Green Hydrogen Cometh?

I attended a green hydrogen conference last week in Amsterdam to gather insight into the various players as well as better understand the what, when & where of the sector.

A few key takeaways:

· Green hydrogen (“GH2”) goes hand in hand with the REPowerEU initiative (at least for Europe). Due primarily to Russia’s war in Ukraine, the EU is adamant in reducing — even eliminating — dependency on Russian hydrocarbons. Upping renewable energy targets, implementing more energy efficiency goals & green hydrogen all play a part. The action plan can be seen here.

· High-level, REPowerEU calls for an incremental 80GW of renewables that, put simply, will fuel green hydrogen production. Today, there is a plethora of “coloured hydrogens” — blue, brown, yellow — but green is the objective & the “only colour” to receive significant EU funding.

· The EU will provide €500bn over the next 2 years in support of its 2030 targets of +20m metric tonnes of GH2. Just stop & process that number. €500bn in subsidies to make GH2 a reality. 10m mt of the targets will be produced within the EU whilst another 10m mt will be imported (interesting metric — currently ~9m mt of hydrogen is produced within the EU with natural gas, representing ~9% of EU consumption)