The conference brought together countries, producers, developers, consumers, and international organisation and non-profit institutions that support hydrogen development and transformation. The pluralist participants presented their perspectives and discussed topics around the current state of hydrogen development and adoption, the main achievements and obstacles so far, and how to move forward. The sessions covered seven main topics surrounding hydrogen development: the role and pathways for international cooperation, finance, new development opportunities, the supply chain, and the transformation of fertiliser and steel industries. Taken together, the sessions showcased that hydrogen technologies have been proven and are available. However, they still entail challenges like higher costs, lack of harmonised standards and regulation, incomplete infrastructure and logistics, and lack of policy stability, all of which hamper demand creation.
Key takeaways
- Low emissions hydrogen is key for a greener, richer, and more resilient world: Hydrogen is a crucial piece of the energy transition as it enables the decarbonisation of hard-to-abate sectors like steel, fertilisers, and aviation. However, the development impacts go beyond that. As highlighted, for example, by the representatives from Brazil, Ecuador, Egypt, Nigeria, Algeria, and Egypt, hydrogen opens opportunities to create local value through new industries, generate jobs, enhance capabilities, and skills. The recent geopolitical crises and global supply chains disruptions also reinforce the strategic role of low-emissions hydrogen when it comes to energy and food security. For producer countries, it is a chance to strengthen and diversify the domestic energy mix and promote local production of downstream parts of the hydrogen chain like fertilisers. For importing countries, it is a chance to diversify suppliers, mitigating the risk of disruptions and shortage.
- Hydrogen solutions have been proven and are available: The sessions covering AI, fertilisers, and steel illustrate that hydrogen solutions are already available to a myriad of challenges and sectors. What is lacking today is completing an enabling environment for hydrogen, encompassing policy, logistics, and regulatory and standards issues.
- Policy has the centre stage, particularly for demand creation: Shifting to decarbonisation sources is a policy-driven agenda and market development hinges on targeted measures. However, policy implementation and stability is the main bottleneck today. Development hinges on active governments that provide stable supply and demand policies and de risking mechanisms like contract for differences, political risk insurance, and currency hedging solutions. However, the bottleneck is not only policy implementation, but mostly, policy uncertainty as changes and retractions in policies deter long term investments
- Shared responsibility to generate shared prosperity: Collaboration and cooperation are crucial to bridge push hydrogen development forward. Commitments and pledges must translate into deepening public-private partnerships, and private sector and governments must work together to develop trade corridors while countries collaborate to create the global trade infrastructure. There must be greater efforts to increase the volume and access to concessional finance, as current financial flows are falling short of what is required. Genuine burden-sharing must become part of partnerships, spreading the risks inherent to early stage development. Institutions like ISO, the International Hydrogen Trade Forum, and the H2 Global foundation can also support demand creation either directly or by promoting greater harmonisation in standards and certification, a requirement to scale up trade.
- Regulatory frameworks must balance environmental and economic sustainability: A stable regulatory environment with adequate standards and certifications is one of the enablers of offtake agreements and trade. Regulations cannot forfeit on promoting greater environmental sustainability; at the same time, they cannot involve such strict production requirements that they further hamper the economic viability of the market at the current stage.