Lofty EU hydrogen goals unlikely to be met

The EU has placed a lot of faith in green hydrogen as a means to decarbonise its economy, but there is a doubt about whether Brussels’ ambitious goals can be delivered on.

Green hydrogen is produced from water via electrolysis, powered by renewables, and is viewed as the lowest-carbon option for tapping hydrogen as an energy source. In its REPowerEU plan released in 2022 as a strategy for eliminating Russian energy imports and accelerating decarbonisation efforts, the European Commission set a goal of producing 10mn tonnes per year of green hydrogen by 2030, while importing an additional 10mn tpy.

This was double the targets set two years earlier in the EU hydrogen strategy.

Production capacity for green hydrogen in Europe last year was a mere 31,600 tonnes, according to the Energy Institute’s Statistical Review of World Energy. This was supplemented by 44,100 tonnes of blue hydrogen, produced from natural gas via methane reforming, using carbon capture and storage (CCS) to sequester the resulting emissions.

The consensus is that not only will the EU not meet its 2030 targets for hydrogen, but it will fail disastrously. These targets are not binding law, but they play a critical role in the bloc’s energy transition plan.

The European Court of Auditors warned in July that the targets needed a “reality check.” 

“Four years after the publication of the hydrogen strategy, we are calling for a reality check,” Stef Bloc, a member of the European Court of Auditors involved in producing the report on hydrogen, told journalists in a briefing. “Based on the available information from member states and industry, the EU is unlikely to meet them by 2030,” he said.

The report described the targets as “driven by political will rather than being based on robust analyses.” These targets were “overly ambitious” and “achieving them has had a bumpy start.”

“Firstly, member states’ differing ambitions were not always aligned with the targets,” the report said. “Secondly, in coordinating with the member states and industry, the Commission failed to ensure that all parties were pulling in the same direction.”

“On the other hand, the auditors give credit to the Commission for proposing most legal acts within a short period of time: the legal framework is almost complete, and has provided certainty that is key to establishing a new market,” it continued. “However, agreeing on the rules that define renewable hydrogen took time, and many investment decisions were deferred. Project developers also defer investment decisions because supply depends on demand, and vice versa.”

The auditors stressed that establishing an EU hydrogen industry “requires massive public and private investment, but the Commission does not have a full overview of needs or of the public funding available.”

But the Commission is not changing its position.

“The Commission stands by the ambition to produce 10mn tonnes of renewable hydrogen within the EU and import 10mn tonnes of renewable hydrogen by 2030, but recognises the challenges in scaling up the hydrogen value chain,” a spokesperson told Euronews in mid-July.

The EU is funding hydrogen through various methods. Foremost is the European Hydrogen Bank, whose first auction was concluded at the end of April, with seven EU projects set to receive €720mn ($796mn). Frans Timmermans, vice president of the commission at the time in 2020, used “magic maths” to create the hydrogen target, Thierry Bros, professor at Po Paris, tells bne IntelliNews.

"Timmermans used magic maths, and at the end of the day, magic maths doesn't exist. So we've lost four years, spent billions of euros, and did get warnings from the Court of Auditors,” he says. “I think he should go to court."

"They wanted to politically start a new industry, and industries don't start on a political decision. It’s science, it's maths and it's economics,” Bros says. "The Brussels civil servants and the Commission didn’t fight back, and I think there is also responsibility on their side."

"Some in the gas industry stated that's a good way, because we will repower our gas backbone, which is insane. We see some people in the LNG and policies area saying we will import hydrogen from Africa, where there is, by the way, no water and not enough electricity,” he says.

"Hydrogen is an extremely, very difficult gas to handle. A very small leak can make a huge boom."