McPhy Brand Guidelines: The Drôme Hydrogen Equipment Maker Liquidated in 2025

Hydrogen stored in solid form.

McPhy began in 2008 in La Motte-Fanjas, a village in the Drôme in south-eastern France. The energy news site Enerzine reported in January 2013 that it was founded by Daniel Fruchart and Michel Jehan to develop and industrialise a way of storing hydrogen in solid form, in metal hydrides, based on work at France’s national research centre, the CNRS. An AFP report in 2024 traced the company’s roots to research at both the CNRS and the CEA, the French atomic and alternative energies commission. Pascal Mauberger, who had worked at Air Liquide and Soitec, became its chairman in 2009, Enerzine said, after which the company moved from proof of concept to industrial production and sales.

By early 2013 McPhy had sites in La Motte-Fanjas and Grenoble and subsidiaries in Germany and Italy, and it had bought an electrolyser production unit, which let it offer hydrogen production on customers’ sites alongside its storage. Its first commercial orders, the site said, had gone to customers including the Italian utility Enel, Iwatani in Japan, E.ON and the University of Nottingham, and pilot projects had been signed with groups such as Total and Linde. Its backers at that time included Sofinnova Partners, Gimv, Emertec Gestion and the French state’s Fonds Ecotechnologies, the site reported.

On 25 March 2014 McPhy Energy listed its shares in Paris. That day EnterNext, the Euronext arm for small and mid-sized companies, described it as a specialist in hydrogen-based solutions for energy storage and industrial uses, founded in 2008 at La Motte-Fanjas, that designed and made storage and production equipment using its own technology for storing hydrogen in solid form.

Electrolysers and filling stations.

Over the following decade McPhy’s weight moved from storage to the equipment that makes and dispenses hydrogen. English Wikipedia describes it as a maker of electrolysers and hydrogen stations for mobility, and says that in October 2020 its chief executive, Laurent Carme, confirmed that the business would continue to rest on both. In 2025 the company described itself as a designer, manufacturer and integrator of hydrogen equipment for industry, mobility and energy, supplying turnkey systems for industrial gas supply, the refuelling of fuel cell vehicles and the storage of surplus renewable electricity, with development, engineering and production centres in France, Italy and Germany.

Two factories marked its last years. English Wikipedia says McPhy opened a plant for hydrogen-mobility equipment in Grenoble in 2022. On 13 June 2024 it inaugurated an electrolyser “gigafactory” on the Fontaine business park near Belfort, which AFP called the largest factory making electrolysers in France. The project had public support through the European hydrogen programme of Important Projects of Common European Interest. AFP reported that the plant would first build the process units that collect the hydrogen and oxygen leaving the stacks, with production of 4 MW stacks on an automated line to follow in 2025.

At that time, AFP said, McPhy employed about 260 people in France, Italy and Germany, and EDF held roughly 14% of its capital. The agency also noted that the company had faced many technical and financial setbacks since its launch more than fifteen years earlier.

Hydrogen and its image.

Hydrogen and fuel cell companies sell equipment that most people never see in use. An electrolyser splits water into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity; a fuel cell runs the reaction the other way, turning hydrogen into electricity. In the PEM designs made by several firms in this guide, the work happens in stacks of thin membranes and plates, assembled into larger systems that are often delivered in standard shipping containers, painted white or pale grey and lined up in rows at an industrial site.

That makes the sector’s public image a matter of pictures and words more than products. Company websites lean on photographs of factory floors, stacks being assembled, container rows beside wind turbines or refineries, and the vehicles that use the gas: hydrogen buses, delivery vans and, in the warehouse market, fuel-cell forklifts. Products tend to carry short, technical names, and greens and blues, suggesting water, air and renewable power, are a common choice.

The firms differ in what they actually make. Some build electrolysers to produce hydrogen; others build fuel cells to use it; and Plug Power says it covers production, storage, transport and use in one business. Several are listed companies, so their history is told as much in stock-exchange announcements, fundraisings and restructurings as in product launches, and a company’s own claims about capacity or cost should be read as claims.

The industry meets at trade fairs such as Hannover Messe in Germany and the Hydrogen Technology Expo, where stand design, demonstration stacks and project announcements do much of the brand work. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — who founded it, who owns it, where it makes its equipment — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Liquidated in July 2025.

McPhy did not survive as a company. Its chief executive, Jean-Baptiste Lucas, resigned in April 2025, and English Wikipedia reports that the business was put up for sale that month. The Belfort Commercial Court opened judicial reorganisation proceedings on 4 June 2025 and heard three takeover offers on 24 June, the company said. By a judgment of 8 July 2025, the court approved the sale of a large part of McPhy’s assets and business, including the Belfort gigafactory, its technologies and its intellectual property, together with 51 of its 71 French employees, to John Cockerill Hydrogen, part of the Belgian engineering group John Cockerill. The same judgment converted the proceedings into a judicial liquidation. McPhy asked Euronext to suspend trading in its shares, by then listed on Euronext Growth Paris, from that evening, announced that they would be delisted and said it expected them to be worth nothing.

McPhy therefore no longer trades. The local news site Ma Commune reported in July 2025 that the other bidders had been Hynamics, part of EDF, and Atewey, and that John Cockerill planned a new stack, called MoJo, combining the expertise of both companies. A year later, on 8 July 2026, the same site reported that the former McPhy plant at Fontaine was gradually returning to industrial work under John Cockerill Hydrogen, with about fifty employees, and that a polymer electrolysis stack described as entirely designed and made in France was to be inaugurated there. The mcphy.com address now forwards to John Cockerill’s hydrogen website.

For a design guide, McPhy shows how a research spin-off from the Drôme built a public brand around hydrogen equipment over seventeen years, and how a company name can end while its factory and technology continue under another owner. Compare it with Sunfire, a German electrolyser maker founded two years later, and with ITM Power. For this guide we use an alpine blue, ink and glacier white with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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