Less than 10 percent of announced green hydrogen projects worldwide have come to fruition as high costs and uncertainty continue to impact the technology.
A new study by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), in Germany, found that despite 60 countries have developed strategies to stimulate the market ramp-up of hydrogen, very few projects were seeing the light of day.
“Over the past three years, global project announcements for green hydrogen have almost tripled,” PIK researcher and lead author Adrian Odenweller said.
“However, only seven percent of the production capacity originally announced for 2023 has been completed on time during this period.”
Mr Odenweller said the main reason was that hydrogen remained an expensive good for which there was little willingness to pay.
He said the study, which looked at 1232 globally announced hydrogen projects, found there was also uncertainty about future subsidies and regulation.
Study co-author Falko Ueckerdt said additional subsidies of around US $1 trillion US would be required to realise all announced hydrogen projects by 2030.
“Green hydrogen will continue to have difficulties meeting the high expectations in the future due to a lack of competitiveness,” Dr Ueckerdt said.
He said, however, the study found that permanent subsidies were not a solution, recommending demand-side instruments, such as binding quotas, to channel green hydrogen specifically into sectors that were difficult to electrify, such as aviation, steel or chemicals.
“For example, according to an EU regulation, 1.2 percent of all aviation fuels must be blended with synthetic fuels based on hydrogen from 2030. This quota is set to rise to 35 percent by 2050.”
Read the full study: The green hydrogen ambition and implementation gap.
