In a study made public recently, the Delta-EE consultancy firm revealed that today in Europe, the green hydrogen market is still embryonic despite huge European aid and significant public funds devoted to its development. If activities around green hydrogen have increased in recent years in the Union, it is “Far from being sufficient to achieve the objectives”, report experts who specify that the market is still totally dependent on public funds.
Will green hydrogen be the miracle recipe that will save our climate? Europe and in its wake several governments, seem to believe in it. One after another, they drew up plans with generous subsidies to develop the sector. Yet it is clear that today ” the results are mixed ”, says Arthur Jouannic, director of the French office of Delta-EE, a consulting firm specializing in energy transition. ” We can welcome the rapid growth of this key technology to achieve zero carbon emissions targets. But we are still very far from the extremely ambitious national and European objectives that have been set ”, he tells us.
According to Delta-EE, the European green hydrogen market will reach 2.7 GW by 2025. This is almost 50 times the production capacity created in recent years! But while this growth is spectacular, it is nonetheless “ far from being sufficient to achieve the objectives of the European Union, set at 6 GW in 2024 ”.
State of play
Analysts have counted 67 operational projects for the production of green hydrogen with electrolysers in 13 countries in total. Thus, Europe can produce 56 MW, or around 4,700 tonnes of green hydrogen per year. Half of this production is consumed by the transportation industry and about a third is used to decarbonize industrial applications, such as petrochemical refining.
Today, Germany is the European leader in hydrogen. The country provides almost half of the EU’s production, while no other achieves a capacity of 10 MW.
However, the sector is booming. Large-scale projects are planned this year, in particular in Spain, the Netherlands and Denmark, and will make it possible to reach 10 MW by 2022 and 100 MW in 2025.
To support this growth, major manufacturers of electrolyzers, such as Nel Hydrogen, ITM Power, Cummins and McPhy, are all building new factories capable of producing hundreds of MW or even GW per year, experts say.
A market totally dependent on public funds
“Today, the green hydrogen market is embryonic”, nevertheless indicates Delta-EE at the conclusion of its report. ” Ongoing projects are almost entirely funded by the EU or national funds and stakeholders target the use sectors where public support is highest. At this stage, the market is totally dependent on the enormous capital made available by the European Green Deal and by the various national hydrogen strategies ”.
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