The membrane is to electrochemistry what silicon is to semiconductors. That's the tight version of the analogy, and I think it's structurally exact. But there's a larger version of the same argument that I find harder to make in public because it sounds grandiose, even though I think it's right.

The larger version goes like this. Semiconductors weren't just an industry. They were the substrate of the last fifty years of the global economy in a deeper sense than is usually appreciated. Computing ran on them, but so did communications, defense, automotive, medicine, finance, logistics, retail, entertainment, and most of what we'd now call infrastructure. The reason "the technology industry" became synonymous with the economy is that the substrate of the technology industry was sitting underneath everything else.

I think the next fifty years are going to look similar, but with a different substrate. The defining economic transition of the next half-century isn't going to be about information. Information is largely solved. The defining transition is going to be about electrification —about replacing combustion with controlled electron transfer across most of what the industrial economy still does with fire and pressure. Fuel production, heat, transportation, chemical synthesis, materials processing, recycling, separation. The list is roughly the same as the list of things humans have used hydrocarbons for, and it's almost everything.

The substrate of that transition is electrochemistry, in the same way the substrate of the information transition was semiconductors. Not as a sector that exists alongside others, but as the underlying technical layer that the rest of the economy runs on. Every electrified industrial process is, at the level of physics, a controlled electron transfer happening at an interface. At some point, those electrons have to be brought into the real world as real atoms and molecules. Electrochemistry is the bridge between the unseen world of electrons and the physical world of atoms.

I realize this sounds like the kind of grand civilizational claim that founders make when they want to talk their book. So I want to be careful about it. It's possible the transition is slower than I think. It's possible that some big chunk of industry doesn't electrify at all and stays on hydrocarbons. It's possible that the technology has surprises in store that I can't see. But even with all those caveats, I think the basic structural argument holds: that there's an emerging substrate, that electrochemistry is it, and that whoever controls the substrate is in a position roughly analogous to the position the US held in semiconductors in 1980.

If you accept that argument, then the strategic question for the country is the same one we faced in semiconductors fifty years ago, but with one important difference. Semiconductors started in the US and stayed in the US for decades before manufacturing began to shift. Electrochemistry started in the US too —General Electric and DuPont, in the 1960s — but we've already lost two of the three platform layers in the broader electrification stack. We've lost solar. We've lost batteries. The third layer is electrochemistry, and it's still American at the substrate level, though the manufacturing trajectory is heading the same direction as the previous two.

The window for this one is shorter than people realize. Chinese electrolyzer manufacturing went from about 5% of global capacity in 2018 to about 60% in 2024. Flow battery deployments are already dominated by Chinese technology thought we still own the substrate. That's a faster compression of the timeline than we saw in either solar or batteries. The substrate underneath those electrolyzers — the membrane — is still mostly American, but it's the last layer, and if it goes the way the rest of the stack has gone, we won't have another one to defend.

The thing I find clarifying about the semiconductor analogy is that it makes the strategic question concrete. In semiconductors, the US recognized, eventually, that the substrate mattered enough to be worth protecting at the national level. The CHIPS Act exists because somebody finally took the substrate question seriously. The question for electrochemistry is whether anyone takes the equivalent question seriously while there's still something to protect.

That, I think, is the real prize. It's not hydrogen, and it's not fuel cells, and it's not any of the individual applications. It's the substrate and manufacturing infrastructure of the next economy, and the choice about whether to keep it.

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