Europe sets more ambitious medium term hydrogen deployments

Several European countries unveiled their hydrogen strategies and roadmaps in 2022 and others revised their hydrogen strategies, setting more ambitious deployment targets for the medium term, according to a new IEA report.

Austria published its National Hydrogen Strategy in June 2022. The strategy targets the installation of 1 GW of electrolyser capacity for the production of renewable hydrogen by 2030. For demand creation, the strategy focuses on hard-to-abate sectors, including energy-intensive industries.

In Belgium the Federal Hydrogen Vision and Strategy was approved by the Council of Ministers in October 2021. An updated version was published in October 2022. The strategy focuses particularly on the importance of renewable hydrogen and its potential to decarbonise industry and transport. According to the updated version, total domestic demand for both hydrogen molecules and hydrogen derivatives is seen to increase to 125-200 TWh/yr by 2050.

Denmark adopted its Power-to-X Strategy in March 2022 to accelerate the conversion of electricity into green hydrogen and other e-fuels over 10 years. The country aims to build 4-6 GW of electrolysis capacity by 2030. The strategy is intended to support the use of green hydrogen particularly in hard-to-abate sectors like shipping and aviation, as well as heavy road transport and industry.

Germany published its National Hydrogen Strategy in June 2020, with a target for 5 GW of electrolyser capacity by 2030. The Federal Government is currently working on revising the hydrogen strategy in order to ensure that the targets from the coalition agreement (e.g. increasing electrolyser capacity to 10 GW by 2030) are met. Publication is planned for 2023.

The UK published its Hydrogen Strategy in 2021, initially setting an ambition for 5GW of low-carbon hydrogen production capacity by 2030. The British Energy Security Strategy, published in April 2022, doubled the production capacity ambition to up to 10GW by 2030, with at least half of this coming from electrolytic hydrogen. Scotland published its Hydrogen Action Plan in December 2022. The plan has a target of 5 GW of renewable and
low-carbon hydrogen by 2030 and 25 GW by 2045.

The Switzerland Hydrogen Roadmap is currently in preparation with a first outline due to be published in 2023. A hydrogen paper was published in September 2022. It presents nine statements on the goals, role and areas of application of hydrogen.

REPowerEU sets ambitious trajectories for low-emission gases, including low-emission hydrogen supply increasing to 20Mt by 2030, of which 10Mt will be imported from diverse sources. Depending on the end use sectors, the rapid scale-up of low-emission hydrogen could replace 34-68 bcm/yr of natural gas by 2030.