Yesterday, I sat down with Nick Walker, who joined AFC Energy as Chief Strategy Officer in September 2025 after years at Peel Hunt, where, among other things, he’d previously been covering the wider hydrogen sector.
Nick has always been passionate about decarbonisation, constantly asking himself what he could do with his knowledge and experience.
Prior to joining AFC Energy, he also worked at Liberum and before that at Evolution, covering a number of small and mid-cap companies. His role was to learn, write, educate and help raise capital — helping to progress technologies and products that could contribute to decarbonisation.
Toward the end of his time in investment banking, Nick spent considerable time looking at fuel cell and electrolyser technologies around the world, modelling them across different regions and applications.
What he particularly liked about AFC Energy’s cracker technology (which he had written about for seven years) was its ability to unlock hydrogen at price points people were prepared to pay. He modeled it across a whole range of ammonia input prices and developed high confidence that it could work without subsidies.
Nick wanted to be part of a company where he could help create the commercial strategy and then execute it — meeting customers, having conversations, building relationships and identifying who has access to green ammonia. He’s talked to all the major project developers and has been successful in building those relationships.
Increasingly, the people who matter are recognizing that AFC’s technology can do what electrolysers can’t.
Nick’s view is nuanced: we absolutely need electrolysers, but they should be deployed in places where the cost of power is low and projects can be scaled. He doesn’t believe the UK and Northern Europe can produce hydrogen cost-effectively with electrolysers because power prices are too high.
Moreover, he expects those prices won’t come down — in fact, they’ll likely rise due to increased curtailment and the need to invest heavily in grid infrastructure.
For sourcing low-cost renewable power, Nick points to projects like NEOM and six or seven other post-FID green ammonia projects around the world expected to come online between 2027 and 2030.
Nick has also been instrumental in co-founding the UK Ammonia Alliance (alongside Beyond 2025), a body created to help educate the government about ammonia, including the viability of importing and cracking ammonia as part of the UK’s energy transition.
We explored why Nick believes now is the inflection point for hydrogen after decades of false starts, and what structural changes in the market have finally aligned to make commercial scale achievable.
The conversation turned to AFC Energy’s competitive positioning in a crowded market filled with established ammonia cracker manufacturers and well-funded electrolyser companies.
We discussed what makes their approach defensible, the core customer pain points they’re solving and how their value proposition stacks up against both diesel incumbents and emerging alternative technologies.
Nick walked us through AFC Energy’s go-to-market strategy, including their fuel-as-a-service model, partnerships with companies including Speedy, ICL and TAMGO, and their distribution agreements.
We examined the challenge of managing multiple channels without creating conflict, and how they’re de-risking adoption for early customers taking a bet on unproven technology.
We also explored the critical decision to pause commercial rollout to achieve deeper cost reductions — a trade-off between time-to-market and long-term competitiveness. Nick also discussed their strategic partnership with an S&P 500 company for joint development, the emerging opportunity in AI data centres hungry for distributed clean power and their manufacturing partnership with Volex.
Looking ahead to 2026, Nick outlined what success looks like in the medium term, the leading indicators he’ll be watching in early 2026, and the path to meaningful revenue inflection in 2027.
We touched on unit economics, the capital intensity of their asset-retention model, cash runway considerations and geographic expansion plans beyond their current focus markets.
Listen in!
