timing.
Three Pillars: Mobility, Power and Technology
From launch, H2 View organised its coverage around three core pillars: mobility, power and technology. Mobility covers hydrogen in transport — fuel-cell cars, buses, trucks, trains, boats and forklifts, together with the refuelling infrastructure they require. Power covers hydrogen's role in the energy system, from generation and grid balancing to heating and industrial energy supply. Technology covers the underlying advances: electrolysis, reforming, storage, compression, fuel cells and safety. Around those pillars the service publishes news throughout the hydrogen supply chain, analysis and opinion from industry contributors, and interviews with executives and policymakers. The structure has proved durable because it mirrors how the industry itself segments. A reader arriving from the transport sector and a reader arriving from industrial gases meet in the same publication, which is precisely the cross-fertilisation a young industry needs from its media.
Print, Digital and the Subscription Model
H2 View combined a print magazine with continuous digital publishing from the outset, its first print edition coinciding with the platform's launch in 2019. Subscriptions bundle the print editions with round-the-clock online access to exclusive interviews, columnists and the full news archive, positioning the title as a professional information service rather than a free news site. Recruitment advertising in 2021, when the expanding team sought a journalist and an industry research and data analyst, described roles based in Truro, Cornwall, or working remotely, delivering content across H2 View's digital and print platforms — evidence of the title investing in research and data capability as well as reporting. The gasworld connection supplies both subject expertise and commercial infrastructure, and H2 View operates as the group's hydrogen specialist alongside the parent title's broader industrial-gases coverage, a sister-publication relationship the group makes explicit in its training and events marketing.
Webinars and Digital Events
Online events became a significant strand of the service. H2 View runs a regular webinar programme bringing industry leaders together for talks, live debate and audience questions, with sessions available on demand afterwards. Its webinars are organised around the editorial pillars: a mobility special in November 2023, for example, hosted by Rob Cockerill and Thomas Dee, brought together automotive supplier FORVIA and its partners to examine hydrogen's role in mobility, the make-up of the value chain and how the landscape was evolving. Showcase webinars have examined enabling technologies in depth, such as water deionisation for electrolysis-produced green hydrogen, presented with specialists from Evoqua Water Technologies. For a dispersed global industry, webinars let a Cornwall-based publisher convene participants from three continents at negligible cost, and they convert editorial authority into a commercial product sponsors value. Recordings extend the life of each discussion as reference material for subscribers.
Conferences: The Iceland Ecosystem Event
Beyond the screen, H2 View developed in-person conferences devoted to the strategic questions facing the industry. Its 2023 event in Iceland, titled An Ecosystem for Green Hydrogen, ran for two and a half days and was devoted to thought leadership and actionable conclusions about the requirements for a green-hydrogen future across industry, transport and society. The agenda ranged across renewable power supply, additionality — the principle that green hydrogen should be matched by new renewable generation — water sustainability, electrolyser technologies and the investment and policy climate needed to move projects to final investment decisions. The choice of Iceland, a country whose electricity system is already renewable, was emblematic of the event's premise: the technology was widely accepted as ready, but the surrounding ecosystem of policy, permitting, infrastructure and finance had yet to align. Conferences of this kind position H2 View not merely as a reporter of the industry but as one of its meeting places.
Class of H2: Training for a New Workforce
Recognising that a fast-growing industry faced a skills gap as serious as its infrastructure gap, H2 View launched a training platform branded Class of H2. The platform offers interactive masterclass modules intended to bring professionals' hydrogen fundamentals up to speed, covering not only the science but the business case, opportunity assessment and market fit. Its official trainer, Stephen B. Harrison of sbh4 consulting, a gasworld Editorial Advisory Board member, brought more than thirty years of experience in industrial and speciality gases, hydrogen and decarbonisation. The inaugural series comprised six modules: an introduction to hydrogen and its value chain; hydrogen derivatives including e-fuels and green ammonia; production pathways of electrolysis, reforming and gasification; turquoise hydrogen technologies, methane pyrolysis and solid carbon; biomass as a pathway to green and low-carbon hydrogen; and related foundation topics. The training arm marks a notable evolution for a news service — from informing the industry's existing professionals to educating its new entrants — and reflects how trade publishers increasingly build education businesses on editorial brands.
Editorial Voice and Industry Role
H2 View's editorial stance, set at launch, is openly developmental: it exists to advance the hydrogen economy, championing its progress while reporting its difficulties. That positioning is common among trade titles serving emerging industries, whose readers want a publication that understands and supports their sector's legitimacy while remaining credible about obstacles — costs, infrastructure delays, competing technologies and policy reversals all feature in its news coverage. Its output mixes hard news about projects, investments and policy with interviews, opinion and explanatory content, and its journalists host the discussions at its own events. The G7 series it published in 2021, presenting thought-leadership articles from the hydrogen associations of the G7 countries ahead of that year's summit in Cornwall, illustrated the convening ambition: a small Cornish publisher assembling the national voices of a global industry for its readers.
Cornwall Roots, Global Readership
The service's geography is part of its character. gasworld and H2 View operate from Truro, Cornwall — far from the energy capitals of London, Houston or Brussels, in a county better known for tourism and maritime heritage. The hydrogen industry's own geography is similarly dispersed, spanning electrolyser factories in Germany, projects in Australia and the Middle East, and policy made in Brussels and Washington, so a digital publisher's location matters less than its network. Cornwall has its own stake in the story, with marine hydrogen facilities planned in the county and the 2021 G7 summit at Carbis Bay placing the region briefly at the centre of climate diplomacy. H2 View's development from a Truro base — daily news, print editions, webinars watched worldwide, a conference in Iceland and a training platform sold internationally — is a compact example of how specialist media now operates: local in address, global in audience.
Why H2 View Matters
H2 View matters because emerging industries need shared information infrastructure, and hydrogen's was built unusually early. Launched months before the wave of national hydrogen strategies that began in 2020, it gave a fragmented sector a common news source, a data and research function, a conference platform and eventually a training system under one brand. Whether hydrogen ultimately fulfils the largest claims made for it — in transport, industry or power — the record of its attempt is being written substantially in H2 View's pages, from project announcements and technology showcases to the industry's own debates about ecosystems and investment. For a directory of news services, it represents the modern specialist title in complete form: editorially focused on a single subject, commercially diversified across print, digital, events and education, and rooted, improbably and effectively, in Cornwall.
