GRID · FUTURE FUELS
The Molecules of the Transition
The fossil pipelines move the fuels we burn today. These move the molecules meant to replace them: 222 trunk corridors carrying hydrogen (the clean fuel) and carbon dioxide(captured carbon), from OpenStreetMap — the same trunk-only filter as the Energy Pipelines layer, applied to the new molecules. They’re coloured by what they carry. But read the map honestly: this is an emergingnetwork, and where it’s thick today says as much about oil and industry as about a clean future.
What they carry
Two molecules, two colours. Hydrogen — 156 corridors, about 1,911km — is the clean fuel: today these are mostly the merchant and industrial hydrogen lines feeding refineries and chemical plants, overwhelmingly on the US Gulf Coast, plus NW-Europe’s first links. Carbon dioxide — 66 corridors, about 2,746 km — is captured carbon. Here’s the part that surprises people: most CO₂ pipelines in the world today were built to pump CO₂ into ageing oilfields to push out more oil (called enhanced oil recovery), not to lock carbon away for the climate. Carbon-capture-for-storage is the newer, far smaller use.
Where they’re built
This map is dominated by one country: the United States is about 74%of every corridor here, with NW-Europe’s first clusters (56 corridors across Belgium, France and the Netherlands) and effectively nothing elsewhere. That’s partly real — the US genuinely operates the world’s largest built hydrogen andCO₂ pipeline networks today — and partly OpenStreetMap mapping completeness. Crucially, most of the world’s announced hydrogen backbones and carbon-capture hubs (Europe’s planned hydrogen network, the big new capture clusters in the UK, the Gulf and Asia) aren’t built yet, so they aren’t on this map. What you’re seeing is the network that exists, not the one being promised.
The longest mapped systems
The longest named systems in the snapshot — and they tell the same story. The big ones are CO₂-for-oil trunks across the US Gulf and Permian (Denbury’s Green Pipeline, the NEJD line), alongside the Dakota Gasification CO₂ line and the Gulf-Coast and Linde hydrogen systems. Of 222 corridors, 106 carry a name; the whole network spans about 4,656 km.
About this data
Every line is a real feature from OpenStreetMap tagged man_made=pipeline with usage=transmissionand carrying hydrogen or carbon dioxide (via the Overpass API, ODbL) — the same source and the same trunk-only, no-recon filter as the Energy Pipelines layer. Lines are coloured by molecule and drawn one width: the diameter is too sparsely tagged to grade, so colour carries the whole story. We show nothing operational — no operator, no pressure, no equipment. Two honesty notes matter most. First, the CO₂ you see is mostly an oil-industry tool (enhanced oil recovery), not climate storage. Second, we deliberately exclude ammonia: today’s mapped ammonia pipelines are predominantly legacy fertiliser transport, so folding them in under “future fuels” would misrepresent them. Coverage follows OpenStreetMap and leans heavily to the US, so treat this as the mapped, existingnetwork — not a complete or proportional picture of what’s planned. Snapshot taken 2026-06-27.